AVS Hardware Acceleration

cybaix

17th December 2003 07:17 UTC

AVS Hardware Acceleration
OK.. yes I read the thread in the FAQ. I really did not want to bump them so I thought I would start a new.

I am curious if anyone knows why nullsoft refuses to make AVS hardware accelerated? I find that rather stupid just to leave gfx to the cpu when your avg consumer now has some kind of 3d accelerator. It just seems really dumb that I can't run AVS in anything higher then 640x480 fullscreen (even on complex presets it goes down to maybe 13 fps) and I have a 3.0ghz P4 /w hyperthreading 512megs ram and a geforce 4.

Deamon

17th December 2003 08:28 UTC

You read the FAQ, and still post this? Damn... :mad: It's all there in the FAQ, and if that's not enough for you, search the fucking forums. This has been discussed for about a 100 times already. Just for fun, open the troubleshooting subforum, look at the first two topics.

cybaix

17th December 2003 08:43 UTC

Originally posted by Deamon
You read the FAQ, and still post this? Damn... :mad: It's all there in the FAQ, and if that's not enough for you, search the fucking forums. This has been discussed for about a 100 times already. Just for fun, open the troubleshooting subforum, look at the first two topics.

Question #7: AVS is incredibly slow on my computer! How can I speed it up?

The answer is simple: you can't. AVS only uses your CPU, so having a fast 3D graphics card won't help much. Here are some tips in speeding it up:

- Run in 32-bit mode. This might sound weird, but 32-bit color depth is a lot faster than 16-bit in AVS. This is because everything is calculated at 32-bit internally, so any other mode requires the image to be converted each frame.

- Run in a low resolution. If your video-card doesn't support resolutions like 320x240 or 400x300 at 32-bit, you can use pixel-doubling. This effectively halves the actual resolution (e.g. 640x480 pixel-doubled is the same as 320x240).

- Turn off any other programs or background processes that are running.

For more in-depth discussions on the hardware acceleration issue, check the following topics:

http://forums.winamp.com/showthread.php?threadid=87279
http://forums.winamp.com/showthread.php?threadid=70823
http://forums.winamp.com/showthread.php?threadid=77753
http://forums.winamp.com/showthread.php?threadid=66004

None of the threads discuss why they still do not use hardware acceleration.. and people that bumped them got yelled at.

Sorry for being new to the AVS forum :down::mad::down:

Warrior of the Light

17th December 2003 08:49 UTC

Okay, here's a short answer:

Due to the high variability (and with that the many variables) of AVS, hardware acceleration ain't gonna help much, perhaps even slow things down.

That enough?

Jaak

17th December 2003 12:47 UTC

Hardware acceleration will help very much... but Nullsoft (read: Justin ONLY) got better things to work on like called winamp5.
AVS is mainly coded by Justin... i know ppl who probably would help him to code avs for free, but thats very different thing

Warrior of the Light

17th December 2003 13:04 UTC

What you mean is totally reconstructing AVS for HW rendering. That would be great, but would mean Sh!tloads of work.

What I meant, was converting the existing AVS to Hw. That would slow stuff down.

So to complete your answer: Rewriting takes (now) too much time, and converting does everything but speed things up.

Rovastar

17th December 2003 13:45 UTC

Read the FAQ.....you you havew done that.....Serioustly it has been said many times before. A total restruturer would be required and then compaility between processer base and 3d graphics h/w based technology come into play.

If it was 3d h/w based it to be honest would not make all taht much difference to some of teh functins available in AVS. I cannot think of how to do some using the full functionalilty of the cards. But what it would be useful for would be new stuff and reusing textures/ images and the DM functions.

Anyway this is by the by as I cannot imagine anything with this much undertaking would be done in the next year or two.

AVS has had a major update with a major speed increase this in a time where more and more Nullsoft satff are getting laid of (i think they are down to 3 or 4 now part time Winamp project staff)

anubis2003

17th December 2003 14:17 UTC

AVS is not a 3D program. Using advanced 3D hardware wouldn't speed up AVS at all. Like unconed has said before(search the forums) - only the most advanced cards offer much of anything that AVS would be able to utilize and only an extremely small percentage of the AVS users have one of these cards.

http://forums.winamp.com/showthread....087#post446087
http://forums.winamp.com/showthread....16#post1046716

cybaix

17th December 2003 14:44 UTC

Originally posted by anubis2003
AVS is not a 3D program. Using advanced 3D hardware wouldn't speed up AVS at all. Like unconed has said before(search the forums) - only the most advanced cards offer much of anything that AVS would be able to utilize and only an extremely small percentage of the AVS users have one of these cards.

http://forums.winamp.com/showthread....087#post446087
http://forums.winamp.com/showthread....16#post1046716

If you read the same threads.. it can be done if they write a pixel shader to do the advanced effects. BUT you need to keep in mind it WOULD be much faster if it was hardware accelerated. The GPU is a highly piplined seperate processer. By offloading this task off to the second processer it will speed up alone by having full use of it (instead of being switched in and out like it would on the cpu).

Also the cpu is at a lack of instructions to really do anything of this sorts quickly. Something could take up to 5 instructions being done on the cpu when it would only take 1 or 2 on the GPU.

I think the reason there is now hardware acceleration is because justin is too lazy to do a rewrite of avs and a pixel shader to go with it. I just think its stupid for them to keep working with it putting in features that no one will ever really be able to use.

UnConeD

17th December 2003 14:48 UTC

cybaix: this thread sums it up nicely.

Thread closed.