Re: New computer planned
On Mon, Feb 20, 2012 at 08:31, Ralf Mardorf <ralf.mardorf@alice-dsl.net> wrote:
> On Mon, 2012-02-20 at 10:15 -0500, Curt Howland wrote:
>> The card has
>> it's own RAM, so system RAM is not shared, which is a very good thing
>
> It's a myth that shared RAM for the framebuffer is less good than a
> graphics with it's own RAM. What exactly should be better if the
> graphics has got it's own RAM?
There is more RAM available. If you have 4GB, and shared memory,
and a game needs 512MB just for textures, then you have that much
less for the system. Also, current GDDR speeds are much higher
than current DDR speeds. Memory bandwidth is king for intensive
modern games.
Now, for low performance stuff, it isn't going to matter much.
Intel IGPs' pure processing power is low enough that the
boost they would get from dedicated memory would be fairly
small. Not to mention the GDDR would add cost and heat. So
Intel doesn't make them like that. Or as discrete cards at all.
>For heavy audio production I never noticed that even the swap gets
>touched with 4GB RAM.
Depend on what else you might be running, including what
desktop environment or window manager. Not to mention than
if he may keep this for another 7 years, he may as well get 8GB
(or more). In 4 or 5 years, RAM should as usual, be much
cheaper for the same amount and be faster too. But it doesn't
mean the RAM he can use in the old motherboard will be cheaper
Have you seen the price of DDR 1 or even 2 compared to 3 lately?
I run a light WM instead of KDE or Gnome, but I still noticed
a difference going from 4 to 8, as I run an inordinate number
of tabs in my browser. It really depends on the details of your
usage. He doesn't say what kind of Software Dev he does,
maybe he will want to run a dev database or two to test
against or something.
>This driver is marked as "experimental" and doesn't work
>for many people.
Well, it is hard to reverse-engineer that kind of thing.
If you get one of the models they been focusing on
for a while, it ought to work fairly well.
But in general, get a well-supported ATI card for
performance, or Intel otherwise. I guess the highest
performance on Linux come from the closed nvidia
driver, but I don't understand people that use Linux
but then support a company like nvidia. Even if you
use Catalyst (which I don't much like either), at least
it supports a reasonable company.
Cheers,
Kelly Clowers
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