Improving 2D peformance

[LittleAndy]

I would like to improve the peformance of 2D graphic applications such as Fireworks MX, Flash MX, Photoshop and Illustrator. Would buying an expensive 3D graphics card be the best option? The current card is an ATI rage pro 128 with 16 MB RAM. (PC spec = P4 1.4 GHz, 392 MB SDRAM)
Any pointers would be appreciated!

 

[DCB_AU]

Yes, there are cards cheap as chips and xxxx more powerfull than the one you have, eg. a Nvidia GF4 440MX are selling for 99$ Aus.
Even cheaper GF MX 400 54$ Aus.

DCB_AU

 

[knowan]

Who dude, getting a GF card won't improve your 2D performance. It'll actually decrease it's performance {url]http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.html?i=1577&p=5[/url]. Fact is for 2D apps what you got is about as good as you can get. You can try an ATI or Matrox card with more RAM, but I don't think that would improve it by much. Ditto for the fire, quatro and wildcat professional graphics cards, as these are designed for 3d apps, not 2D.

You would be much better off with a RAM and CPU upgrade.

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Knowan likes you. Knowan is your friend. Knowan thinks you're great.

 

[phial]

absolutely untrue


newer cards like the Radeon-original or higher do alot of 2D graphics effects in hardware. like Icons, the mouse cursor (yeah the rage pro prolly does the cursor) .. theres lots of tings

when i went from my TNT2 to my radeon 8500 my windows performance improved substantially. even over my radeon-origial, the 8500 was faster, because it does alot of GUI things in hardware, freeing up your processor

 

[ejsmith2]

Yeah, it's true your video card makes a little difference.

But for Flash and Photoshop and Illustrator, those are all functions of your cpu and ram. It's one thing if it's premiere; hardware acceleration helps multitask when you're playing movies and editing.

But Photoshop eats memory like a cannibal eats @$$. Depending on how "heavy" you're using those apps, 512meg and even 1024meg of ram would give you a noticable boost.

You could stand to move up to a 2.4ghz processor too.

"I personally think filesystems should be rewritten from scratch every 5 years..." --- Hans Reiser

 

[knowan]

You will see an improvement with a new ATI or Matrox video card, but you will see a much better improvement with more/faster RAM and CPU. If you're looking at bang for your buck spending 150 on a new vid card will net you a 5 to 10% gain. Spending $150 on a new CPU or new/more ram will almost double your performance. IMHO spending that money on a new vid card is a waste.

What's especially holding your system back is the SDRAM mixed with a P4 processor.

Oh, and don't bother getting a geforce card. Nvidia focuses all their attention on 3D stats, and ignores 2D performance. Matrox focuses almost all of their attention on 2D performance, while ATI is a bit more well rounded.

Here's the link I posted earlier, <A HREF="http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.html?i=1577&p=5" target="_new">http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.html?i=1577&p=5</A>.

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Knowan likes you. Knowan is your friend. Knowan thinks you're great.