Video card memory size.?.?.?

[DaviDaVinci]

For a non gamer, would it matter how much memory a video card has?
Does it affect web-browsing?
mpeg playback?
Photoshop?

Thanks

 

[Rand]

Outside of gaming there are very few applications in which DRAM capacity on a graphics card has much of an impact beyond that taken up by the 2D display which is negligable.
It would not have any impact at all on general office application, and web browsing etc.
If your doing heavy PhotoShop rendering then it will have a small impact, but even then anything beyond 16MB would be near useless in most cases.

 

[DaviDaVinci]

If i have an AGP card and a PCI card, will XP do the Dual monitor thingmachig? I want dual monitor for Photoshop for my other PC.

 

[BFG10K]

Of course it will. In fact that's pretty much the only way anyone does it.

 

[Rand]

Yep, it should work fine. Either that or buy a card that supports dual monitor via only one card.

 

[imgod2u]

There's also 3d design, if you have your program optimized to use the rendering engine on your graphics card (like the T&L unit on the Geforce 3), it would matter somewhat as bigger memory would mean you'd have to send less information while rendering to memory.

 

[Rand]

<< There's also 3d design, if you have your program optimized to use the rendering engine on your graphics card (like the T&L unit on the Geforce 3), it would matter somewhat as bigger memory would mean you'd have to send less information while rendering to memory. >>



Naturally 3D rendering/CAD/3D design apps can most definitely benefit strongly from added memory, in many cases significantly more so then games in fact.