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3D overload3D overloadPosted Dec 1, 2009 23:35 UTC (Tue) by bojan (subscriber, #14302)In reply to: 3D overload by eru Parent article: Between Fedora 12 and 13
> but I find all this emphasis on 3D pretty annoying, a waste of resources
90% or more of silicon real estate of graphics chips these days is dedicated to 3D. Using that to display 2D is actually faster and works better than using the 2D hardware. This whole thing is not about 3D effects, 3D for CAD or anything like that. It is about using the hardware so that the regular desktop works smoothly.
For instance, I use compiz but I do not enable any of the fancy 3D effects (e.g. wobbly windows, workspaces on the cube), because they are annoying to me. However, windows move better around the screen with compiz (because it's using 3D hardware to draw them), zooming is better, small objects are displayed more precisely (just look at the workspace switcher), scrolling is faster, CPU utilisation is lower etc.
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3D overload Posted Dec 2, 2009 19:34 UTC (Wed) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]
From what I understand is that for video cards still containing 2D
acceleration those 2D acceleration processors are just little more then copy-n-paste versions of the processors developed over a decade ago when people still cared about 2D performance.
Once popular gaming switched gears from 2D side-scrollers to 3D shoot-em-ups
3D overload Posted Dec 3, 2009 11:19 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
There's another reason why graphics card vendors only pay attention to 3D performance... because even with old cards like the Radeon r100 series, 2D performance is limited by memory bandwidth these days, not by GPU speed. Screen updates are pretty much instantaneous as long as the CPU can get the data to the card fast enough. Graphics card vendors are paying attention to 3D because there's nothing left for them to do in the 2D arena.
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