Author Topic: Graphics support/Hardware  (Read 8285 times)

lmotaku

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Graphics support/Hardware
« on: March 19, 2013, 03:53:31 pm »
While this topic is more of a mixture of programming and hardware, can we get more than 32mb out of our graphics cards using eCS? "It doesn't need it" isn't really an answer I'm looking for. I'm an advanced video editor. I've used things like Sony Vegas, where a project could very well consume 2GB ram, and a lot out of a video card. Is it impossible to program in a GUI or something to control the OS and how much power/memory it uses from any graphics card? Of course that is more advanced and could lead to problems, but takes out the need to have individual driver profiles for every card.
« Last Edit: March 19, 2013, 03:59:50 pm by Larry »

Andy Willis

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Re: Graphics support/Hardware
« Reply #1 on: March 19, 2013, 06:13:15 pm »
While this topic is more of a mixture of programming and hardware, can we get more than 32mb out of our graphics cards using eCS? "It doesn't need it" isn't really an answer I'm looking for. I'm an advanced video editor. I've used things like Sony Vegas, where a project could very well consume 2GB ram, and a lot out of a video card. Is it impossible to program in a GUI or something to control the OS and how much power/memory it uses from any graphics card? Of course that is more advanced and could lead to problems, but takes out the need to have individual driver profiles for every card.
Is this 3D rendering?  Currently there are no 3D hardware drivers for OS/2, any 3D rendering in OS/2 is done by software rendering with at most 2D acceleration (current hardware is not even 2D accelerated at this time).  SNAP (which is a 2D accelerated driver for supported cards) would only use 32mb for 2D acceleration (which was stated as a max for 2D but I don't know any technical details around that).  Panorama is pure Vesa so no acceleration, I don't know what limits it has on memory usage but as there is not a 3D component I suspect it is not needing much either.  In neither case will more video memory be likely of much use as the rendering is happening in software which would probably require an increase in the VirtualAddressLimit to accommodate 2G of memory by a single application.

lmotaku

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Re: Graphics support/Hardware
« Reply #2 on: March 19, 2013, 06:58:18 pm »
Thanks Andy, does this mean it would be possible to port video editing programs then?

Andy Willis

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Re: Graphics support/Hardware
« Reply #3 on: March 19, 2013, 07:58:03 pm »
Thanks Andy, does this mean it would be possible to port video editing programs then?
Short answer is yes.
It may take a lot of porting supporting libraries to make it happen.  If porting from Linux I find that one library requires another library etc. and etc.  If porting from Windows using Odin then Odin may require some (possibly significant) updates.  Also, without 3D support (and on modern hardware not even 2D support) it would be slow.  There had been an effort begun to build 3D support but it was by one person and it became more than he could do.