GPU also counts as more than one core and dedicated video system/bus.
I have a K8MM-V for development with onboard video, 2GB, 2GHz, shared video RAM.
Once I installed a 512MB nVidia in dedicated AGP, I could even watch and record TV the whole day, using a generic Windows 98 VBE 2 driver, because there is no native driver for that card.
It feels as if at the very least I'm finally using the whole speed of the system.
Emulation of Windows XP under Bochs 2.6 is also faster.
If I go back to use the onboard shared video, the system is not so outstanding in performance or speed. It is visible when recording from a LifeView FlyTV FlyVideo 2000.
Basic DirectX functionality seems available in this setup.
Dedicated video doesn't need to use bandwidth from main system RAM because it has its own RAM to read that in a dedicated way instead.
LtG wrote:
~ wrote:
Some video cards are dedicated, some are just generic onboard ones.
Dedicated video cards, no matter how simple, free main RAM from being accessed constantly just to display video. They have their own RAM and complex stand-alone display circuitry. That causes the full main RAM bus speed to be available to running programs, not shared between refreshing the video and running code.
Even a single-core machine feels noticeably faster. VESA modes look practically like native ones (depending on the quality of graphics implementation too), almost as if it was a dual-core machine.
Is this all just your opinion or is it also based on facts?
For instance, if you don't use 3D acceleration, then where is the actual "picture" to be displayed composited? In a RAM based framebuffer? How does that end up on the discrete display adapter's VRAM? By copying it from RAM to VRAM? How does it avoid RAM access?
Integrated GPU solutions also have "complex stand-alone display circuitry"...