Shared v. Dedicated

I am looking at getting a nc6400. There area few options they have.

- shared memory up tp 224 meg
- 64 meg
- 128 meg

I believe the card is a ATI 1300 or GMA 950

I am thinking the shared memory is GMA 950. So... if I want to play any 3D games I would need to have the ATI1300, and the higher amount the better in memory correct? If a game requires 256 or 512 meg can I still play it using the shared hyper memory of the ATI1300?



THanks in advance

grazzt

 

Yup...you'll want the 128MB dedicated version for sure. Anything less will be crippling.

What kind of games are we talking about? You might need to get a better GPU depending.

 

Any dedicated GPU is better than the intel gma950 therefore if you have the option of an ATI x1300 128mb by all means choose that over the gma950.

Hypermemory will take care of any extra graphics memory you may need...

 

I'm sorry, but HM is no substitute for dedicated RAM. ATI's HM implementation is particularly poor and leads to little additional performance from what I've read.

 

I was just asking this as a general question. I used to game quite a bit before, not much in the gaming scene on the PC. I just want to see what my options were. Something like War Craft, Civillization, etc... would interest me. I just want to see if I had enough RAM with the hypermemory, I would be covered, if a game required 128 meg and i got the 64 dedicated versus. Thanks again in advance.

grazzt

 

Bump - what you think?

 

Without knowing the specific game you plan to play, I would say 128MB with at least 64MB of that dedicated will be fine provided

1) Your GPU meets or exceeds the minimum requirement for the game.
2) You don't mind a hit in performance, especially in load times.
3) The game doesn't have some software check in place to test the actual amount of physical RAM for the GPU before installing.

 

With Warcraft and Civilization 4, you'll be able to run with medium detail or so on the 128MB X1300, so that's the minimum card that I'd recommend. The video RAM recommendations aren't hard lines in most games, so the Hypermemory will help you somewhat. If you're considering newer games, or something more intensive than the games you listed, look into something with a 7400/X1400, or a 7600/X1600, both of which will have a lot more graphical power than the setups you're looking at.

 

This may be a stupid question, but is the GMA 950 adequate for playing DVDs and using the computer as a digital video recorder through Windows Media Center?

I have a Thinkpad T43 with a Pentium 760 M running at 2 GHz and 1GB of memory and an ATI x300 (64MB), and it occasionally pauses when playing DVDs. This may be due to other reasons (maybe the lens in my optical drive is not clean), but it gives me the motivation to make sure my next computer has adequate graphics capabilities.

 

GMA is not good for gaming at all. Its a low end IGP. If your looking for computers in the low price range, look for a laptop with x200m. Its the best IGP out there and the price is good if your only going to play games like Civ 4 or Warcraft on medium settings. Just make sure you have a nice amount of RAM on it to smooth the game out. 1gb+ Should be just fine.

 

Thanks, Filipinocrzy. I actually don't play any games. I just need to watch movies and record TV shows. Don't know if I need to spend extra bucks to get something better than the GMA 950.

 

bump ............

 

DVDs...definitely. Excellent battery life also helps your watching experience when you're on the run.

DVR?...probably. Just make sure you get a TV Tuner that has hardware accelerated decoded built into the tuner to aid in the process. If you get one that uses software based PC decoding, you'll stress out the CPU and GPU (not that the GPU will help much). Only the really cheap models don't use hardware acceleration.

As for your pausing issues, it may be a bug with your DVD Codecs or graphics card drivers. Try updating them, and check out the DixV and K-Lite codecs. Both work fairly well from my experience.

 

Thanks a lot, night_2004, for settling this issue for me. Really appreciate it.