videocards and processor power..

slmgringo

New Member
sup everyone, i just have a quick question. If you buy a powerful videocard, is it going to need a substanital amount of processor power? or is the vc made to make it easier on the processor? the reason i ask is i plan on doing some graphic design and music production, and while doing those things, i want to keep the processor power open for the software, and not the hardware. I plan on running 2gb of ram and dual core manchester 4200 with 7800GT. thanks.
 
the graphics card will benefit from having the extra CPU power it will not prevent it from running fine.
a lot of people seem to be going all out to say that a component bottlenecking another component will make your system somehow crap. i dont see this as a problem and these components will run fine together.
 
yeah but the point is that too much is being made of how "bad" it is, when in actual fact there is nothing wrong with it.
 
The reason i asked is b/c in the music production forums that i frequent always reccomend against getting powerful graphics card, b/c its supposedly CPU hungry...but i was thinkin if the software im running isnt a game that uses all the power of a videocard, the card wouldnt need to pull CPU power. Thx for the replies tho.
 
i wouldnt think that a better gfx card would use up more of your cpu then a crappy one would...
 
the nvidia quadro cards are made for graphic designing, arent they? I think they are. check them out at pricewatch.com.
 
nVidia's Quadro cards and ATi's FireGL cards are not recommended for playing games at all, btw. A guy played CoD2 with a Quadro card, sure they are powerful but his FPS was 6.
 
mrjack said:
nVidia's Quadro cards and ATi's FireGL cards are not recommended for playing games at all, btw. A guy played CoD2 with a Quadro card, sure they are powerful but his FPS was 6.
True. But this guy is not playing games.
 
mrjack said:
bebopin64, might I ask, how much did your system cost?
There is a thing called a PM for a reason.

slmgringo said:
The reason i asked is b/c in the music production forums that i frequent always reccomend against getting powerful graphics card, b/c its supposedly CPU hungry...but i was thinkin if the software im running isnt a game that uses all the power of a videocard, the card wouldnt need to pull CPU power. Thx for the replies tho.
I would recomend, to stop recomending that.
 
powerful graphics cards are only cpu hungry when they're being used in gaming; the graphics card needs the cpu to process the frames before they're sent to the card. so that piece of advice you've been given is crap.
the reason a graphics card is there is to take the load off the cpu. also a fast graphics card improves 2D performance when you're not gaming so you'll see a benefit when using windows and applications that dont require 3D performance.
also, quadro graphics cards are for 3D design like 3d studio max and similar applications. they're very poor in directx gaming but i believe their performance in an OpenGL environment is excellent. They also costs thousands of dollars (if thats your favourite currency)
 
Hairy_Lee said:
powerful graphics cards are only cpu hungry when they're being used in gaming; the graphics card needs the cpu to process the frames before they're sent to the card. so that piece of advice you've been given is crap.
the reason a graphics card is there is to take the load off the cpu. also a fast graphics card improves 2D performance when you're not gaming so you'll see a benefit when using windows and applications that dont require 3D performance.
also, quadro graphics cards are for 3D design like 3d studio max and similar applications. they're very poor in directx gaming but i believe their performance in an OpenGL environment is excellent. They also costs thousands of dollars (if thats your favourite currency)
What if your playing a agem in openGL?
 
i would imagine the performance would be good but i dont think it'll beat a 7800 or even a 6800 because its not optimised for that sort of environment.
 
If you buy a powerful videocard, is it going to need a substanital amount of processor power? or is the vc made to make it easier on the processor?
Read up
http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=2149&p=1
http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=2330

The reason i asked is b/c in the music production forums that i frequent always reccomend against getting powerful graphics card, b/c its supposedly CPU hungry...but i was thinkin if the software im running isnt a game that uses all the power of a videocard, the card wouldnt need to pull CPU power. Thx for the replies tho.
Maybe the reccomend that because gaming and music production require different things

the nvidia quadro cards are made for graphic designing, arent they? I think they are. check them out at pricewatch.com.
They are but you dont game on a Quadro.

What if your playing a agem in openGL?
Henry is partially right: the workstation cards excel at OpenGL because OpenGL is what pros use (you dont make animation in DX, that's silly)... now the difference with professional OpenGL and gaming OpenGL is that professional are concerned about pixel precision and gamers are concerned about framerates. So still, Quadro for gaming = bad idea
 
Back
Top