Graphics Card Recomendation Please

[DWLighting]

I use VW9 on a PIII 450 - WIN98SE machine with 384mb RAM. The video card has only 16mb of onboard RAM. It is an AGP card. Would you recomend an ideal video card? Will higher memory increase screen redraw rates (of standard 'plan' views - nothing rendered)?

32MB, 64MB RAM, nVidia, ETI, etc???

Thanks,David

[Matthew Giampapa]

DWLighting,

We really don't have an official recommendation for video cards. While you may see a small speed increase in 2D redraw, the limiting factor in VectorWorks performance is probably the CPU. Your upgrade would probably be spent best there.

For what it's worth, the old king of 2D performance used to be Matrox, but I haven?t seen any numbers on 2D performance in the last few years. Most video cards handle 2D so well now that they are not the bottleneck.

Matthew GiampapaTechnical Support

[ 10-29-2001: Message edited by: Matthew Giampapa ]

[DWLighting]

So, my 450mhz PIII is the bottleneck in terms of redraw speed? Really?

It is relatively fast with everything else.

My drawings are very symbol heavy and tend to have about 5-8 layers in a given sheet.

Any other thoughts on this matter?

Thanks,DW

[Matthew Giampapa]

Well yes, I made some fairly specific inquiries with our windows developers about this. Most of the speed gains made in video cards over the last few years have focused on accelerating two things, 3D and DVD playback. 2D performance in VectorWorks is not likely to be limited by the graphics card.

Now I can't be 100% certain you wont see a speed increase. If you have an exceptionally poor performing video card it could be the case. The only way to find out in that case is to try. I would suggest trying your local CompUSA or other computer store. I know the ones here have a 14 day no questions ask return policy on hardware so you can try it out first.

The only other suggestion I can really make is that you consider switching your OS to either windows 2000 or XP. Most of our testing and development is done on the NT/2000/XP platform rather than 95/98/ME (The Mac is a whole different story). So by and large you will probably have better performance and stability using something in the NT/2000/XP family.

It may also be a good idea to make sure your system is using the latest drivers and that your hard drive is in DMA mode opposed to PIO mode. Actually if you are using 1st generation drivers supplied by Windows 98 itself, you could also see a speed increase by updating those to the current release as well.

Matthew GiampapaTechnical Support

quote:

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Originally posted by DWLighting:

So, my 450mhz PIII is the bottleneck in terms of redraw speed? Really?

It is relatively fast with everything else.

My drawings are very symbol heavy and tend to have about 5-8 layers in a given sheet.

Any other thoughts on this matter?

Thanks,DW

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