Reply to: Laptops and ExpressCard

[d000hg]

There is nothing wrong with having a minimum required specification in which your software will run.

If the customer objects then perhaps you should investigate the possibility of providing a version of your software that doesn't have so many bells and whistles.

Manage their expectations.

Sounds like somebody made a fundamental cockup in the design of the software if that was the requirement.

We told them at the very start what our best-guess requirements were... a mid-range CPU and a low-mid range dedicated GPU. However it transpires that internally in the client company, they sold it to management as running on any 2-3 year old machines. Only now have they realised that business-grade laptops don't (or didn't until recently) come with dedicated graphics as standard (although we've told them this from the start so 'realised' is maybe not the best word). So their main person on the project is happily accepting it's a cockup on their part... but demanding we fix it anyway.

We are now forced to try and make a cut-down version, but that's not a simple proposition when we are talking 10-50X performance hit for integrated graphics.

Anyhow, the issue here is the technical side. The business side is a bit messed up but once I've explained the problem to them, if they say "requiring ALL customers to buy a new PC is not an option" my role is to try and make it work. ExpressCard/ViDock was one possible workaround but on closer investigation it appears a bit of a dead duck. So we're back to feature cutting and so on.

[VectraMan]

Also - in the real world we have to support the PCs they have, not force them to buy new stuff.

Sounds like somebody made a fundamental cockup in the design of the software if that was the requirement.

I ran into this one frequently back in the Windows 95 era, When RAM was expensive. Too many software producers claimed their product required x amount of RAM, but to run it properly you needed a decent chunk more.

Those sort of requirements are generally made up anyway. I should know: I was the one that made them up for the software producer I worked for. And of course marketing always wanted the requirement to be as low as possible.

[Sysman]

There is nothing wrong with having a minimum required specification in which your software will run.

If the customer objects then perhaps you should investigate the possibility of providing a version of your software that doesn't have so many bells and whistles.

Manage their expectations.

I ran into this one frequently back in the Windows 95 era, When RAM was expensive. Too many software producers claimed their product required x amount of RAM, but to run it properly you needed a decent chunk more. The producers' statements made it very hard to get RAM purchases past bean counters, with the result that otherwise decent software ran like a dog.

[Churchill]

We originally had cross-platform support for Macs but it's not current. Also - in the real world we have to support the PCs they have, not force them to buy new stuff.

There is nothing wrong with having a minimum required specification in which your software will run.

If the customer objects then perhaps you should investigate the possibility of providing a version of your software that doesn't have so many bells and whistles.

Manage their expectations.

[d000hg]

We originally had cross-platform support for Macs but it's not current. Also - in the real world we have to support the PCs they have, not force them to buy new stuff.

[Moscow Mule]

Everyone's a winner...

[d000hg]

Portability is a key client requirement - salesmen travelling to customers' sites to demo the software, and apparently most end users have laptops. Requiring all customers to buy a desktop is not seen as a sensible business move (not that I have any involvement on the business side, but I argued at length all the technical reasons and that was the response I got).

[xchaotic]

What's the bandwidth on of an ExpressCard? ca 2Gbit/s in PCIE mode or 1 PCI Express 1.0 Channel.
You might think that's a lot, but modern GPU come with 16x PCIE 2.0 interface, which is 64 Gbit so 32 times more.
So you'll find the bw of the ExpressCard to be a problem.
Looking at the prices is seems like such a pointless exercise for the time being.
I would consider:
1. A dedicated mid-range desktop PC with a decent GPU, these can be had for ca $500 nowadays. Form factors can be surprisingly tiny at a cost of $$$ and noise (or lower performance).
2. A replacement laptop with a dedicated GPU already built in. They will be a bit more expensive than a basic laptop, but should offer similar performance to the ViDock solution in a much better (more portable) form factor.

In general, unless you're doing math on GPU, which would be double backwards in this case, you're dealing with graphics and that graphics needs to presented, it's much, much better to do this on a PC connected to a huge, color-calibrated display than a tiny laptop with a dim screen.

[VectraMan]

I don't actually know if the HEL still exists, or was dropped once shaders got so much more complicated.

You're probably right. I did quite a lot with DirectDraw (that's 2D), and some with Direct 3D - 3 I think, but they changed the whole API after that, and again, and quite possibly again.

[d000hg]

There must be 3D performance benchmarking tools out there you could try.

HP Compaq 6710b using integrated graphics
3DMark06 Score: 565
SM2.0 Score: 185
HDR/SM3.0 Score: 208
CPU Score: 1620

HP Compaq 6710b with the ViDock 4 plus, using dedicated ATI Radeon 5770
3DMark06 Score: 8550
SM2.0 Score: 4102
HDR/SM3.0 Score: 4286
CPU Score: 1672

[d000hg]

Integrated graphics hardware reports benchmarks 10-50X slower than half-decent dedicated hardware, using hardware support... it's basically a case of lack of transistors even when the integrated hardware has proper support. Modern graphics hardware is massively parallelised and integrated chips just have far fewer parallel execution pipelines (amongst other things).

I don't actually know if the HEL still exists, or was dropped once shaders got so much more complicated... you can run a program 100s of lines long for every single pixel that's rendered, whereas in the old days as many cycles would be a terrible implementation, you wanted to squeeze a pixel every 10 cycles or less. It's really quite staggering how much graphics has changed in the last 10-15 years, raw graphics power is probably 1000X faster if not more.

[VectraMan]

You may be screwed then.

I'm a bit out of date on all this, but DirectX used to have a HEL (Hardware Emulation Layer) that would do things in software that the hardware couldn't do, which means everything would work but of course would be much much slower. But there was a way of initialising it to use hardware only. If it's 10-50x slower, then it's probably not a case of performance of the card that's lacking, but that the card lacks hardware support for what you need to do and the software is filling in.

There must be 3D performance benchmarking tools out there you could try.

[d000hg]

It requires decent 3D graphics. It's been designed to require a dedicated card from nVidia/ATI but business machines tend not to have this. It's a question of both feature-set and raw grunt power... some integrated chipsets expose features but are still dog-slow, we're talking 10-50X times slower than a mid-range dedicated card.

[VectraMan]

What dedicated graphics does the software need?

Perhaps if it's a case of the software refusing to run, there's a way of fooling the software into running.

[Churchill]

If your laptops have USB 2.0 then have you looked at any of the stuff that DisplayLink produce?

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