[OT] Re: Suggestions for a good graphics card for RH9/Fedora?
Mike A. Harris
mharris at redhat.com
Fri Oct 24 06:20:33 UTC 2003
On Thu, 23 Oct 2003, Xose Vazquez Perez wrote:
>I saw tests of same ATI board with 64 and 128 over MS Windows and they get
>the *same* performance. Forget the RAM, it's more important chip type.
>A Radeon 8500 or 9100 with 64 MB is good and cheap.
The amount of video memory on a board doesn't indicate the
performance one will see out of it. The only time the amount of
video memory affects performance at all, is when the software you
are using has a LOT of textures, and the textures do not fit into
video memory anymore. When textures don't fit into video memory,
then AGP textures must be used which are slower. If you run a
high end modern game like UT2003, you will definitely see a very
big difference between a 64Mb and a 128Mb card, with both clocked
identically with same speed and same type of memory, because the
game will fill video memory on both cards easily.
Also, depending on how much system RAM one has, if you run games
which require a lot of texture memory and you only have 64Mb of
video memory, the memory gets used via the agp aperture, and that
is system memory stolen for the purpose of texture storage. If
you only have 128Mb of system memory, and a 64Mb GART size, that
means your system only has 64Mb of useable memory for
applications.
If you run glxgears to benchmark hardware, you'll see the same
performance on a 256Mb card as a 64Mb or 32Mb, or even an 8Mb
one, as glxgears doesn't have 256Mb of textures to stuff into
video memory.
Hope this helps.
--
Mike A. Harris ftp://people.redhat.com/mharris
OS Systems Engineer - XFree86 maintainer - Red Hat
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