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

[Jonathan Rogers]

D Richard Felker III wrote:
> 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.

Creative probably had misleading advertising, which is reprehensible, 
but the fact that some of the synthesis was done in software wasn't 
secret. My brother, who is a musician but not a computer guy (and uses 
Windows 2000), told me about that. I think this was mentioned in the 
official specs, if not the advertising.

I'm not excusing misleading advertising, which I hate, but let's be 
careful to not misrepresent things ourselves.

Jonathan Rogers