Need Some Enlightenment About 2D ASICs/Drivers

[swaaye]

I was playing around with a old Virge 2D card the other day. Let's just say it's not so great compared to the G200 that I was letting my friend borrow earlier. Heh.

But, I was amazed how Diablo 2 in Directdraw mode was so much slower on the Virge compared to the G200. I began a limited investigation using Sandra, checking out the Directdraw capabilitiess of the card. To say the most, the Virge has less caps than the G200.

This is in Win2K so I'm assuming that the drivers for the Virge are just not too hot. But, I couldn't help but wonder if it was the drivers or just the hardware.

So, do you guys think they just never got around to implementing more Directdraw features in the drivers?

Do those caps even matter for DDraw games that much? How much do 2D games get out of the 2D accelerator? Is it more dumb framebuffer action going on like in the DOS days?

Are Directdraw caps something closely related to 2D GUI duties or are they so different as to make it sorta like 3D in that many new functions are needed in the silicon?

This really is a topic nobody has hit on to my knowledge.....I'm dripping with intense curiousity and excitement!

 

[Nappe1]

S3 Virge is Pre DirectX 3D chipset. it was pretty ok with native supported (S3d or S3 Toolkit API) games.

as far as I remember, S3 Virge supports:
- perspective correct texture mapping
- bilinear filtering
- 8 bit, 16 bit and 24 bit rendering (2 first ones are hardware dithered.)
- z-buffering (no idea about Z-buffer bits)

In Direct 3D it was really slow. Basically 400x300 was last fast enough resolution in Direct3D.