[PD] Gem for a dual G5

[chris clepper]

On Oct 6, 2004, at 7:37 AM, Amos Elmaliah wrote:

> hi Chris, list;
>
> I am trying to figure out ways to improve gem setup on my machine.
> It seems like the bottle neck is the graphic card (the Geforce fx 
> 5200) as the frame rate drops when I texture many goes but cpu's 
> staying stable.  Is there a way to have cpu/ddr share these things in 
> gem? Should I just try to upgrade to a better ATI card or are there 
> any other options?

Without more specific info on what you are trying to do it is a little 
difficult to make a suggestion.  In general, the 5200 is not a very 
fast GPU these days and I have run tests where the G5 ran Altivec code 
several times faster than the 5200's shader unit could process the same 
work.  Most of my testing for the G5 was on a dual 2.0 with a 9600 and 
I never saw the GPU affect performance dramatically even when texturing 
hundreds of geos with 1920x1080 textures.  If you can afford the 9800 
then go ahead and get it - there will probably be some work on GEM to 
take advantage of more advanced GPU features.  At the very least you 
can crank up the frame rate, FSAA, and texture size without problem 
with the current version.

> Just out of curiosity, what the specific difficulties of coding pd and 
> gem for 64 bit machines?

64 bits hasn't even factored into GEM coding at this point - we don't 
use 64 bit ints and only two objects might possibly require more than 
4GB of RAM and even that's a stretch.  My work has mainly focused on 
making GEM fast on G4s, and fortunately that same code runs well on a 
G5 with only minor modifications.  GEM basically has a HD capable 
real-time system by accident, which was a pretty pleasant surprise for 
me.

cgc

> Thanks
>
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