Video Compatibility ???

[hilleyja]

Just purchased the latest and greatest HP with Intel Core 2 Duo. It came with a PCIe video card: Nvidia GeForce 7300LE. My understanding this card has 64MB on board and is designed to share upto a max of 256MB from the 2GB memory on the system.

I haven't tried to installed G3 yet because I needed to order replacement CDs and was just wondering if anyone out there has :D experience :D with these Nvidia GeForce LE cards. I'm looking for experience because I know there is a common perception that if the video card shares memory it just won't work well. I know for a fact that the Nvidia GeForce Go To on my laptop works just fine although does have some video hesitations at times.

BTW, I was running an ATI Radeon 9800 Pro 128 on my previous computer and had NO difficulties.

[opjose]

Shared memory cards are suboptimal.

For various reasons, much like a winmodem versus a hardware modem, or a winprinter versus a fully intelligent printer.

As the CPU processing power increases the detrimental side effects of shared memory decrease...

(WHAT you say? Shared memory good?)


Well not quite, but... once the program workload is low enough (because the computer is so fast) that the CPU can devote more time to graphics (something that a a dedicated card would do more of), the differences start to disappear.

So what's the bottom line?

You will not get the SAME performance as with a dedicated video subsystem on a computer such as yours.

BUT you still may get ACCEPTABLE performance or even good performance if everything else is on the high end, so to speak.

e.g. you'll do better with more RAM and a faster processor with the shared memory cards, etc.



However, I'll stick with dedicated video cards whenever possible and only resort to shared schemes when there is no other choice.

I'll pay for the better performance of the dedicated cards. IMHO they ARE worth it over time.