Under Windows (but not the Mac), video-driver software is vital for drawing images in system memory. Typically, video acceleration hardware cannot be used for this task, so the performance rests solely on the cleverness of the driver software.
The speed of drawing images in system memory is crucial to overall system response time, because many applications will prepare the image in memory and then copy the finished image to the screen.
Even on fast 486/66 machines, the performance of the software driver is often more important than the speed of the video hardware. We found instances where a new driver would boost a board's performance by 25 percent, enough to move it from the bottom of the heap to near the top. If you haven't upgraded your driver recently, it might pay to check out your vendor's BB
S for any recent enhancements.
The difference in driver performance is even more dramatic when using operating systems other than Windows. Our top-performing board for use with Windows NT was the Hercules Dynamite VL Pro D602, a low-cost DRAM board; its faster driver far outweighed its marginally slower hardware.
Flexible C++
Matthew Wilson
My approach to software engineering is far more pragmatic than it
is
theoretical--and no language better exemplifies this than C++.
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When Video Drivers Matter
