On Fri, 22 Feb 2002 12:00:34
Nikhil Joshi wrote:
I'm not sure but the jazzy icon colors,plethora of
small icons on
taskbar,the brilliant color schemes (themes) (especially in GNOME) must be
taking some VRAM right?
VRAM is used to store a "snapshot" of your screen, and the size of a snapshot
depends only on the resolution and color depth. The reason why GNOME taxes the display H/W
is because the themes that use textured backgrounds or mouse-overs etc. require more
processing but not necessarily more VRAM. Icons, panel etc. don't use up any more VRAM
(they use system RAM and CPU, though).
You can make GNOME run easy on the display by using plain Jane themes and lightweight
WM's like TWM. Still, it's not going to affect system RAM requirements (so
it's not light). It is not going to do much for movies either, because you still
can't do anything about the H/W acceleration that you're missing.
I always thought that drivers made for a specific
hardware were much better
than those made for a generic ones.
Usually, but you can't generalize this as some specific models are different only in
that they improve the internal logic w/o changing the interface, or add new features
keeping the old ones in place.
Mine:
Cyrix MII 300 (~233 MHz Pentium)
64 MB SDRAM
2MB Sis 6215
800X600 8bit colors
Ouch! that hurts :-&
As an aside, today's CPU's are fast enough to play MPEGs at, say, 640x480x16, even
without hardware acceleration.
---
Tahir Hashmi (VSE, NCST)
http://tahirhashmi.scriptmania.com
mailme(a)tahirhashmi.scriptmania.com
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