nVIDIA woes

[Mark Danks]

  I am sorry that it has taken me so long to reply.  If people haven't
figured out yet, my day job is currently keeping me _really_ busy.

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Jason Freeman [mailto:jason_freeman34 at hotmail.com]
> Subject: Re: nVIDIA woes
> 
<snip>

> 3) In addition to my previously mentioned problem of 
> rendering large font
> sizes using nearly 100% CPU, using the pix_draw object also 
> consumes nearly
> 100% CPU. Again, this CPU usage is from XF86 4.0 and not from pd.
> 

  I have posted it a few times, and finally updated the documentation, but
DO NOT USE PIX_DRAW!!!  There are no graphics cards (except some SGI ones)
which have hardware acceleration for the OpenGL commands behind pix_draw.
ALWAYS use pix_texture.  You should not be wasting any more main memory,
although the texture will be resident on the graphics card.  If you are
trying to push gigabytes of textures in a piece, let me know...people have
done this before and it is possible to do.

> 4) To circumvent my current problem, I've redone all the text 
> in my patch as
> images and texture mapped them to squares. While this 
> consumes very little
> processor time, it is rather memory hungry (both from pd and 
> from X). But it seems to work for now.

  Yep, see my comments above.

> 5) One more problem of note: With the nVidia drivers only 
> (not with MesaGL),
> my Xserver crashes whenever I switch workspaces and a GEM 
> window is open
> with rendering turned on. If I turn rendering off, then I can switch
> workspaces with no problems.
> 

  I suspect that the nVidia drivers do not really understand the concept of
virtual workspaces, and so are trying to continue rendering.  If someone is
bored, they could probably have GEM deal with a message from the Xserver
which alerts the app that the workspace is changing and stop rendering.

> Any suggestions about any of the problems, or the previously mentioned
> problem of the text3d object causing pd/GEM to crash, would be greatly
appreciated.
> 

  I have never had any problems with text3d under Windows, but that is the
only platform I am working on (yuck...)  Someone pointed out that the
website which has gltt is down, so there won't be any improvements from the
original author.  If someone knows of a good cross-platform font renderer, I
would love to know about it.

  One of these days I will fix the Arial/arial naming problem...

Later, Mark

============================
= mdanks at stormfront.com
= Lead Programmer PS2
= http://www.danks.org/mark
============================