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Video Cards |
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Ron Overdrive
Registered User
Join date: 10 Jul 2005
Posts: 1,002
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03-06-2006 08:02
Regarding video cards, does anyone have an opinion on the difference, in the context of SL, between the ATI Radeon 9250 and the ATI Radeon 9600? Both have 256 MB of RAM. - Lavanya Usually the difference is features and clock speed, with the 9600 being the better of the two. |
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Ron Overdrive
Registered User
Join date: 10 Jul 2005
Posts: 1,002
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03-06-2006 08:12
I respect your opinion, and I'll probably go for a separate card. But I wouldn't be so quick to berate on-motherboard video. I have an old laptop -- a Dell D600 -- with on-board video. Considering it's a business machine, the fact that it runs SL at all is impressive, and I've been using it since I was "born". I also have a newer HP Pavillion ZD8000 laptop with an on-card ATI video adapter with 128 MB of dedicated memory. That one has very smooth animation in SL, even on full screen with all the rendering toys turned on and a draw distance of 128m. Perhaps your misgivings stem from experiences you may have had with video cards that use "shared memory", a crafty way of saying "no memory". These adapters actually piggyback onto your computer's main memory and so will only barely function in SL at maybe 1 FPS on even a hearty machine on a good day. I would warn anyone to steer clear of any laptop or video card that advertises a video adapter with "shared memory" if you plan to run SL on it. That said, I kinda assume that one benefit of on-board video chip-sets is that the vendors can choose the fastest possible bus configuration instead of worrying about using a more standard card slot. But then, I haven't really kept up with the market much. I'm curious to know if you have a sort of standard test that you would use to determine whether a video card is any good for SL. That is, what settings would you try? And maybe, which sim would you visit? A clear test configuration might be a good way of weighing one card against another. - Lavanya Last I checked, the only onboard video that has its own memory was standard VGA. My mom's brand new computer has a Geforce 6100 in it, its shared memory. Majority of onboard graphics accelerators from my experience are shared memory units. High end laptops tend to be the only ones with actual dedicated memory for their videocards, but even then most of the affordable laptops ($2k and under) use shared memory. Besides, there are other short commings as onboards tend to be more CPU dependant. As for wich is better for SL the rule of thumb is nVidia for PCs and ATI for Macs. |
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Corvus Drake
Bedroom Spelunker
Join date: 12 Feb 2006
Posts: 1,456
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7300 Gs
03-06-2006 09:44
Great new card if you're on a budget. Has most of the coding of the 7000 series nVidia cards, is PCI-E, and only 80 bucks with 256 MB of DDR3 on it.
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Lavanya Hartnell
Registered User
Join date: 9 Dec 2005
Posts: 55
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PowerColor Radeon X550 Video Card
03-12-2006 23:40
A gamer friend recommended ATI and PowerColor as two good brand names she's had good luck with. Now, I know many of you think ATI makes awful video cards, but I've had decent luck with them and SL, too, so maybe the bad blood stems from some older ATI stuff I don't know about.
That said, after a little research, one option I came up with that looks fairly low cost, yet has some nice key specs is the PowerColor Radeon X550. You can buy it from Directron at: http://www.directron.com/x550256mbddr2.html Here are some key specs: - Four extreme parallel 3D rendering pixel pipelines - Two programmable vertex shader pipelines - PCI Express x16 lane native support - 128-bit memory interface with 256MB DDR - Core Speed: 400 MHz - Memory Speed: 266 MHz x 2 At $72, this seems a good deal for someone looking for a video card under $100. I'd like other opinions about this, though. Anyone have specific experiences with this or a similar model from PowerColor or using the Radeon X550 chipset? Thanks. - Lavanya |