Author Topic: Panorama v Snap Video  (Read 21096 times)

ivan

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Panorama v Snap Video
« on: May 10, 2018, 08:03:36 pm »
I am a little mystified at the moment.

I have one computer that has been running OS/2 Warp 4.52 CP2 since CP2 landed.  Video is provided by a Radeon X550 card, Snap drivers and a 28" 1920x1200 LCD monitor.  Everything works as expected.

Since the computer is getting old I am thinking of replacing it with one of my ArcaOS mini ITX units but I still need my large monitor.  Rather than crawling about to change cables I used the maintenance partition on this computer to install ArcaOS.

Found out a couple of things.

ArcaOS install does NOT play well if there is BOOTMANAGER installed - at first reboot after installing files it says there is no operating system, getting round that is a fiddle.

The default Panorama video driver does not recognise the video card or the resolution of the monitor.  Is this normal or some bug?

By looking at the ArcaOS DVD I see there is a modified (updated??) Snap driver.  Will that work with large monitors and Radeon video cards - I am considering getting a 30" 2560x1600 monitor if it will work at that resolution with ArcaOS or OS/2.

Does anyone have experience using large high resolution monitors with Panorama or Snap? 

I know that Snap v3.1.8 works at 1920x1200 with the Radeon cards I have, I have also found out that Panorama does not but would like to hear other peoples experiences.
 

Matt Walsh

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Re: Panorama v Snap Video
« Reply #1 on: May 10, 2018, 09:03:10 pm »
Yes, SNAP will do what you want if you have the right video chip.  Be sure to check the readme file.   I've tried both Panorama and SNAP and prefer SNAP, but it doesn't work on every chip set.   Give it a try.
Matt :D

Valery Sedletski

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Re: Panorama v Snap Video
« Reply #2 on: May 10, 2018, 10:45:17 pm »
Yes, SNAP from 25 Sep 2006 (it seems this is 3.1.8, but I don't know for sure) works fine with by big FullHD monitor (1920x1080) and ATI 9600 XT video card. Panorama requires wide-screen activator from Robert Lalla. But this activator supports only ATI and Intel video cards. So, I was unable to use this monitor with Panorama and Matrox G400. As SNAP Matrox driver does not support FullHD resolution, and Panorama/Widescreen activator as well. Note that this wide screen activator now seems to be included into newer versions of Panorama, but I'm not sure as I don't have them.

Dave Yeo

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Re: Panorama v Snap Video
« Reply #3 on: May 10, 2018, 11:43:09 pm »
Generally you can use Panoutil.exe to force higher video resolutions with Panorama, but it doesn't always work and sometimes the quality isn't as good. There's also now a setting in the screen object to make this easier, see the custom resolutions tab.
Best to experiment, as others say, if your chip is supported by SNAP, that's the way to go.

Neil Waldhauer

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Re: Panorama v Snap Video
« Reply #4 on: May 10, 2018, 11:52:36 pm »
Sometimes I can get SNAP to support other resolutions by installing Panorama, setting the resolution, then re installing SNAP. This is the case with Thinkpad T540p. SNAP seems slower, but it can turn off monitor power, so I like to use it to save power.
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Dariusz Piatkowski

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Re: Panorama v Snap Video
« Reply #5 on: May 11, 2018, 02:50:26 am »
Neil,

...SNAP seems slower, but it can turn off monitor power, so I like to use it to save power....

ATI X850 XT PE video card here, SNAP is about 30% faster than Panorama...the old (IBM) SNAP is actually faster then the AN one as well.

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Re: Panorama v Snap Video
« Reply #6 on: May 11, 2018, 03:08:48 am »
Hi
 
Following the line of the discussion, does Panorama support to turn the monitor to sleep mode like SNAP? (for example when using Doodle's Screen Saver).

Regards
Martin Iturbide
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Dave Yeo

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Re: Panorama v Snap Video
« Reply #7 on: May 11, 2018, 04:51:01 am »
Hi
 
Following the line of the discussion, does Panorama support to turn the monitor to sleep mode like SNAP? (for example when using Doodle's Screen Saver).

Regards

No. I wish they'd port that from SNAP to Panorama.

Neil Waldhauer

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Re: Panorama v Snap Video
« Reply #8 on: May 11, 2018, 06:22:38 am »
Neil,

...SNAP seems slower, but it can turn off monitor power, so I like to use it to save power....

ATI X850 XT PE video card here, SNAP is about 30% faster than Panorama...the old (IBM) SNAP is actually faster then the AN one as well.

Given a recent motherboard with Intel HDA graphics, laptop or desktop, DIVE graphics will be quite a bit faster than an ATI video card old enough to have SNAP support.
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Dariusz Piatkowski

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Re: Panorama v Snap Video
« Reply #9 on: May 11, 2018, 01:40:37 pm »
Given a recent motherboard with Intel HDA graphics, laptop or desktop, DIVE graphics will be quite a bit faster than an ATI video card old enough to have SNAP support.

...which is why we should let the numbers tell the story instead:

Code: [Select]
Sysbench 0.9.5d result file...

 Graphics
   BitBlt S->S copy      :    12452.139    Million pixels/second
   BitBlt M->S copy      :      297.329    Million pixels/second
   Filled Rectangle      :    45967.299    Million pixels/second
   Pattern Fill          :     3505.676    Million pixels/second
   Vertical Lines        :      173.686    Million pixels/second
   Horizontal Lines      :     1455.066    Million pixels/second
   Diagonal Lines        :       69.389    Million pixels/second
   Text Render           :      873.777    Million pixels/second
   -----------------------------------------------------------------------
   Total                 :     1318.652    PM-Graphics-marks

 CPU integer
   Dhrystone             :     6725.200    VAX 11/780 MIPS equivalent
   Hanoi                 :    23158.000    moves/25 microseconds
   Heapsort              :    22031.000    Million Instructions Per Second
   Sieve                 :    22031.000    Million Instructions Per Second
   -----------------------------------------------------------------------
   Total                 :    15891.876    CPU integer-marks

 CPU float
   Linpack               :     2877.960    MFLOPS
   Flops                 :     3599.600    MFLOPS
   Fast Fourier Transfrm :     2162.790    VAX FFT's
   -----------------------------------------------------------------------
   Total                 :     1421.639    CPU floating point-marks

 Direct Interface to video extensions - DIVE
   Video bus bandwidth   :     1145.600    Megabytes/second
   DIVE fun              :     3909.899    fps normalised to 640x480x256
   M->S, DD,   1.00:1    :     3910.315    fps normalised to 640x480x256
   -----------------------------------------------------------------------
   Total                 :     1461.519    DIVE-marks

I left the CPU benchmarks in case the performance is CPU bound.

Martin Vieregg

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Re: Panorama v Snap Video
« Reply #10 on: May 11, 2018, 03:18:42 pm »
There are two different strategies:

A) installing an old graphics card shown in the SNAP compatibility list. On my old computer (2005) I ran an ATI X300 with Snap and a 1920x1200 pixels DVI 26 inch monitor.

The main problem of this strategy is that current operationg systems do not support this old hardware. On Ubuntu, version 10 was the last with ATI X300 support.

B) installing a real current graphics card or an APU processor. Because of the lack of SNAP support, you need a fast graphics card to get speed in VESA mode. A current Ryzen G APU processor (90 EUR) comes with a fast (comparible to graphics cards mid-class) graphic and I managed to run 1920x1200 pixels (all has been installed automatically by ArcaOS). I assume that 2560x1440 pixel will work, too. This resolution seems to be a limit: Higher resolutions are no more supported with DVI cable, you need a HDMI cable instead. And perhaps there are other limitations, too. I can set an old Windows game up to this resolution. And there's a non-technical problem: If you use 4k resultions, the OS/2 VIO fonts are going very small.

My new computer is faster with Panorama than the old one with Snap and ATI X300 card and needs less energy. I also tried the same mainboard with the elder Bristol Ridge processor (predecessor processor generation of Ryzen), and there's a distinctable difference. So "brute force" is an adequate strategie with Panorama...

I have heard that meanwhile ArcaNoae has got the rights for the source code for SNAP. It is planned to support current Intel and AMD graphics in the future, but no timetable.

The next days, I will publish here in the forum a detailed report with my new AMD Ryzen G computer where I have installed ArcaOS, Windows 10 and a current Ubutnu Linux, which was a hard work but now works - nearly - fine, but at the moment only 1 processor used (modern hardware, safe mode). And Seamless Win16 does not work, that seems to be a Panorama problem.

Neil Waldhauer

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Re: Panorama v Snap Video
« Reply #11 on: May 11, 2018, 04:36:16 pm »
Lenovo M92p tiny Dive Marks: 7295
Lenovo T540p Dive Marks: 11243

Newer machines will show an even bigger gap, more than 10x, over SNAP and an old ATI card.
PM-graphics would be faster on ATI/SNAP, but I'm not clear on how that matters.
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ivan

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Re: Panorama v Snap Video
« Reply #12 on: May 11, 2018, 11:27:22 pm »
Thanks everyone.

From what I see here ans the experiments I have undertaken it appears that Panorama isn't really ready for prime time and needs much more work to allow easy adjustment of resolutions - import INF for example.

SNAP still appears to be better even when running in VESA bios mode.

I am not so concerned with graphics speed as long as screen redraw can keep up with my typing I am happy.

So, again thanks to all and I will let you know I get on after crawling about under the desk to get at cables to fit a KVM switch between the old and new computers and my normal keyboard, monitor and trackball.

Now all I need is to get the USB keyboard to do key repeat when holding down a key to make life easier...

Andreas Schnellbacher

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Re: Panorama v Snap Video
« Reply #13 on: May 12, 2018, 01:46:04 am »
Now all I need is to get the USB keyboard to do key repeat when holding down a key to make life easier...
That should be fixed since David's USB version 11.17. (I haven't tested it since then, because I usually use IBM PS/2 keyboards.) See here.

Dave Yeo

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Re: Panorama v Snap Video
« Reply #14 on: May 12, 2018, 05:35:38 am »
I'll say one thing, with an unsupported video card, SNAP is ridiculously slow at scrolling compared to Panorama here. Resolution choices are the same as well.