dumb question about nvidia nforce and geforce cards and AMD boxes....
Dear Debianists,
I have been reading a little on the web about graphics cards.
The machine I currently use is an AMD 64 Sempron 3200 machine (AM2 board)
with what is termed on board graphics.
I also have an 80GB ATA drive in it and a DVD optical drive. THe machine
has 512 MB of RAM at present.
I am thinking of upgrading it a bit. I thought to add a further 1GB of RAM
and get myself a graphics card so I could do video editing and mess about
with e.g. Blender.
I notice from reading various web sites that nvidia make nForce chips that
can be attached to AMD64 boards and I think boost the graphics performance
of these machines.
One one site I was reading it seemed as though the nforce chips were only
for dual core processor chipsets.....
But then I found a machine being sold that contained an AMD Sempron 3200
chip and nforce chipset combined with geforce graphics chip that were
supposed to work together in harmony in some way or other.....
I had thought that maybe it was possible to upgrade an AMD64 box with a
geforce graphics independently of the nforce card being there but maybe I
was wrong....
Can the geforce card also run on Intel systems?
I looked on other web pages and it seemed that on board graphics can do
quite a lot. It's only certain uses of a computer that need the graphics
card.
I assume that the onboard graphics facility is present in every AMD Sempron
3200 chip as standard (correct me if I am wrong here).
I also assume although the web sites are a bit vague on this that if you add
a graphics card such as a geforce card that it does not negate the on board
graphics capablity it just supplements it.
Please correct me if I am wrong here.
Other sites explained that you would only want to use a really powerful
graphics card in a computer if you were doing high end gaming.
There were also warnings in there about fans, overheating and power supply
requirements if you start putting more advanced graphics cards into the
box....
If I want to upgrade my AMD Sempron 3200 Novatech box for video and blender
use would for example an Nvidia Geforce 7600GS chipset graphics processor be
a reasonable add on?
Also would I add one of these nforce beasties and if so which one?
What would it be doing that the other geforce card was not doing?
What are these pixel pipelines and what is the benefit of having 20 of them
as opposed to 12?
I also notice that the really powerful cards have e.g. 96 stream processors
in them.
What do they do that pixel pipelines don't?
One final question. In the world of very high end gaming on PCs are most
people running Windows to play the games?
If so is this because most of the code for the games themselves is written
solely for Windows and not Linux or is also because drivers and other
proprietary restrictions make it difficult to run the games properly under
Linux?
Or, are there infact quite a few high end games that run fine under Linux
and actually you could you save money on games software, the OS software and
other things by dumping Windows for high end gaming?
What linux based applications could give a geforce 8800 GTX graphics card a
serious 3D work out?
Sorry about all the dumb questions.
Regards
Michael Fothergill
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