RE: video memory vs.regular memory
I'd recommend a Geforce 4 Ti4200 64mb card. They're around au $330 retail,
which would be around us$165 or so (since the aussie dollar is so crap). At
this point of time it's the best value for money card, and performance wise
it is a good improvement over the ATI 8500/8500LE or 8500 AIW (all in
wonder) Radeon cards. Be aware that ATI cards have been image quality than
Nvidia cards. DVD quality is also better on AVI cards. If you really want
to spend some money go the new ATI Radeon 9700 pro. It has only just been
released and it is easily the best card by a MILE.
As to video card/memory on motheboard issues - ram speed itself will be
similar, although your Athlon system might be using DDR ram, and the older
video card sram or something similar. With older cards, they struggle to
get the data out at a sufficient rate for new CPUs, which means the CPU is
basically sitting their, tapping its feet impatiently, waiting for data.
Not very bandwidth efficient. A newer card would better utilise your Athlon
CPU for games purposes.
As for a dual cpu situation, very few games support SMP (Quake 3 being the
only one I can think of atm). I was only recently using a older TNT 2 Ultra
video card on an Athlon 1ghz, but switched to Geforce 4 Ti 4200 due to game
that I am playing (Morrowind - great game). Noticebly performance increase.
Go grab a new video card Lance - highly recommended.
Dave
-----Original Message-----
From: nate [mailto:debian-user@aphroland.org]
Sent: Sunday, 15 September 2002 6:13 AM
To: debian-user@lists.debian.org; David Pastern
Subject: Re: video memory vs.regular memory
Lance Hoffmeyer said:
> Am I wrong in this assumption? Is there a tradeoff with processor speed
> and mainboard memory and video memory? In other words, is a 16M video
> card sufficient on a system that has 512M and 1.67Ghz processor?
depends, a Voodoo3500 is for sure not able to handle modern games,
I have one, and it struggles to run unreal tournament at 1024x768 at
a good frame rate on either P3-800 or Athlon 1300. Videocards are
"tuned" to work with certain processor speeds. That is, a really slow
video card will still be really slow if you have a 50ghz machine. A
really fast video card will not reach it's full potential(or anywhere
near it) if its hooked to a 233mhz machine.
If your running a 1.6ghz machine and want fast video I would reccomend
a mid range Nvidia Geforce3 or ATI 8500(I haven't used ATI in years
so I don't know much about em).
But voodoo3 3500 won't cut it for most modern games, but this of course
completely depends upon your expectations. My main game is still
unreal tournament, I went from a 3dfx banshee(16MB), to a voodoo3
2000(16MB),
to a 3500(16MB), to a Geforce2 MX200(64MB), to a Geforce3 Ti200(128MB).
The more memory you have on the card the better for 3D games, then
the game can use that memory for higher quality textures(if you so
desire). Video memory is many many many times faster then system
memory(accessed over the AGP bus).
I am pretty happy with my GF3TI200 on the athlon 1300(kernel 2.2.19),
Most UT maps are really fluid smooth(1024x768x32bit), some still can get
quite choppy though. frame rates vary quite dramatically depending on
the map. UT ran much smoother for me using Glide under xfree 3.3.6 then
it ever did in opengl under xfree4.
nate
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