On 1/8/06, James Wilkinson <fedora@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > 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(r) 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. > Maximum resolution per ATI, http://www.ati.com/products/server/radeon7000m/ , is 1280x1024. Brian, were you aware of this limitation? > (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. >
