one of my gaming systems was equipped with a Matrox G400 16meg *cough*. THe most I could say for it was that it ran UT decently at High Quality & Jedi Outcast on Mediumish settings.
Right, but like he said he's not gaming. And like I mentioned it's NOT for gaming. It's simply the best 2D series of cards out there.
As for advantage of better arch. cards in 2D applications it's mainly things like the speed of the VPU/GPU, good for all things, the dedication of the memory (not shared, and the speed of the RAMDACs (most important for 2D). Would you notice a difference betweeen an R7200 64mb and an R9100 64mb, no not really, except for the raw speed differences of the VPU, and then likely only at very high res and very fast frame rates (for video or the like) for something needing to be rendered. The RAMDACs being the same a video will appear the same. The advantage there would be that a lesser VPU (especially onboard) is usually running at a much lower clock rate and also needs to share resources (accessing system memory much more often, especially when a seperate card usually wouldn't tap those resources in most 2D apps.) Most modern stand alone cards also come with some hardware-assisted MPEG aspects that are not usually found on integrated chipsets. The main difference is simply how much of the computer's resources are you freeing up and how powerful is the integrated video? Something like the 9100IGP would likely see very little diff. (except the raw memory issues) between itself and a stand alone card. However most modern chipsets are so poor that they are barely up to the task. His is a ProSavage KM266 with a S3 ProSavage8 graphics chip (consuming 32mb), which s a very low-end graphics chip. We are not talking nForces MX equivalent or EVEN an Intel Extreme. You can pop another 512mb on this puppy and it will still run slow, simply because it IS slow. The access to the memory alone is 2.1GB/s compared to even the early Radeon's 6.4BG/s or the original Geforce's 4.8GB/S or the GF4MX's 6.4GB/S. This matter at high res. and high colour depth. The RAMDAC speed isn't listed at VIA but they are likely the typical 230-260mhz kind found on most cheaper/older integrated setups. This means the max colour depth for 1600x1200 is 8bit at 60fps and who wants that! Even for 1280x1024 you max out at about 24bit. Only 1024x768 and just above run smoothly on 32bit colour. the speed of the RAMDAC is very important for 2D. Stand-alone board usually come with at least 350-400mhz RAMDACs, even my RageFuryPro was 300+MHZ. The Matrox cards like the G400 you had and above (even the PCI versions) have 360MHZ + 230MHZ RAMDACs (primary/secondary), Of course your older cards would have had slower RAMDACs, just like the G200 which has 250mhz and the TNT also had/has 250MHZ RAMDACs and a memory bandwith of 1.2-2.4GB/s .
I'm not saying that ALL integrated are bad, just MOST and if he's currently having trouble with 256mb, he'll have just about as much with 512+.
If you really want to test this real world, you compare the systems while running multiple windows and runnning video/flash animations at the same time as you are scrolling or something. You will see visible slow down. Also, pushing the resolution up will make the problem worse, like I said. The issue is not the complexity of the engine so much as the SPEED and resources availible to the grpahics. If something hits the CPU hard and it needs the memory it will compromise the graphics and vice-versa. Whereas with a separate card with it's own resources memeory dumps and all that 'work in the background' doesn't kill the graphics, just the processes.
Hey I know it's all a part of the WHOLE equation, heck the computers at work in my previous position had Savage 32 AGP CARDS married to a PIII, and when it did an NTFSDefrag it shut everything down even page draws. But I even tried increasing memory on the system (canabalized it on the night shift from another computer) going from 256 to 768 and that did NOTHING because the SYSTEM was bottlenecked at the CPU because of all these tasks (heck it even dropped keystorkes), and that was based on a system that HAD a seperate AGP card. So like I said it depends on the system and what it's doing. In MY case at work the only solution (other than disabling features) was a CPU upgrade which wasn't up to me.
The only time you will ever notice the difference (wether it's between PCI and AGP or Integrated and Stand-Alone) in 2D applications is at high res. and good colour depth.
In this case I still say he's better off with ANY modern stand alone card. IMNSHO.
Sorry the post is so long and meandering just a stream of conciousness what hit me at the time and I didn't want to go back and edit. I also had to double check the speeds and specs of some things.
Anywhoo hope that helps.
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