Re: [gentoo-amd64] Re: Heads-up: KDEers: Particularly kde3-ers,

[Paul Hartman]

On Thu, Aug 27, 2009 at 11:03 AM, Sebastian
Beßler<sebastian@××××××××××××.de> wrote:
> Paul Hartman schrieb:
>> On Thu, Aug 27, 2009 at 8:16 AM, BRM<bm_witness@×××××.com> wrote:
>>> Not everyone upgrades their video card every 6 months.
>>> Most probably get a video card upgrade only when they buy a new computer;
>>> and most don't buy a new computer every other year either, probably more like 4 years or so.
>>
>> You can get a GeForce 9600 for around USD$50, which comes near the
>> performance of the famously-expensive 8800 series (or at least near
>> enough for costing hundreds of dollars less), and has an H.264 decoder
>> so you can use vdpau with mplayer or mythtv to allow even very slow
>> computers to play high-res video smoothly.
>
> Many mainboards from that time only have AGP not PCI-E and to get a 9600
> with AGP is not easy or even possible, so that is not really a option.

I have an old Pentium 4 box which has a PCI-E video card. If a
computer is so old it doesn't even have PCI-E, its owner probably
wouldn't expect 3D desktop effects to work so well in the first place.

My old PII 266MHz had an AGP 3dfx card. I wonder if KDE4 desktop
effects would run well on that? :)


> And even if it is possible why trash a card that most of the time works
> and needs only a fraction of the power of a modern card?

If your primary concern is power usage, you're probably not going to
use the desktop effects anyway. To improve performance, which is what
I thought we were talking about, you could get a better-performing
card.

I could ride a horse to work but I choose to drive a car instead
because it is faster. :)