Darren New wrote:
> Invisible wrote:
>> In the uncompressed case, you take some data on disk and copy it to 
>> the framebuffer. 
> 
> Not quite. You need to align the scanlines, perhaps reorder the R, G, 
> and B, etc. You can't just blit the whole image to the screen like you 
> could with an Amiga.  And I'd highly expect that it goes through RAM on 
> the way between disk and screen.

Well actually, WMP is playing it back at 200% original size, if you want 
to be picky about it.

Even so, moving data from A to B has to be faster than performing highly 
elaborate arithmetic over it. Unless DMA really does require *that much* 
CPU power.

> Depends on how expensive decompressing into the frame buffer is compared 
> to moving the uncompressed data in and out of RAM.

Bearing in mind that the video data in question is many, many times 
larger than any L1 or L2 cache on Earth...

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