[rogerkylin]

I have a 533 MHz g4 Digital audio. Scrolling seems a bit slow, but things seem mostly fine. I don't do any heavy gaming, but do my share if iMovie and iPhoto.

I have the stock GForce2MX with 32 MB of video RAM. Are there any grahics cards out there that are worth upgrading to since I don't do heavy gaming (running 10.2)?

[Misanthrope]

Check your PM box.

[bstone]

Originally posted by Misanthrope:
Check your PM box.

Can you share the knowledge for the rest of us?

[Misanthrope]

I sent an offer for a GeForce 4 MX 32Mb to this person, but rather than turn a technical thread into a buy/sell thread, I figured it'd be best to discretely mention it.

[DrBoar]

I put a Radeon 8500 in a G4/400 and it did nothing to scrolling. gaming improved a bit. Adding a 1200 MHz CPU on the other hand made a huge difference and improved gaming a lot. For 2D stuff the limitation is the CPU not the GF2mx

[typoon]

I did the same thing. I put a Radeon 9000 in my machine then Upgraded to an 800 MHz Processor. The processor upgrade helped the most. As well as my RAM and the video card

[Langdon]

How much of an improvement is getting a new video card with the same amount of VRAM?
If gaming is not a users main use, how much better would that GeForce4 be than a GeForce2 or even an original Mac Radeon all having 32mb?

[DrBoar]

Langdon
No improvement what so ever if you migrate between two QuartsExtreme enabled cards. Nor will a 16MB to 256 MB VRAM improve any 2 D work.

With say a 7500 motherbaord video and a G3/500 CPU the video chip is the limitiation even for 2D stuff but with a ATI128 card and upwards the video is not limitong the 2D speed but the CPU.

Fast cards are great for games and 3D work but for scrolling, window resizing and so on it is the CPU not the GPU that is the weak link

[dfiler]

This is simply not true. There is a huge performance disparity between cards with different amounts of memory.

Quartz extreme ofloads window contents onto your graphics card as a bunch of heavy weight textures. Too little ram and the card will have to fetch some textures from main memory via the AGP bus. A good demonstration of this is to compare expose on a card with 32megs and a card with 64megs.

If you have more than a handful of windows open, that extra memory can be the difference between 2 frames per second and 30 frames per second.

Some of the scrolling libraries are hardwrare accelerated and also vram bound. More ram translates into quicker scrolling if all vram has been consumed.

A radeon 8500 (64megs) made my dual 450 way faster than it was with a stock rage128pro.

I highly recommend upgrading to a 64 meg card.

[Langdon]

Originally posted by dfiler:
This is simply not true. There is a huge performance disparity between cards with different amounts of memory.

OK, that I understand but it wasn't what I asked about. I am talking about different models of cards with the same amount of memory (All 32mb in this case) and how they might perform better under non-gaming situations.

Like the original poster. What gains would he get from a GeForce4 over a GeForce2... in my case I am wondering if there is any reason to upgrade from an original Radeon (32mb) to a newer card, also with 32 megs.