So as I
have written before I've been playing with maps and renderers and found
this very interesting thing. My old home laptop which is a 5 year old
Sony VAIO FE11S with a intel T2400 CoreDuo 1.86GHz CPU, 2GB ram and a
NVIDIA GeForce Go 7400 256MB is as fast a Intel XEON E5520 with 8GB ram
and ATI FirePro v5700 video card. I've run the code on both machines and
the difference is minimal, so what is wrong here? Well after testing
there is nothing wrong on the code, there are no dead locks or threads
waiting for each other. What is wrong is the video card drivers. On my
VAIO I still have Windows XP SP3 and a NVIDIA driver from 2006 (because
Sony doesn't allows me to install the latest from NVIDIA). On the fast
desktop I have Ubuntu 64 bit with the crappy ATI proprietary driver.
This ATI driver is the key here since on Windows all my rendering is
done using Java2D with the DirectDraw pipeline on and it is amazingly
fast, it is also true if I use the OpenGL pipeline but the OpenGL driver
is not as good as DirectX. On linux the driver is so crap that all
rendering is done in software and a machine which I expected to be say
10x faster (it has 6x more cores, it is 64bit and the OS is also 64bit)
it just sucks.
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