Video Card Compatibility

[Talkiet]

Perfect!!! Wonderful...

After installing build 143 (64 bit), my GPU performance has gone from dead slow (1 second per image regardless of what the precaching was set at) to blindingly quick (after it's had a couple of seconds to preload)...

Without exaggeration, it's 25 times faster at least.

Thanks!

Cheers - Neil Gardner

[Axel]

Back to normal, I guess...

Some people like stories so here is a little background on this issue: some XP DirectX drivers had the bad habit to return an unusually high (nearly 4GB) amount of free video memory when running low, probably a miscalculation in the driver returning a negative number. This caused FPV to load more images and the machine to crawl, so a test was made and if the amount of free video RAM was too high, the program (rightly) assumed that the value was wrong and that the card was instead low on free resources. This worked perfectly until x64 drivers actually returned 4GB of available video memory (that's what one get on 64-bit platforms with 64-bit apps and some of the Big Cards, as the drivers map some system address space to video memory and manages a mixed memory pool made of real video memory and system RAM). The program (wrongly) assumed that the card lied and was actually short on resources, which caused it to aggressively unload images to conserve memory as much as possible. Everything worked exactly as designed but performance suffered...

[EricB]

I've installed FPV on both my desktop and laptop, both under Win7 x64
GPU Acceleration works on the desktop (ATI 3650 512Mo ddr2), but not on the laptop (Intel GMA4500MHD), anything to expect there?

[Axel]

The program checks if the adapter appears to have what it takes and does not let users enable Direct3D under certain circumstances. Look for a value named D3DDeviceSquareOrPow2Textures in HKEY_CURRENT_USER\ Software\ ARSD\ FastPictureViewer. If the value is 1, set it to -1 (i.e. ffffffff, 8 times the letter f) and the program will bypass one of the checks. This does not means that hardware acceleration will actually work on this graphic chip, but the program will nevertheless try.

[7oby]

os: Vista SP2 32-Bit
gpu: intel X3100 shared memory (GM965 Mobile Intel 965 Express Chipset)
driver: v15.12.6.2039 dated 2/2/2010 currently latest and features DirectX 10 support

FPV complains upon startup amount missing gpu acceleration and disables it altogether. However modifying D3DDeviceSquareOrPow2Textures in the registry as suggested above seems to work just fine! Scrolling zoomed pictures is significantly faster and I don't see any rendering artefacts.

Maybe gpu capability detection is too conservative? Older Versions of FPV ran without registry tweaking and gpu acceleration (maybe that code was based on D3D9). I expect that the registry tweak will also help the GMA4500MHD user two postings above. However latest win7 64-bit driver in his case is currently version 15.17.10.2189 dated 8/16/2010.

[jamec9869]

tested registry as suggested and lowered settings, still no go.
as in fail there is one second lag scrolling images using gpu, it´s not workable
i´ve even reinstalled directx and latest drivers, still no go on the radeon
at xp 32bit gpu worked very well with my older nvidia.
maybe others could report their experiences using gpu on win7 x64





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[Axel]

NVIDIA GTX 460 on Windows 7 x64 with i7 960: works perfectly. It's a moderately priced DirectX 11 card (starts at about $150 according to pricewatch.com) ready for the future as it supports CUDA and DirectCompute.

[peppe]

NVidia Quadro FX570 w/ 276.14 tesla 64 bit drivers, on Windows 7 x64 professional works like a charm! The fastest one available for sure.

Only thing of note, annoying if you need NVidia's nview desktop manager, is that NView 136.02 (included with the above drivers) prevents FastPictureViewer from opening. Disabling it lets everything work normal (posted in the user to user forum too).