Need advice: Mobile ATI card with 'shared' memory - EXA performance?

[Alex Deucher]

On 12/8/05, Michel Dänzer <michel at daenzer.net> wrote:
> On Thu, 2005-12-08 at 12:05 +1100, Dan wrote:
> >
> > I'm on the verge of buying a Turion ( mobile Athlon 64 ) notebook. As
> > far as I can tell, there are NO ATI cards for the Turion with dedicated
> > RAM. The only cards worth talking about with dedicated RAM are nVidia
> > cards. I'd prefer to use an ATI if possible.
> >
> > While this will be primarily a purchase for coding work, I'd also like
> > to use EXA. I've been using it on my Powerbook, and I'm quite impressed
> > so far. I know that one of the big issues at the moment with EXA is
> > memory consumption, and that people are recommending using a card with
> > stacks of memory for EXA with lots of windows open. Where does this put
> > users who have cards that share video RAM with the motherboard? Is it
> > going to be horrible performance, as if I'd run out of dedicated RAM, or
> > will EXA be able to use shared RAM at a respectable pace?
>
> This should not be an issue, as others pointed out already. An issue
> might be that there's no RENDER acceleration for R300 class cards yet.
>

plus no one has gotten the DRI working yet on r300 class IGP chips, so
it's unclear whether or not we'll even be able to do render accel on
them.

Alex

>
> --
> Earthling Michel Dänzer      |     Debian (powerpc), X and DRI developer
> Libre software enthusiast    |   http://svcs.affero.net/rm.php?r=daenzer