* Luca Villa:
I made an 1 hour long research and found that he top-of-the-line
graphic cards commercialized for 2D work according to NVidia and ATI
would be these:
- NVidia Quadro NVS 440 PCIe (~$400 on eBay)
quad-head
"high-performance 2D rendering engine"
MPEG-2 and WMV9 decode acceleration
source: http://www.nvidia.com/object/IO_30901.html
- ATI FireMV 2400 (~$400 on eBay)
quad-head
"ATI's FireMV(tm) multi-view 2D workstation acceleration cards are
designed exclusively for the financial and corporate marketplaces."
http://ati.amd.com/products/firemvseries/index.html
Yeah, right. Manufacturers websites as the reference. Now *thats* a
reliable source....NOT
Finally, I found a very interesting 2D benchmark comparison between
these 2 cards and a $3699 priced Quadro FX 4500 X2 he
http://www.computerpoweruser.com/edi...01%2F07c01.asp
Funny, the site that opens on my webbrowser doesn't talk about 2D
performance but multimonitor setups: "We got our hands on a several
multimonitor graphics adapters and threw them at a mishmash of monitors
of different sizes and resolutions to see if our personal video wall
could really improve our productivity"
The Quadro FX 4500 X2 performed significantly better in all the 2D
(and 3D) tests.
Where does the article say that?
Now I miss the final prove that I would not perceive this 2D speed
difference when I'm working with tens of standard Windows applications/
windows.
Ever thought why no-one is talking about 2D performance any more nor why
2D performance hasn't been benchmarked by reputable magazines and
hardware sites for ages? Again for you: 2D performance of the last ~8
years or so is *more* than fast enough for *anything* 2D, period. That's
a fact. And if you understand how 2D acceleration works i.e. under
Windows and why the bandwidth needed for 2D is incredible low, much
lower than even the cheapest crap gfx card provides, then you know why
no-one talks about 2D performance any more.
BTW: things like video decoding support (MPEG2/HDTV etc) is *not* part
of the 2D performance. In fact, video hardware support has basically
*nothing* to do with gfx performance. It's done by a separate part of
hardware that is integrated in todays GPUs.
For example every time I unlock Windows I currently have to
wait 10-15 seconds for all the windows and icons to be restored/
painted on the screen. My system has a Geforce 7300 card. I wonder if
the graphic card can positively influence this speed.
No, it can't. The waiting time has nothing to do with the gfx card. If
you logon to Windows the appropriate user profile has to be loaded.
Especially if you're on a network (ADS) this can take several seconds
because the local Windows has to retrive user data from the server. Even
on a standalone PC this can take some time, depending on disk
performance, CPU and memory. The gfx card simply does **** about that.
You came here for an advice and you got it. If you don't believe us fine
then go ahead and buy the most expensive gfx card that you can find if
you think you will getter 2D performance. But I'd recommend you get at
least a basic understanding how these things really work.
Benjamin