On Tue, 2006-12-19 at 23:34 -0800, Jon H wrote: > On 12/19/06, Kjetil S. Matheussen <k.s.matheussen@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > I mentioned video cards... I really prefer nvidia under > linux, due to > > the quality of the proprietary drivers and ease of > installation, and > > This is a bad advice. The proprietary drivers from nvidia > cause xruns, and > should be avoided. But older (ie. at least 2-3 year old) > nvidia cards can > be used with the open nv driver instead, which I will > recommend, because I > have had experience with numerous nvidia gfx cards, and have > had very > little problem. > > Actually anything you do visually will require a video card. The more > capable the card and the drivers the less resources it will take away > from the remaining system that is busy processing your audio. With a > good video card that handles the majority of graphical rendering I > experience almost NO xruns, that's at 5.8ms latency using an onboard > (nforce4) chipset, and lower than that with a dedicated soundcard like > the M-Audio stuff. Relying on the CPU and system ram to render FFT > graphics and such will cause xruns, a good video card will not. If you have a system that has a good realtime preemption patched kernel, irq's properly optimized, a decent sound card, and a video card that has drivers that are decent but has _no hardware acceleration_: "Relying on the CPU and system ram to render FFT graphics and such" will _not_ cause xruns. In a properly tuned system with properly designed software the screen update will definitly slow to a crawl - and perhaps it will be unusable - but you should not get xruns (provided that the sound apps don't max out the audio threads with realtime processing - in that case all bets are off and no amount of graphics acceleration will help). -- Fernando
