Speeding Up Java Graphics (JVM)

[James Wilkinson]

Brian D. McGrew wrote:
> Speaking from a hardware standpoint, we distribute our systems on Dell
> PowerEdge 1800 Server machines and we're limited (by our own hardware)
> to 512MB RAM.  It stands to reason that these machines don't have very
> beefy graphics support in them.  Low end nVidia or ATI chipsets at best!

Guy Fraser wrote:
> Just to make sure you are aware a that if you are using
> TrueColor 16M colors 2048x2048x3Bytes = 12 MB per image
> buffer. With 512 MB Ram shared between your OS and your 
> video card you are going to have memory contention issues.
> 
> It may help to reduce the memory allocated to the video 
> card to 4 MB and run the display at no more than 
> 1280x1024 in TrueColor which requires 3.75MB of display
> memory.

Actually, in my experience Nvidia chipsets often do 4-byte aligned
(32-bit) "true colour" graphics. (It's supposed to be faster for the
hardware, since it can work on 4 byte boundaries).

I'm not sure that Brian meant "system chipset" when he talked about
"chipsets", I think he meant "graphics chip". A quick Google brings up
http://www.dell.com/downloads/global/products/pedge/en/1800_specs.pdf
which says:
    The PowerEdge 1800 server uses the latest Intel® Xeon™ processors
    and the Intel 7520 chipset
and
    Embedded ATI Radeon 7000-M with 16MB SDRAM
i.e. it has its own memory; it doesn't share system memory.

A Google on "ATI Radeon True Color" brings up a (presumably related)
http://www.ati.com/products/radeon7000/radeonve/ which talks about
    eye-catching 32-bit true color

So yes, 2048 × 2048 × 4 bytes/pixel = 16 MB = all the memory on the
card, with no ability to do accelerated 3D.

(In any case, Dell only sell Intel processors, I'd be *very* surprised if
they actually used Nvidia or ATI system chipsets. So we're talking
separate graphics chips with their own memory.)

James.
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