[linux-audio-user] latency: video card contribution

From: Dmitry S. Baikov <c0ff@email-addr-hidden>
Date: Wed Sep 28 2005 - 22:24:28 EEST

Hello!

Another set of questions for experienced Linux Audio Users.
Mainly it's related to laptop performace.
It seems the choice of video system for modern laptop consists of two
main alternatives:
1) dedicated high performance controller (nvidia/ati) with closed source
drivers
2) shared memory controller (intel) with open source drivers

People on Windows forums (no choice for Apples) prefer dedicated
controller (with own video memory) because shared memory video degrades
performance and increase latencies (they say, and in windows).
I suppose, under Linux the things are different, because minimal
possible latency is directly related to interrupt processing: closed
source drivers have arbitrary interrupt paths, surely are written to
maximise video performance and thus, should play a bad role in latency.
Moreover they cannot be fixed. Open source ones at least can be fixed.

Or I am completely wrong and shared video memory makes it bad on a
hardware side (locking pci bus, for example)?

So, the question is: what to choose, integrated intel solution or
ati/nvidia one (in this case, nvidia is preferred, because of driver
quality).

Thank you.

Dmitry.

P.S. As a target system, imagine laptop with RME Cardbus.
Received on Thu Sep 29 00:15:12 2005

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