October 2004
Intermediate to advanced
304 pages
7h 44m
English
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Chapter 7. Video Hacks
Introduction: Hacks #68-74
Except for the CPU and memory, the video card handles more data more often than any other component in your PC. It's possible for a 1024768 display with a color depth of 32 bits (4 bytes) refreshed 60 times per second to move tens of megabytes per second—if the entire screen refreshed with new data at each screen refresh interval. This is a lot of data, and it does not include the processing and rendering the video card's CPU has to handle to generate a constantly dynamic display. Enhancing video performance is most important to graphic designers and gamers, but it can also make Windows less sluggish and clunky for the rest of us.
Overall video performance is affected not only by the speed, quality, and features of the video adapter card (which in some cases you may overclock just as you can your CPU and system RAM) but also by which I/O interface your video adapter uses—ISA, PCI, or AGP (including video adapters built onto the system board).
The ISA and PCI buses can be used for just about every type of I/O device there is, from modems to network to video adapters. A lot of activity is going on within these buses. The 16-bit (2-byte wide) ISA bus runs at 16 MHz, yielding a maximum throughput of 32 megabytes per second (MBps). The 32-bit (4-byte wide) PCI bus runs at 33 MHz, yielding maximum throughput of 133 MBps.
The AGP bus is dedicated specifically to graphics—a straight pipe from the PC's CPU to the display—and it's fast! The 64-bit-wide ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.