Brian D. McGrew wrote: > Speaking from a hardware standpoint, we distribute our systems on Dell > PowerEdge 1800 Server machines and we're limited (by our own hardware) > to 512MB RAM. It stands to reason that these machines don't have very > beefy graphics support in them. Low end nVidia or ATI chipsets at best! Guy Fraser wrote: > Just to make sure you are aware a that if you are using > TrueColor 16M colors 2048x2048x3Bytes = 12 MB per image > buffer. With 512 MB Ram shared between your OS and your > video card you are going to have memory contention issues. > > It may help to reduce the memory allocated to the video > card to 4 MB and run the display at no more than > 1280x1024 in TrueColor which requires 3.75MB of display > memory. Actually, in my experience Nvidia chipsets often do 4-byte aligned (32-bit) "true colour" graphics. (It's supposed to be faster for the hardware, since it can work on 4 byte boundaries). I'm not sure that Brian meant "system chipset" when he talked about "chipsets", I think he meant "graphics chip". A quick Google brings up http://www.dell.com/downloads/global/products/pedge/en/1800_specs.pdf which says: The PowerEdge 1800 server uses the latest Intel® Xeon™ processors and the Intel 7520 chipset and Embedded ATI Radeon 7000-M with 16MB SDRAM i.e. it has its own memory; it doesn't share system memory. A Google on "ATI Radeon True Color" brings up a (presumably related) http://www.ati.com/products/radeon7000/radeonve/ which talks about eye-catching 32-bit true color So yes, 2048 × 2048 × 4 bytes/pixel = 16 MB = all the memory on the card, with no ability to do accelerated 3D. (In any case, Dell only sell Intel processors, I'd be *very* surprised if they actually used Nvidia or ATI system chipsets. So we're talking separate graphics chips with their own memory.) James. -- E-mail address: james | "Now I've got the bead on you with MY disintegrating @westexe.demon.co.uk | gun. And when it disintegrates, it disintegrates. | (pulls trigger) Well, what you do know, | it disintegrated." -- Daffy Duck
