Does age of video card matter with software mode?

ZDoom LE, Pentium 133's, Windows 98, and DOS 3.1 all go here! A bygone era, of particular interest to some folks.
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invictius
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Does age of video card matter with software mode?

Post by invictius »

Got one of the very first pentium 4's - with sse2 - but I've run out of agp video cards, chucked a geforce 2 mx in it. As long as it has proper drivers for the o.s, not ones that shipped with xp, does it really matter since the cpu takes the brunt of software mode processing? The card is roughly from the same era as the cpu.
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Rachael
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Re: Does age of video card matter with software mode?

Post by Rachael »

Yes - the age does matter. The GPU is still used for buffering the actual drawing that the CPU does, and then puts it on the screen.

Unfortunately, that's the point where it gets a little more complicated. Some systems perform better with DirectDraw due to a combination of GPU and operating system; some systems will perform better with the Direct3D. Either way, DirectDraw is deprecated, so if GZDoom is still being forced to use that your video card is way too old.
koverhbarc
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Re: Does age of video card matter with software mode?

Post by koverhbarc »

You would, if you run GZDoom under that configuration, experience the same video issue I recently encountered, and tried to explain in my current thread 'ZDoom current progress'. Briefly, you will not get truecolor software rendering, even when the engine tells you that you are, because it relies on hardware acceleration that that GPU doesn't have.
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