Re: dumb question about nvidia nforce and geforce cards and AMD boxes....

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On 04/20/07 15:12, Michael Fothergill wrote:
Dear Debianists,

I have been reading a little on the web about graphics cards.

The machine I currently use is an AMD 64 Sempron 3200 machine (AM2
board) with what is termed on board graphics.

Yes, "on-board graphics" is the standard term.

I also have an 80GB ATA drive in it and a DVD optical drive. THe
machine has 512 MB of RAM at present.

I am thinking of upgrading it a bit. I thought to add a further 1GB of
RAM and get myself a graphics card so I could do video editing and mess
about with e.g. Blender.

I notice from reading various web sites that nvidia make nForce chips
that can be attached to AMD64 boards and I think boost the graphics
performance of these machines.

No.

nForce chip_sets_ are designed to manage the whole system, not the
graphics.

One one site I was reading it seemed as though the nforce chips were
only for dual core processor chipsets.....

Nope.

But then I found a machine being sold that contained an AMD Sempron 3200
chip and nforce chipset combined with geforce graphics chip that were
supposed to work together in harmony in some way or other.....

Yep.

CPU on one chip, geforce graphics on another chip & nforce on
another one or 2 chips.

I had thought that maybe it was possible to upgrade an AMD64 box with a
geforce graphics independently of the nforce card being there but maybe
I was wrong....

Nope, you're correct.

Can the geforce card also run on Intel systems?

Of course. It's a card. That's what cards do.

I looked on other web pages and it seemed that on board graphics can do
quite a lot. It's only certain uses of a computer that need the
graphics card.

"Certain uses" is highly generalized.

I assume that the onboard graphics facility is present in every AMD
Sempron 3200 chip as standard (correct me if I am wrong here).

You are wrong.

On-board graphics is popular because it's cheap and is Good Enough
for reading email & surfing the web.

However, graphics are NOT (and should never be) embedded into the CPU.

I also assume although the web sites are a bit vague on this that if you
add a graphics card such as a geforce card that it does not negate the
on board graphics capablity it just supplements it.

Maybe it can supplement the OBG (on-board graphics), but I seriously
doubt it. But the speed differential between OBG and discreet
(card-based) graphics is so great that it would suck, so no one ever
does it.

There's an option in the BIOS to disable the OBG when you install a
video card. Do that.


Please correct me if I am wrong here.

Other sites explained that you would only want to use a really powerful
graphics card in a computer if you were doing high end gaming.

Or watching videos or playing doing any 3D work.

X.org doesn't have free drivers to handle that kind of stuff, and
not all OBG chips are nvidia.

For $60 you can gets an *excellent* GeForce 6200 256MB AGP 4X/8X
Video Card at NewEgg. Won't hold up to the latests and most
complicated games, but will easily handle any video editing you want
to do.

There were also warnings in there about fans, overheating and power
supply requirements if you start putting more advanced graphics cards
into the box....

Sure, the newer ones, but not the trailing edge cards (which have
more than enough oomph).

If I want to upgrade my AMD Sempron 3200 Novatech box for video and
blender use would for example an Nvidia Geforce 7600GS chipset graphics
processor be a reasonable add on?

"chipset graphics processor".

You're mashing and mangling terms.

Add a cheap GeForce 6xxx or 7xxx series card to your system and
you'll be set.

Also would I add one of these nforce beasties and if so which one?

What would it be doing that the other geforce card was not doing?

nForce & GeForce are two different beasts. Don't confuse them.

What are these pixel pipelines and what is the benefit of having 20 of
them as opposed to 12?

Geek bragging rights.

I also notice that the really powerful cards have e.g. 96 stream
processors in them.

I can piss farther than you can.

What do they do that pixel pipelines don't?

Haven't a clue.

One final question. In the world of very high end gaming on PCs are
most people running Windows to play the games?

Windows is the *only* PC platform for high-end gaming.

If so is this because most of the code for the games themselves is
written solely for Windows and not Linux or is also because drivers and
other proprietary restrictions make it difficult to run the games
properly under Linux?

The games are all DirectX, which can only be emulated under Linux.

http://cedega.com/

Or, are there infact quite a few high end games that run fine under
Linux and actually you could you save money on games software, the OS
software and other things by dumping Windows for high end gaming?

You mean by using free high-end games? Other than Doom/Quake, there
are none. You *must* buy Windows games, even to run them under Cedega.

What linux based applications could give a geforce 8800 GTX graphics
card a serious 3D work out?

So you want to use a Sempron 3200 CPU and a video card who's price
at NewEgg *starts* at $530?

Man, that's totally bass-ackwards.

Can I have some of that money burning a hole in your pocket?

Sorry about all the dumb questions.

You gotta start somewhere...

- --
Ron Johnson, Jr.
Jefferson LA USA

Give a man a fish, and he eats for a day.
Hit him with a fish, and he goes away for good!

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