I didn't know if this was more appropriate here or in the monitor section, but I'm looking for a new monitor, and I need to know the max resolution that my video card can handle. I know it's really old, so I'm thinking I might not like the answers I get, but I hoping.

I have an nVidia GeForce4 Ti 4200 AGP 4X w/ 64MB RAM.

I really need a 22" or 24" monitor for more workspace and I would love to have 1900x1200 resolution. However, I don't know how long it will be before I overhaul my system (I don't want to spend any money on a better AGP card, because I plan to move to PCI in my next upgrade), and 24" are really expensive right now. On the other hand, I really don't want to buy a 22" now and then wish I hadn't.

So here are my questions:

• What is the max resolution that my video card can handle? (And where can I find this??? The nVidia site hasn't been too helpful...)
• Depending on what my video card can handle, how will that affect the text on a 22" or 24" if it doesn't run at native resolution? I've heard some bad things about mangled text when not running at native resolution.

I'm really frustrated that I haven't been able to find the specs on my video card.

Can anyone help?

Thanks so much in advance!

the maximum res your card can show is by far and away more than any 24" or 30" TFT, it will run fine, just make sure your tft runs at its native res, eg the maximum it can display.

If this site has their facts right it supports up to 2048x1536.

http://www4.dealtime.com/xPF-Evga- [...] 0-20258631


As long as you aren't playing games on it at that res, you will have no problems. Yes, non native on LCD's looks bad when doing anything but games, but your card can handle it so don't worry.

Yeah, I'm not planning on doing any real gaming until I upgrade everything, so that's not a big issue right now. I just do a bunch of Photoshop and web work, so I want more space.

I'm really surprised, since this is an old card and only 64MB (not 128MB), but hey, I won't complain.

Thanks for the info!

The computation for the vram needed is actually quite easy. First you need to know your resolution, (talking 4:3 aspect ratio here), maybe 1024x768, 1280x1024 or 1600x1200. You also need to know the color depth, 256, 8-bit, 16-bit, 24-bit, or 32-bit.

Now considering that you want 1600x1200 resolution with a color depth of 32-bit, the computation goes as:
1600 * 1200 * (32 / 8) = 7680000 bytes/ 7.68MB of VRAM needed. For those who don't know, i divided the 32-bit color depth by 8 is because each byte is made up of 8-bits. (This is similar with internet bandwidth computation, you divide your advertised speed by 8 and that's your actual dl or up speed.)

Now imagining even that you have 200% overhead, say the OS does a lot of other things before displaying the desktop, you'll still only need only around 23.04MB of vram, which is still quite a very low number even by standards of 2 years ago.

*Just wanted to refresh myself of how it's actually computed.

*Side note: I haven't really researched on why vid cards of today, and even three years ago are still limited to around 2048x2048 as the absolute maximum resolution.