On Tue, 20 Apr 2004 14:26:13 -0700, Peter Duniho wrote:
If your CPU and memory bandwidth is your bottleneck, a faster video card
will produce NO increase in speed whatsoever.

I have to call you on that one. Remember, newer video cards are able to
offload a lot of work from CPUs these day. If your video card is only a
generation or two back, it *can* make a big difference. Why? Well,
drivers are now able move the data the card and let the card compute and
figure out how to draw things. This means, you now have more CPU
available. The net effect is that in some cases, it's like getting a
faster computer. Furthermore, if memory bandwidth is a bottleneck, it
might be because your computer is having to juggle large amounts of
textures bewteen its self and the video card. Again, a newer video card,
may greatly alleviate this. Why? Because a video card that is a year or
two old, especially if it's a commodity board, may only have 16M or 32M on
it. Maybe 64M if it's a fairly nice one. These days, you can get a nice
mid-range card which is several generations more advanced, which have
128M, 256M and even 512M on them. This means all those textures which
were saturating your memory bandwidth and bus can now be loaded, ONCE,
onto your video card. That also means more main memory may suddenly be
available. If you were paging before and offloading the textures prevents
this, it can make a **HUGE** performance difference (of course, adding
memory would probably be recommended too). Again, this can result in new
life in a slightly older computer.

Because computers, video cards, drivers, and the 3d software which is
running greatly differs, it's impossible to answer in absoluetes what type
of return you'll get by moving up to a new card. Just the same, If you
are thinking of getting a new system, try a nice card first. You may find
that it gives you the extra life that you was wanting. If it falls short,
then you already have your video card for your new system. Nothing is
lost.