I run Photoshop at home on an old Matrox card that only has 8M video ram. I run it at work on an ATI Radeon 9700 with a bunch more ram. No difference in refresh as far as I can tell… I am in the process of building a new system and bought the Matrox Parhelia with 128M of ram, $350… but since the system is a #Ghz proc, I suppose that any comparison will be moot.
IMHO, the only noticeable difference between earlier 2D cards and 2D on today’s cards, is overall quality of the displayed image, and support for multiple monitors, higher refresh rates, etc. Video RAM is mostly used 3D textures.
When choosing a card, you need to balance your requirements against the manufacturer’s intended customer, for example, a "gamers" card will focus on 3D performance/quality, possibly to the detriment of 2D quality. A lot of the nVidia based non-branded clone cards suffer from this.
I was reading a video card review article the other day, and the writer made an interesting point. Originally, all cards were 2D, and to get 3D, you added a 3D accelerator card – the design philosophy was that 2D requirements were relatively static, and you just upgraded the 3D add-on as required. However, manufacturers found that the cost of including 2D and 3D circuitry on the one card was not a lot more than just a 3D card, and here we are.
viol8ion,
I just upgraded my PC system to a 3ghz P4 with RAID drives and 2gb of DDR RAM which runs like a bat out of hell. HOWEVER, I found that the Matrox Parhelia card caused flickers and a strange cursor arrow and other problems on my Sony Artisan monitor.
It frustrated me so much I dumped it and bought an ATI 9600 Pro which you can get at Circuit City for only $150 with the rebate. It is wonderful and works flawlessly. Given an 8x AGP slot it produces almost instantaneous images on both my Sony and my Viewsonic LCD VP171b. I strongly suggest you look at this card rather than the Parhelia which I think is inferior and has very poor drivers. Just my 5 cents worth, but based on hours of testing and frustrations with the Parhelia in three different machines.
Could it have been a faulty card? I use a Parhelia with a Iiyama Pro502 CRT without any problems.
All 2D Cards the same?
I upgraded the PC about 6 months ago but kept the same monitor and did notice the improvement going from one of the older Matrox cards to a Parhelia, so not all cards give the same 2D performance. The speed of the video DACs will have an effect on the quality of the video signal especially when running CRT monitors at higher resolution.
Hold!…………………………..reminder;
The topic is about Photoshop 7 and its benefits from a faster 2D card. Yes better cards will have more memeory and therefore higher resolutions and colour depths and refresh rates.
Is the quality of the display all that better with the best of best cards, e.g. compared to a 1997 budget s3 3D virGE DX2 4MB 64-bit card ?….I mean I used it for several years and the it produced a sharp display at the higest of resoulutions (provided a monitor to match was present)…..would the the latest card’s 2D display of the windows desktop really be distinctive/distiguishable ?. I have not found anythign natually when switching to a voodoo 3 card….
The amount of memory is not the issue, once you have enough to run at the required colour depth and resolution more will not help.
correct. and most 2d resolutions will run just as well in 8 meg as they will in 128 meg.
So, then, when I upgrade, is it reasonable to buy a new Video card like the Matrox, or will my nVidia GA-620 series do just as well?
Lawrence,
Upgrading systems is largely a case of moving the performance bottleneck somewhere else <grin>.
Without knowing the specs of your current system, it’s likely that your new system will have features like AGP 8x and DualDDR memory, etc.
I’m not very familiar with the TNT2 Model 64, but it’s around two or three years old, isn’t it? This will continue to handle 2D fine, but won’t take advantage of the higher bandwidth available in newer motherboards.
My recommendation would be to retain the old board, and if there are no apparent issues, then you’re fine. Otherwise start looking for a replacement.
The difficulty, for me, in evaluating videocards is that it is difficult to view hands-on demos of various cards in similarly spec’d systems. You usually end up comparing performance specs, and reading reviews.
Isn’t there an incompatibility between AGP 1.0 specs cards and the newer AGP8.0 slots? (I recall different voltage, but I’m not 100% sure)
Search now working! 🙂
Pierre asked about 1x vs 8x, and I was thinking 4x vs 8x. Checking around, 4x cards will work fine in 8x slots, just slower.
Not many 8x cards yet, and the Matrox 8x are more than the entire computer parts together. Sooooo, until I want dual monitors, I suppose the nVidia stays. I have enough expense trying to get beyond, or even up to, 2G Ram.
ati aiw 9700 pro is 8x! whoopie!
