[TheGreatButcher]

My limited experience seems to indicate that processor speed is more important - I just switched from a G4 400 PCI graphics desktop to a PowerBook G4 at 500 MHz and in every game the PowerBook has been faster than my desktop (Madden 2000, UT, ST: Elite Force) - any opinions?

[a2daj]

On Macs, that is a given. For the most part, current video cards are sitting around twiddling their thumbs waiting for the processor to feed it some more triangles to play with, particularly at 640x480. At that resolution the CPU is usually the limiting factor.

[ShortcutToMoncton]

On the other hand, take your favorite game and start up in Software mode.

Yes, that's right. You can switch back to that 3D card now.....

greg

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Though the day's been
really long
I still feel I'm close to
nowhere....

[kevcarl]

I think, unfortunately, that both are important. I have a Voodoo5 in my biege G3. The textures are amazing, as are the lighting effects and full-scene anti-aliasing. But framerate is not so good. UT averaged around 18 fps. It was great and smooth in simple scenes (30 fps), but if more than one other character was in frame, framerate dropped enough to make it stutter (10 fps). a2daj is right; the card is very capable, but it was waiting on the rest of the system to feed it data. Sooooo...

I got a G4 500 upgrade for it (it was a stock 266 before). These cards are getting very cheap. This has made a huge improvement. While my average framerate has only gone up to about 28 fps, the stutter has completely disappeared in complex scene rendering. It seems to have really boosted the *minimum* sustained framerate, while not really improving the top end framerate as much as I would have liked. Although I guess a 35% framerate increase is nothing to sneeze at.

I think another really important consideration is the system bus speed. I'm limited to 66 Mhz in my beige. That makes a huge difference in shipping tons of triangle data around the system.

[blizzard]

This reliance on video cards is much more pronounced on PCs, to be sure, where the clock speeds on the processors are higher. But another thing to keep in mind is, all the current video cards possess something called 'hardware texture and lighting' which I'm sure you've run into if you have any interest in games. New games are starting to support this, and the result seems to be pretty jaw-dropping; the next Unreal engine, with its built-in support to T&L, will be able to push around about 100X as many polygons with little to no impact on framerates, if you believe what the companies in question are telling us. So, the video cards will only get MORE important as time goes on, as well.

Blizzard.

[Archangel]

If you are a serious gamer you will have a video card. I don't think they're overrated. Have you seen what the Geforce3 chip can do? Have you seen what the new Unreal engine can produce? You will needa GPU to do that stuff. Pretty soon you will have to have a GPU to run any top-shelf games.

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"Elvis has left the building!"

[Leonard]

If you think graphics cards are overated, you should try an older Mac without 2D or 3D acceleration or better yet disable your graphics card extensions and you'll soon be begging for the acceleration. Yes, graphics acceleration is dependent on both the CPU and GPU. But without a graphics card with a GPU you'd see a dramatic decrease in scrolling speed, quicktime movie playback, etc.

You also may want to note that the Powerbook is going to kick ass on your desktop because your desktop has a PCI graphics card (since you have a G4 PCI graphics) and the Powerbook has AGP graphics circuitry.