I just joined the PCI Express club

[Sherwin Maxawow]

My old AMD Athlon CPU got fried recently after serving me and my system for over 2 years. My plan was to just have it replaced with the same model chip and speed, since I am a bit tight on cash lately, and it still had been doing an adequet job for my system before it died.
Yet I came to find out that both my old CPU along with my HP motherboard it originally came with had not been in production for quite some time and there werent any new CPUs that would fit in my out dated motherboard.
So I was advised by the people at Prime Systems that I just buy a brand new board and of course a new CPU, which they recommended both be by Intel, and explained to me how AMD's chips and other hardware goes bad a lot more commenly than stuff made by Intel, regardless of which company presently makess the highest performance chips.
They really did make some good sounding points to me that I never realized before, which were all strong enough to officially bring me back over to being an Intel supporter more than an AMD supporter, after years of it always being the other way around for me.
I also decided to relax on the whole cost issue, and just get whatever they recommended, within sane reason. I was going to first just go with an equiviant P-4 chip, which I was told would still be faster than what I had before, especially with the new state of the art motherboard.
But when I was shown that they were having an great sale which included the new Pentium D (duel P-4s in 1) chip, which would end up only costing me 30 dollars more because of the sale they were having, I went with it.
I was now a happy camper, as I was leaving the store with my new hardware which I was going to install at home with my computer nerd friend's help. The people at the store also assured me that all of my other computer's hardware such as the DDR Ram and most importantly my ATI 9600 pro graphics card would all be compatible and fit into the new board. Which they should have known since they already took my whole system apart and back together again when tracking down my problem, being the bad CPU.

However, we found out they were wrong about the graphics card, which needed an AGP port to fit into. The new motherboard had only the new PCI Express port which I've learned is where the whole industry is moving towards eventually dropping AGP for good, which is almost true now.
But I definitely couldnt aford a new graphics card that was equally as good, and they told me the next day they had no mew motherboards with AGP unfortunately, and I definitely wanted the motherboard I had because of all its techology.
But because it was indeed their mistake in telling me that the ATI card would fit with the new board, the manager offered to trade my card (ATI Radeon 9600 Pro) for a brand new one which turned out to be the "Nvidia Geforce 6600 LE"
which he mistakenly thought my card was equal to in ram, since I didnt have my card on me at the time of his trade offer, and he already had plugged it into my motherboard to make sure it would fit into my towor case alright. After which I ran home to grab my 128 meg ram ATI card, for his generous PCI Express compatible 256 meg Ram Invidia card.
Its great when you luck out at times, which I sure did in this case. I am glad my old CPU died on me, because now I have a MUCH more powerful faster system!
I must say also, that I do notice the difference in untra tight responsiveness when watching Milkdrop react to the beat of music with my new card and its PCI Express connection which makes it seem literally one with the sound its reacting to, compared to how it always has seemed before. I guess AGP is A LOT slower than PCI Express from all I've been reading.

[redi jedi]

wow that really worked out! i went to circuit city and found winamp running on one of the display models, so of course i fired up milkdrop. man it looked sweet! i bet your new system is kickin'!!

one of these days i'll get my self one of these new fangled pci express with all that sli hype i've been hearing, and update MD to take more advantage of it... although i've been considering rewriting the whole frame cycle for some time now.... ooo i feel a rant comming on.....
i had an idea for multi-threading MD, but i'm not sure how well it would work or if it would change the way the effects look... make a diffrent thread for each render(ie: each wave/shape/border has its own thread, and they all will return a texture, then the renders will be added together into two groups, "above" the effects and "below" the effects. after waiting for all the renders for the frame to get done it will continue to the effects

and for the effects there will be a seprate thread for dx/dy,sx/sy,zoom,rot each thread will take the "below" the effects texture and do there respective effects it and return the result, then when the effects are done it will add the resulting textures together then put the "above" the effects renders on top of that... i think that made sense..

anyway my biggest problem with the whole idea is, if i do a zoom in one texture, and a rot in another, then render the images ontop of one another at 50% opacaty, will it look the same as if i do the same zoom and rot in one "effect", and actualy as i think about it, that would require more render calls as you have to do zoom+rot+combine them as aposed to just doing one call for zoom+rot....

i'm still working on the idea, so any feedback would be good(--eos-> is there some problem i'm missing with this approach?)

[Sherwin Maxawow]

Hey Redi. Thanks for your reply. Wow you really seem to know your stuff when it comes to computers and programming.
I wish I had the mind for that kind of stuff, because I'd love to write my own creative presets. But I just dont have the disapline or determination I guess to learn how. Anything math-like or math related I just leave to people like you, hehe. :)

Yes, my new system really is a giant leap up in performance for me. But probably the most amazing thing about it that I've found is how many programs and multiple applications this new Pentium D can handle at once, compared to before.
It really makes running Milkdrop's desktop "wallpaper" mode especially nice. It runs so very smooth and steadily, without noticing hardly any slow down in whatever other programs I choose to pull up and work with at the same time, and Milkdrop also even flicker or have any pauses like it would so commonly before in desktop mode. On my old system I hardly ever liked to use the desktop mode on MD, just because of how it would slow things down, and it would commonly cause my whole system to FREEZE UP completely requiring a complete reboot by holding down on the power button until it went off! This complete "freeze up" happened almost every other time I'd run Milkdrop in Desktop mode, along with how it would slow everything down, made running it not even worth it what so ever.
But all that is in the past now, and so far I have been able to run desktop mode beautifully and I've yet to see any glitches!
Desktop mode is really the best for when you have other people over and you want to really show off your system as you causually work on your computer, with this unbelievable wallpaper in the background, and you just act as if its nothing, hehe!
I must say that Milkdrop is really an efficiant running program using a lot less of your properties than one might think. Am I correct on that? Ryan Geiss did program it well, so I've heard.

[redi jedi]

well as far as i can tell ryan did a damn good job of coding it! the code is very modular and well designed, most of my modifications have been very easy to insert into the flow of the code, theres alot of code there thats not being used as well(a 'z' variable for waves, per-point for shapes, to name a few) there is room for improvment though, mostly in the areas that where underdevloped when ryan wrote the code, like multi-threading, md doesnt really use much, but when compared to anything else out there, it still shines through

i still to this day am yet to see anything that reacts to music as well as md, and it doesnt even have any beat detection!(built-in anyway, and no bass, mid, and treb do not count as beat-detection) I will admit that, some of the other visulations out there *cough*avs*cough*r4*cough* do have more capabilitys as far as raw drawing power, but are serously lacking in the music reaction department. not that i've looked at the now available sourse code for avs but from what i learned about it when i use to use it(thats where i started writing presets) it is built to be easy to learn, easy to use, and easy to get what you want. and also to be modular so users can make updates(good idea btw!) that others can conusme, witch is nice but its hard to do the things that NEED to be in a preset(custom beatdection, "control systems" to control varions parts of the preset, ect.) not to mention i dont think the built in beat-detection algorthim works worth a damn, and its not customiseable... basicly my point is avs and r4 are built(as far as i can tell) from the ground up to be easy to use rendering engines that, almost as if it was an after though, happen to have imputs that come from some music thats playing. In contrast MD was built to react to music and to give the preset writer maximum control over every aspect of the preset, and to do it in a logical manor(i admit the menus can look scary, but they do make sense once you learn them) so we can insert music reaction whereever we want, true avs can too, but it uses diffrent contex in diffrent spots, just adding bass or treb into an equation is sooo much easyer, and it results in better looking movments. not to mention dx/dy f-ing rock!

humm mabyt i should stop ranting and get back to work, lest i get fired....

[Sherwin Maxawow]

I couldn't agree more with all that you wrote Redi. Even though some of it is over my head. But I got you for the most part I think.
R4 is cool, and I am even gaining an appreciation for AVS too, which I am actually pretty amazed at how smoothly it now runs with my new Pentium-D or PD chip.
But I am still very much partial to good old Milkdrop, pretty much for the reasons you just mentioned above.
I don't think anyone would dispute that when it comes to tight music reaction, Milkdrop completely blows away any other visualization plugin, or stand alone visual program too for that matter.
I also wanted to say THANK YOU redi jedi for bringing new life into the plugin that truly deserves it the more than any others. I am of course referring to your continued development of MD, which I only recently just discovered myself.
I am still sad, just as I'm sure you and many others are also that Ryan Geiss has pretty much moved onto other things and no longer has the time or perhaps even the interest in Milkdrop development. At least for now anyway.

But there is nothing that tells me you (redi) cant produce equally as nice Milkdrop upgrades as Geiss could do. Besides, any development is better than no development.

By the way redi, your new beta 1.05 version runs nice. But can you explain in terms I can grasp how the beta 1.05 differs from 1.04?
Thanks, and PLEASE keep up the good work!!!!!

[redi jedi]

well from a end users point of view it really isnt much diffrent, it just gives preset writers more options to play with, witch inturn makes for cooler presets for you to gawk at :)

[Eo.S.]

redi, i'm not exactly sure what you mean by zoom and rot in separate textures.
Do you mean...

textureA = rotate starting image
textureB = zoom starting image
final = (textureA+textureB)/2

vs

final = rotate and zoom starting image

?

[redi jedi]

yep thats exactly what i'm talking about!

on a seprate subject, check the last message in the presets fourm, if you havent already, someone made a new vis, screenshots look damn good

[Phat]

We've already been contacted about that, but thanks!

[StudioMusic]

Sherwin the easiest way to see the difference from the beta to the original 104 is take a beta preset and run it in 1.04 and then run it in the beta, most the time it looks like a tottaly different preset. A good preset to check that out with Sherwin is sweet vanilla cancer beta 6.1 by shifter eos and phat. The only thing I do not like about the beta Redi and no offense here is that it slows the framerate way down on my 128 meg cards, even the 104 presets are way slowed down. I know you can figure a way to smooth it out and speed it up again, at least I think you can. Then I can learn to love the beta. For now I will continue to use 104 most the time. 1.04 just runs so smooth and quick. SM

[Phat]

One big thing is keyboard commands. If a preset has in it's title 'keyboard command' you can press Ctrl + the arrow keys inorder to affect the preset.

Like the presets I'm posting here..

(A few of these are un-finished, but you've coxed me into posting them...)

[Phat]

p.s. don't worry, it's just presets in there... april fools is only the date..