I need something better than a Trident 8900

January 18, 2006 7:54 PM

What is the ultimate 2D graphics card?

The situation:
I am running a large spreadsheet like application where the cells are updated with fairly high frequency. Each cell might be updated several times a second, and there are 500-1000 cells. The people who write the application were probably good developers but not game developers - they almost certainly didn't make use of any DirectX code that could have made drawing more efficient. Instead, I have to assume that the application relies entirely on the Windows GDI.

I am currently driving two 1920x1200 flat panels with a 128MB ATI Mobility Radeon X600. When I move the application over to a desktop platform, I'm willing to drop down to a single 1920x1200 display, or dual 1280x1024 displays. It would be nice to be able to drive two 1920s at maximal speed though.

Obviously I need Windows XP support (64bit would be nice, but if I have to run a 64bit CPU in 32bit mode, that shouldn't be the end of the world), PCI-Express, at least one DVI port (two would be nice) and lots of memory.

Will the graphics chip matter much?

I would feel very silly spending $1500 on a 3D graphics card, but that isn't entirely out of the question.

posted by b1tr0t to computers & internet (11 comments total)

I'd look into what Matrox has to offer. They have a long history of excellent 2D and have been doing a lot of stuff with multiple display tech for a while now.

Something like this might work for you.
posted by selfnoise at 8:05 PM on January 18, 2006

I'm no graphics expert, but my thought is that anything capable of playing a DVD on a single 1280 would be fine, assuming your values aren't refreshing much faster than 30 fps, in which case I don't know why you care about seeing them change.

I'd focus more on processor speed, RAM read/write time, and hard drive performance/cache size, etc... When trying to get huge tables of data to display, that seems to have been my bottleneck in the past. I have an old 750 MHz with a great graphics card (for the time) and mediocre RAM and HD, and a 2.8 GHz with a crappy GC and very fast RAM and HD, and stuff spits out MUCH faster on the 2.8... orders of magnitude faster, in fact. My favorite Mathematica command is N[Pi,1000000];
posted by dsword at 9:13 PM on January 18, 2006

Most modern cards do heavy GDI optimization, but there is only so much that hardware can do, short of rewriting code on the fly. The limiting factor is CPU performance.

This is because GDI and its ilk are chatty APIs, designed to fit into machines with little ram. What this means is that even if every drawing operation was free, the overhead of processing the shear volume of drawing operations will still result in poor performance.

That said, the most complicated aspect of rendering a windows application is font rendering. Turn off everything in the system that purports to improve the readability of fonts, such as anti-aliasing or clear-type. Consider using a small bitmapped font, so that rasterization (rendering truetype) is not performed.

In excel, turn off everything you don't need, like gridlines, etc. Don't layer things like charts over the workspace, this might interfere with clip-rectangles, which decrease GDI's natural chattyness by only redrawing small sections of the screen.

But all this aside, it sounds like your application needs a rewrite. If all this info needs to be on screen at once, I would go with multiple windows running on separate threads, running on a multi-proc system.
posted by clord at 9:18 PM on January 18, 2006

The system definitely needs a rewrite - but before I can get a rewrite done, I need to demonstrate that the system in its current incarnation works at moderate speed in its current incarnation.

I can't wait to get the system off of windows and onto a nice headless linux box, but being able to see the inner workings of the system is great for debugging :)

As far as CPUs go, my other machines are a dual core opteron 175 (linux) and a dual g5 (osx). This new machine will be on par with or better than either of those. I may go with a dual chip opteron 275 motherboard (the dual chip version of the dual core 175, yielding 4 cores in total, like the current big powermac) or something prebuilt from dell. Enough useful specs are published on motherboards, chipsets and RAM to make those decisions relatively painless. The graphics card world is so full of hype and videogame benchmarks that it is harder for me to make the call on that one.
posted by b1tr0t at 9:31 PM on January 18, 2006

I'm really curious what this application is. Some kind of monitoring app? How do you read a ton of cells that are updating that quickly?
posted by devilsbrigade at 10:10 PM on January 18, 2006

I'm really curious what this application is. Some kind of monitoring app? How do you read a ton of cells that are updating that quickly?

You have mostly guessed it. The application is a kind of monitoring app that was designed so that a human user could select a few values and monitor them in real time. I am using their API to create and log summary data, both to add rigid real-time cheks on the data and also to allow one user to monitor more stuff at one time. Unfortunately, anything you monitor via the API *has* to be displayed in the GUI part of the app - which is why I need really great graphics performance. Once I demonstrate that the system works using the GUI API, I will license the network data API and dump the entire GUI system. That will require a LOT of work, so I'll wait until I know that it is a worthwhile project.
posted by b1tr0t at 11:09 PM on January 18, 2006

selfnoise definately has the right brand. I'd head for a Matrox Parhelia -- It's what I have in the PC next to me.
posted by krisjohn at 12:27 AM on January 19, 2006

highest quality 2d quality: matrox all the way
(parhelia cards are not better than older g-series cards, so don't pay too much)

i don't think you need a special card for your purpose
posted by suni at 3:38 AM on January 19, 2006

that was supposed to say "highest quality/2d quality"
posted by suni at 3:42 AM on January 19, 2006

clord has it spot-on: the graphics card is only one part of the equation. Going for a bitmapped font will probably make a big difference to the redraw speed.
posted by blag at 6:12 AM on January 19, 2006

Definitely Matrox for 2D.
posted by mrbill at 6:43 AM on January 19, 2006