Two Video Cards

[lifeblood]

I run two video cards with a monitor per card. My primary card is a Radeon 9600 XT (AGP). I am trying to decide which card to run as the 2nd (PCI) card. I own a PCI version of the TNT2 as well as the Matrox Millenium and Millenium II. Games run on the AGP card, the PCI card only displays 2d things like word processing. This is very useful when doing school work or web based research. The browser is on one display, the report I'm writing on the other.

My question is this, the driver file for the TNT2 is large while the driver for the Matrox cards is small. How much CPU and RAM does a video driver take? Does it make a real difference?

I have an AMD 64 2800 with 512 MB RAM. I want to use 64 bit Windows and nvidia has a 64 bit driver that will work with the TNT2, but Matrox does not have a 64 bit driver for the Millenium.

 

[uOpt]

Video drivers will generally not take much CPU.

But the actual kernel module will be an indication of RAM actually wasted.

Kernel memory is generally not pagable, unlike Application code. If you have a 320 MB executable then you will still only get those 4 KB pages into RAM they your program code is actually "touching" (using). if you are not using the program and it doesn't wake up periodically then it will end up not taking more than a few pages at all.

Generally speaking this is not true for kernel code. If the thing is 5 MB without debug info, then 5 MB will permanently be gone no matter whether you use it or not.

The NVidia unified drivers have more than 2 MB code and slightly less than 1 MB data. That's a huge chunk.

So I believe it is an overall advantage to run related cards which share a driver.

 

[lifeblood]

Thank You that answers my question. I shall look for a relatively current ATI card that uses the same driver as my 9600XT.