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Hardware GUI Acceleration on GF 6/7 series

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First post, by kch17

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Hi!

I have an old GeForce 6600GT 128MB card and therefore I have some questions about Geforce 6/7 series GPUs:

1. Starting from Riva128 through GeForce FX Nvidia in their technical documents always wrote that these cards had a dedicated hardware 2D unit for GDI operations and support for hardware cursor. In documents about GF 6/7 series and above there is no more info about 2D Engine. Maybe Nvidia is not just writing about it, but this unit is still there? Performance in Passmark 2D and Tom2D bechmark is good for these cards, so I guess 2D GUI acceleration is present and works well. XP without VGA drivers (so without hardware acceleration) is very very slow (laggy and slowly windows dragging, windows appear slowly too), therefore I think cards in XP/W2000 times must have 2D engine so that you can work normally. I read GF8 and newer has no hardwired 2D unit but unified shaders are used to emulate GDI functions. What is true?

2. So, is this GF6600GT would be good enough for operating systems like XP or W2000? Games don`t interest me, only Windows GUI is important. Or, what cards you prefer to these systems? Is there hardware GUI/GDI and hardware cursor acceleration present on GF 6/7 series cards?

Thanks!

Reply 1 of 5, by tpowell.ca

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2D acceleration existed since ISA cards, and already present in Windows 3 if the card and it's drivers supported it.
The GF 6600GT is way overkill for 2D.

Are you using an AGP or PCIe bus?
If AGP, just about any card with 16MB of onboard RAM should do, at which point the RAMDAC or DVI output becomes more important.
If PCIe, any card will do, but compatibility with 2k/XP is more limited as newer cards stopped supporting XP.

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Reply 2 of 5, by swaaye

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The only time I've seen very apparent slowness was with a 780G motherboard's Radeon HD 3200 IGP and XP. ATI didn't implement GDI acceleration at all at the time for that chip. I got to watch screen redraws and web browsing was poor. I've used other Radeon HD GPUs with XP without issue.

I've never had issue with any GeForce with XP.

Reply 3 of 5, by bakemono

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I've used a ton of cards with 2K/XP over the years. Never had a problem with 2D on GeForce or Radeon cards.

Intel graphics on the other hand doesn't seem to support 8bpp directdraw modes, or OpenGL 1.x 2D functions.

There is one big difference between GeForce 8xxx and later vs. the 7xxx and earlier. They now do rescaling on the card and emulate VGA hardware instead of supporting it directly. Old cards could do the 31KHz scanrate used by standard VGA monitors and could be reprogrammed to go lower (for instance, MAME systems connected to arcade monitors) but new cards ignore the setting and output a different scanrate.

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Reply 4 of 5, by Jo22

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Hi, there once was a related article at Tom's Hardware.
I've linked to it in an old thread. It's here -> Re: Best PCI VGA card for Windows 3.11 performance?

"Time, it seems, doesn't flow. For some it's fast, for some it's slow.
In what to one race is no time at all, another race can rise and fall..." - The Minstrel

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