[MPlayer-users] Re: best graphical card for mplayer

[D Richard Felker III]

On Sun, Sep 14, 2003 at 03:12:25PM +0530, Tathagata Banerjee wrote:
> [Automatic answer: RTFM (read DOCS, FAQ), also read DOCS/bugreports.html]
> On Thursday 11 Sep 2003 9:01 pm, D Richard Felker III wrote:
> > the two biggest
> > reasons they don't release specs are to cover up lies in the
> > advertising and to cover up infringement on (usually bogus) patents.
> >
> > Covering up your false claims about what your hardware can do with
> > secret emulation in software? That's a scam too. This is a classic
> > case of corporate crime, and it needs to be stopped.
> 
> 
> gosh, how do you know all this?

There are many well documented cases of this; it seems to be more the
rule than the exception. One I know about that's very well-verified is
Creative's sound cards. They advertise having a lot more wavetable
channels than they really have, emulating extra ones with software
mixing. The free drivers for Linux make it clear how many channels
really exist, as would a test of CPU load with the windows drivers.
Someone else in this thread mentioned a case with nvidia modifying
their driver to special-case operations performed by a popular
benchmark program so that the benchmark scors come out better, even
though it doesn't improve performance at all in actual software. If
you investigate you should be able to find much more serious
misrepresentations about 3d card abilities, though.

Rich