2D performance problems - a general topic

Hello, everyone,

I found this on the site of "Tom's Hardware" :

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/…xtmc=2d&xtcr=4

This is a longish article on 2D performance.

It was made because of ATI/AMD seemingly having *huge* 2D-performance problems. Something no-one had expected to ever be.

The German site also has an in-depth article looking at the differences of GDI vs. Directx : http://www.tomshardware.com/de/wddm-…te-240487.html

My general comment towards all of this is just :
Yes, the performance problems of 2D were always there - but no-one ever noticed them. There are simply no more or only very few benchmarks for 2D out there anymore, because no-one is interested in 2D anymore. All everyone is interested in is 3D.

3D rulez ! Who needs 2D ?

Alrik

Most impressive is this benchmark from the second part of the article (so far only in German, bit will be seemingly in English soon, too :

http://www.tomshardware.com/de/wddm-…240487-13.html

There, the GDI function of "Stretching" is benchmarked.

Guess who's at the top ?

You'll NEVER guess it !

(Here once was a wtf picture)

Matrox!

Voodoo 4 ??!!

I still remember I bought a Voodoo5 5500 to play Ultima 9.

Modern chips cards lack dedicated "2D" hardware. No surprise. Drivers pick up most of the slack. Traditional 2D acceleration methods and interfaces have to change though, and until that happens 2D will remain "slow". GTK and QT are doing some pretty nifty stuff in this regard. Windows is falling behind, but since drivers tend to be better overall it's a bit of a trade-off.

The early voodoo cards were really great…. except that you could not use them for anything but fullscreen applications, you needed another graphics card for 2d. So NVIDIA figured what if we offer the possiblity to buy one card instead.. making computer cheaper since you don't need two graphics card.

Voodoo was thinking darn it we need to fix our 2d rendering in windows…… by the time they were done it was too late….

Hmmm… I don't remember any problems in both 2D and 3D on my Voodoo 2 3DFx… but it was so long ago…

that's because your computer surely also had another graphics card…. maybe you did not know it at that time.

Correct, Voodoo 1 and 2 were add-on cards.

Well, you may be right… I was 9-12 years old when I had this graphic card so I did not know much about it