ATI or NVIDIA Best Text?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Arnold Packer
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A

Arnold Packer

Gentlemen,

I am assembling a PC for a Visually Impaired person and need to select
an ATI or a NVIDIA video card for best text display.

A LCD monitor will be used set at 800 x 600 for optimum legibility in
this situation. In this setup what would be an ideal amount of memory
on the card ….128 or 256 Megs?

T I A,
Alvin
 
Arnold said:
Gentlemen,

I am assembling a PC for a Visually Impaired person and need to select
an ATI or a NVIDIA video card for best text display.

A LCD monitor will be used set at 800 x 600 for optimum legibility in
this situation. In this setup what would be an ideal amount of memory
on the card ….128 or 256 Megs?

T I A,
Alvin
Click to expand...

I doubt brand or dedicated video memory makes ANY difference unless the
computer is used for editing video or other graphics intensive tasks
like 3D games or satellite view programs like Google Earth and the 3D
mode of Windows Live Search.

For things like office productivity, email, news reading and MOST web
browsing built in motherboard video would work just as well.
 
Arnold said:
Gentlemen,

I am assembling a PC for a Visually Impaired person and need to select
an ATI or a NVIDIA video card for best text display.

A LCD monitor will be used set at 800 x 600 for optimum legibility in
this situation. In this setup what would be an ideal amount of memory
on the card ..128 or 256 Megs?

T I A,
Alvin
Click to expand...

Pretty much any card or on-board graphics will suffice.


If you're going to use an LCD monitor that *isn't* set at it's native
resolution it's going to be blurry anyway. You need something like my
bedroom TV. It's a 20" (3:4) Phillips with a DVI input and a native
resolution of 800 x 600. Most large panels have a high resolution and can
look crap if set to anything else. They work on a pixel-by-pixel system,
unlike a CRT.

Rather than say an arbitrary 800 x 600 I would consider setting the
resoltution to half of what the native spec is. (You may need software to do
this, the word "powerstrip" comes to mind) At least that way, instead of
having 'confused' pixels that the screen doen't really know whether to have
on or off you'll have blocks of four pixels all working in harmony.

In the above scenario, my 19", 1280 x 1024 LCD would become 640 x 512 and
would be quite clear. My 19" has a relatively low resolution for it's size
and, with a visually impaired person, perhaps you'll be getting a larger
monitor? Try halving the native resolution is my suggestion.

Good luck.
 
You can run 800 x 600 at 16 bit color with 1 MB memory; a typical configuration in about 1995. More memory is needed for higher resolution or color depth. A lot more memory is needed for 3D video games.
 
Arnold Packer said:
Gentlemen,

I am assembling a PC for a Visually Impaired person and need to select
an ATI or a NVIDIA video card for best text display.

A LCD monitor will be used set at 800 x 600 for optimum legibility in
this situation. In this setup what would be an ideal amount of memory
on the card ..128 or 256 Megs?
Click to expand...

You will only need that much graphics card RAM for running games. Like
someone else said, you would only need about 2MB of graphics card RAM to run
windows. You didn't mention operating system, but Windows Vista benefits
from a more powerful graphics card, but anything recent will be powerful
enough.

If the PC is not for games, then on-board graphics (built into a
motherboard) will be fine and can be configured to take just 2MB of system
RAM.

As someone else pointed out an LCD monitor will be clearest at the native
resolution. To get bigger text, you should change the visual options in
windows. Right click on the desktop and choose Properties. On the Appearance
tab, you will find settings to make text and boxes bigger. This means the
font size is increased, but the screen resolution is left alone, so the
screen pixels will be sharp and the text will be clearer than running
'normal' font sizes at 800x600.
 
Pretty much any card or on-board graphics will suffice.


If you're going to use an LCD monitor that *isn't* set at it's native
resolution it's going to be blurry anyway. You need something like my
bedroom TV. It's a 20" (3:4) Phillips with a DVI input and a native
resolution of 800 x 600. Most large panels have a high resolution and can
look crap if set to anything else. They work on a pixel-by-pixel system,
unlike a CRT.
Click to expand...

This is the right answer. Native resolution should be used
and native resolution of a typical computer LCD monitor is
going to be too small so an LCD TV running at native
resolution is the best answer. At a mere 800x600, DVI
probably won't make much difference but it would still tend
to be the better choice.

Now that LCD TV prices have continued to drop, a larger than
20" LCD TV would be even better... and if large enough it
need not even be set to 800x600 anymore so long as it's
still at the native resolution.
 
Arnold said:
I am assembling a PC for a Visually Impaired person and need to select
an ATI or a NVIDIA video card for best text display.

A LCD monitor will be used set at 800 x 600 for optimum legibility in
this situation. In this setup what would be an ideal amount of memory
on the card ….128 or 256 Megs?
Click to expand...

In that case 128 meg will be just fine.
 
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