hello,
i have intel p-4 2.4 on ausu p4vp-mx motherboard with 256 mb ram, it
uses onboard VIA ProSavage8 Graphics. i'm considering to purchase new
agp card of 64 mb for good gaming performance.. existing on board is
32 mb & not working with some games.
i want to know whether i need new card of 64 mb or else, is there any
way that works like 32 mb of onboard graphics + 32 mb of new card if i
purchase card of 32 mb...
advice me ... thanks
krunal
The ProSavage will not "combine" with a new video card, and in any
case, the onboard graphics uses system memory. You are much better
off to increase both system memory and video card memory, to be
able to handle modern games.
"Good gaming performance" is difficult to achieve. There are some
games now that even the fastest computers have trouble with. 3D
gaming is very demanding of system memory, video texture memory, and
CPU performance.
To start with, I would increase system memory from 256MB to 1GB,
by installing two 512MB memory sticks. (If you have Windows 98, I
would only install two 256MB memory sticks, due to the issues with
using more than 512MB of system memory.) If you buy DDR400 memory,
it is backward compatible with slower motherboards, and if you
upgrade the motherboard, the memory can be reused - if you buy
DDR266 memory, it would hold back a new motherboard.
On the video cards now, you can get 128MB or 256MB video card memory,
which is good to hold many of the textures needed in a game level.
Picking a small video card memory would be a waste of money, as you
won't be satisfied with it.
There is some info on video cards and motherboards here.
http://www.playtool.com/pages/agpcompat/agp.html
This page will show you some of the performance parameters for the
cards. The level of Vertex and Pixel Shader support is shown at
the bottom of the page. Unfortunately, the web site has stopped
updating the information on this page, and this archived copy is
the most recent table of information:
http://web.archive.org/web/20041012...ykuly/zestawienie_GPU_2/skala_wydajnosci.html
There are some benchmarks here, to allow comparison of the cards:
http://graphics.tomshardware.com/graphic/20050705/index.html
The unfortunate reality is, a game costs $50, and the hardware to
run it costs $1000 :-(
HTH,
Paul
