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Built a PC 4 years ago mainly for web and mail. Cheap low end Celeron chip, 2Gb ram, onboard graphics. Noticed it getting slower over the years - even after OS reinstalls and upgrade from 2to10mb broardband.
Took a bet it was due to the heavy graphical advertising of web pages. Just installed a £26 graphics card. It now flys.
Sorry - am very excited about this.
Oh yes. Takes a lot of thinking away from the main cpu and memory.
The whole graphics card business needs to be a bit more transparent for normal folk.
I would never have paid to have the stupid second card in my Macbook Pro if I had known how good the pikey one was.
[i]The whole graphics card business needs to be a bit more transparent for normal folk.
I would never have paid to have the stupid second card in my Macbook Pro if I had known how good the pikey one was.[/i]
Do you mean you would recommend buying an external card or not??
Agreed. ie what is the performance difference between x3000 chipset and Radeon HD4350?
The whole cpu power thing ie dual/triple/quad core is now mainly marketing as only gamers/encoders really need the power ( matched with a graphics card of course).
Also wide screens at low resolutions also brass me off. At 1024*600 you had better love scrolling.
What I mean is... unless you really know your z-buffer from your polygon count you havn't got a danny what all that stuff means.
I paid coming on £400 over the odds on my laptop to get a 512MB all singing card that I have only used to play one game (a very good one I must add). A PS3 would have been a better bet.
Like Earl says, you need to read some serious PC gaming literature to know the difference.
I suppose if one is sporting an ancient beige box one might benefit from slapping a newer card in.
Bit of a gamer here - Had a pair of 7800GTXs when they were the dogs danglies, now sitting happy with a pair of HD4850s, upgrade time coming up. You can certainly tell the difference between different setups when you're running modern games at high resolutions, all antialiased into loveliness.
The differences for the low-end consumer market isn't as clear cut, and recently one of the major GPU manufacturers have used this to their advantage - remarketing old hardware with a new higher number, etc. I know sod all about 2d rendering, but the majority of the shader units etc on a card aren't used - so for non-3d use, you're no better off with an expensive card over a cheap one.
Of course, as said, any is miles better than none - off loading the work etc.