Speeding Up Java Graphics (JVM)

[Kam Leo]

On 1/8/06, James Wilkinson <fedora at westexe.demon.co.uk> wrote:
> 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(r) 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.
>

Maximum resolution per ATI,
http://www.ati.com/products/server/radeon7000m/ , is 1280x1024.

Brian, were you aware of this limitation?


> (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.
>