Video Card Upgrade Questions

[ChrisMc73]

I'm wanting to upgrade my current card, which is a Quadro FX 1000.
My main concern is the new Windows Media Player 11, when scrolling while viewing the album art, it seems to be a bit laggy at first, rendering the art slow, then when its "cached" it is fast, but not a smooth scroll. Do you think I need a card with 256MB or more to help here? Something faster in the rendering than the QFX1000? I have AGP, so I would guess you could suggest the top of the line AGP cards out there?

Thanks!

 

[Job]

WMP11 lags because its a beta and not properly coded yet - it lags on mine too - by the time its released properly that issue will be sorted out (it wouldn't be a GPU problem anyway - more likely CPU or RAM).

What would be the reasons for upgrading your card ignoring the WMP issue?

 

[ChrisMc73]

I guess none then, the Qurado FX 1000 has never given me any other issues. I just was comparing my performance to a friend of mines, who has a Dell XPS machine and I don't recall seeing the lag issues, I thought his scroll went pretty smoothly. I myself have a decent machine:

Dell PWS650
Dual 2.4 CPUs (multi threading turned on)
2 GB RAM
Windows Media Center 20005 installed on a 74 Gig/10,000RPM Raptor.

You still think its cause its beta? I swear my friends newer machine doesn't lag...but I need to double check that before buying a new card.

I just figured the 256MB cards would help with the speeds of that scrolling in WMP11, that and the 16 pipes etc...not sure how stout my Quadro FX1000 is, its only 128MB I know that.

 

[Job]

Well - think about it logically: on WMP11 you only have to display a few dozen thumbnail images at a time. An FX1000 is capable of god knows how many million pixels per second. I doubt it would have trouble rendering a few images at 240x240 res.

Check that your friend is running the same build number as you and that he hasn't enabled some option to reduce lag. Even if it does run a bit smoother its not something I'd upgrade over, the issue will be fixed by the time the full release comes out.

Extra memory on gpus is only gonna help you in 3Dapps - my card is 256 and my PC is pretty high spec and WMP11 still lags - don't worry about it!

 

[ChrisMc73]

You say you experience the same thing, have you read about others as well?
I also think it has to do with the # of albums I have in my collection, I'm approaching 150GB of music, so there is a lot to load up in memory when you open WMP11 and go to album view, or artists view etc...1956 Albums total...thats a lot of songs.

 

[Job]

it won't display all those albums at once tho - I started a topic about this a while back and the consensus was the same - just because its a beta.

If you wanna test that theory, empty your WMP11 library and then add about 50 albums to it so thats all you have on media player. I gurantee that whether you have 50 or 5000 albums it will be the same.

Its just the program is slow to tell your CPU what images need loading next. Take windows explorer for example - if you go to your music folder and set view to 'thumbnails' you should be able to scroll properly unlike in WMP11

 

[ChrisMc73]

I guess you are right, I'm going to double check my friends specs on his XPS machine and see how it performs just to see, maybe I'm dreaming it up, that scrolled so smoothly?

 

[Job]

which XPS model is he using?

 

[ChrisMc73]

Its one of the first ones that came out, not the new ones that are super sweet looking, but the original one, silver, not sure all the model info, I'll have to take a look at it.