16th December 2003 08:21 UTC
Why Does AVS Suck so bad?
Hi I have always wondered why AVS seems to run so slowly in full screen mode? AVS looks very cool, but in full screen mode beyond anything more than about 640x480, things slow down to a not very pretty crawl. (Even this resolution is slow).
I thought maybe one day I would have a computer that was fast enough to run AVS smoothly. But that was about 2 and a half years ago and I am now about 9 PCs on and am currently running an Athlon 3200, 512MB RAM, Radeon 9800XT Graphics card, 340GB HDD and AVS performance still sucks. I no longer believe that it is my system specs that are at fault.
AVS may not be a vital component, but it is a nice thing to have and it adds to the overall package, making Winamp that much more of an enjoyable experience. By comparison, Windows Media 9.0 Visulisations suffer no such lag.
How can I get AVS to run smoothly in full screen mode, or is this simply not possible?
Q
Edit: Ok I have just been told that this is because AVS uses the CPU and does not touch the video card. This begs the rather obvious question of why? Surely AGP - or even PCI acceleration has to be infinately better (and certainly faster) than always depending on the CPU? Doing things this way seems crazy... Besides I wouldn't mind my CPU being turned over to more useful tasks such as Folding@home while I listen to some music and watch some pretty visualisations. Without AGP acceleartion, this sort of thing just isn't possible. Anyway who in their right mind wants to run at resolutions of 320x280? That's just crazy...