What video card for decent Flash videos/games? (FarmVille & YouTube)

[NeoPTLD]

I have an older desktop which I'm too lazy to move/reintall everything to a new computer.

It's got a basic ATI Rage 128 based card with 32MB and FarmVille doesn't play very well on it.

The board has an AGP 4x connector. What video card should I get to get better FarmVille and YouTube performance for the time being?

 

[palladium]

mm.. whats you CPU?

 

[NeoPTLD]

mm.. whats you CPU?

Athlon XP Thoroughbred 1.9GHz or so. 1536MB PC2100 RAM. My laptop is about the same CPU performance on Super Pi, but it does substantially better on FarmVille, so I'm guessing it's the video card.

 

[Syran]

Afaik, until the new Flash 10.1 release, Flash is pretty much CPU bound.

 

[palladium]

Afaik, until the new Flash 10.1 release, Flash is pretty much CPU bound.

yea....that's my understanding too. You should check if they are using the same version of Flash.

 

[Syran]

Here's a quote from the Anandtech article on testing GPU accelerated Flash 10.1.

This isn’t just a Mac issue, it’s a problem across all OSes and systems, regardless of hardware configuration. Chalk it up to poor development on Adobe’s part or...some other fault of Adobe’s, but Flash playback is extremely CPU intensive.

Today, that’s about to change. Adobe has just released a preview of Flash 10.1 (the final version is due out next year) for Windows, OS X and Linux. While all three platforms feature performance enhancements, the Windows version gets H.264 decode acceleration for flash video using DXVA (OS X and Linux are out of luck there for now).

 

[v8envy]

The GPU acceleration is for video playback -- that is, decoding a video stream encoded with one of several popular codecs. A powerful video card won't do much for the procedural & vector part of heavily CPU bound flash games like Evony and Farmville.

Those will play back on an ISA Tseng Labs card were you able to pair one with a CPU powerful enough to run modern flash. What you need for hoggy flash games is single core performance & memory bandwidth and lots of it. These applications are tailor made for the new Intel socket 1156 CPUs with agressive single core Turbo modes.

SuperPI is floating point performance. Dhrystone would be a more apt benchmark to compare relative ability of your machines to run that particular game. Flash 10.1 may help though -- they seem to have optimized even non-accelerated performance. Give it a shot on your slower box.

 

[jvroig]

What video card should I get to get better FarmVille and YouTube performance for the time being?

You actually need a new CPU if that's your purpose. Despite being "graphic-y", Flash uses the CPU, not the video card.

 

[Arkaign]

I have to differ with my colleagues here. I had a buddy that had a P4 1.6A, and was running that same piece of garbage video card, and flash videos on youtube looked like crap, choppy and pixelated (even more so than normal, ha!). He was on an actual Intel brand mobo, so no overclock was possible. We dropped in an AGP 6600GT, or maybe it was a 6600 vanilla, can't remember for sure, and bingo, Youtube looked like it normally does, and he could play the other flash online games as well.

Remember, the CPU we're talking about there has more performance than the Intel Atom, yet single-core Atom netbooks have no issue with youtube/farmville/etc.

EDIT: I think people are forgetting just HOW old the Rage 128 is, that thing is from the 90s man. It was back when ATI was really terrible. It wasn't until the Radeon that ATI took off and ran with something truly good.

http://beyond3d.com/resources/board/159

"November 1st, 1998"

 

[kalrith]

Even if your desktop and laptop give the same SuperPI times, that doesn't mean that they handle video as well. Some cpus (typically newer ones) handle video content better than other cpus (typically older ones).

 

[Marty502]

I have to differ with my colleagues here. I had a buddy that had a P4 1.6A, and was running that same piece of garbage video card, and flash videos on youtube looked like crap, choppy and pixelated (even more so than normal, ha!). He was on an actual Intel brand mobo, so no overclock was possible. We dropped in an AGP 6600GT, or maybe it was a 6600 vanilla, can't remember for sure, and bingo, Youtube looked like it normally does, and he could play the other flash online games as well.

Remember, the CPU we're talking about there has more performance than the Intel Atom, yet single-core Atom netbooks have no issue with youtube/farmville/etc.

EDIT: I think people are forgetting just HOW old the Rage 128 is, that thing is from the 90s man. It was back when ATI was really terrible. It wasn't until the Radeon that ATI took off and ran with something truly good.

http://beyond3d.com/resources/board/159

"November 1st, 1998"

Yup.

My mom has my old rig, a PIII 800 Mhz, with a Radeon 7500. Slow card even back in the day, but way way way faster than the Rage 128. Youtube works fine, and Farmville is as slow as you'd expect with a Pentium III but playable. And a P3 is ages older than an Athlon XP.

 

[Arkaign]

Even if your desktop and laptop give the same SuperPI times, that doesn't mean that they handle video as well. Some cpus (typically newer ones) handle video content better than other cpus (typically older ones).

Trust me, even with a P4 3.0ghz (@ 3.2ghz or so) on an Asus P4S533 (yeah I know the mobo sucked, but still), a Rage 128 *Pro* was unable to do video capably. I think it just has to do with the card being a DX5 card with really really antiquated directdraw.

 

[jvroig]

I think people are forgetting just HOW old the Rage 128 is, that thing is from the 90s

I stand corrected. Yes, now that you mention it, that part does look a little too old.

 

[taltamir]

The GPU acceleration is for video playback -- that is, decoding a video stream encoded with one of several popular codecs. A powerful video card won't do much for the procedural & vector part of heavily CPU bound flash games like Evony and Farmville.

Those will play back on an ISA Tseng Labs card were you able to pair one with a CPU powerful enough to run modern flash. What you need for hoggy flash games is single core performance & memory bandwidth and lots of it. These applications are tailor made for the new Intel socket 1156 CPUs with agressive single core Turbo modes.

SuperPI is floating point performance. Dhrystone would be a more apt benchmark to compare relative ability of your machines to run that particular game. Flash 10.1 may help though -- they seem to have optimized even non-accelerated performance. Give it a shot on your slower box.

+1

Sometime in the future adobe will release a flash version that can use a GPU to accelerate video decode...
A video GAME does not decode video, ever. It creates graphics on the fly
There is no ETA of adobe flash ever being able to use a GPU for that... so for the foreseeable future this is 100% a CPU issue and now a video card issue.

 

[Syran]

Sounds like you just need a cheap video card in the $20-40 range just to get better graphics in general then.

There's a 6200 for $32+ shipping on Newegg
Radeon 3450 for $50 + shipping on Newegg

Or check the FS/T threads, i'm sure there are some cheap AGP video cards floating around there.

 

[Arkaign]

I just thought of another example of proof showing that CPU is *not* the only thing determining 2d and flash video/game performance. At one of my worksites I've converted a long-since-replaced file server into a workstation. It's an old Proliant ML570 with a couple of 18.2G 10K SCSI drives, dual Xeon 900s, 2GB of ECC PC-100 memory, and an onboard AGP Rage II video adapter.

With both the original Server 2000 OS, as well as with the XP Pro SP3 install that I replaced it with, just running web pages at 800x600 was sluggish, and showed a lot of tearing/redraw on sites with a high amount of images. Youtube was utterly worthless.

I popped in an old Nvidia FX5500 PCI card (yes, I know it sucks), and after setting it to be the primary video adapter and disabling the Rage II, I was immediately able to browse smoothly at 1280x1024 (old 21" CRT) @100hz, and what's more : Youtube/flash video was smooth. On Vimeo, it was still hit or miss. Some videos worked really well, others were just a tad jumpy on the HD mode.

The system is still so old that the only thing it's really used for is for a guest or extra internet connection, and it also serves as a print server for a couple of old HP Laserjets that refuse to die with dignity.

 

[zephyrprime]

Flash apps behave like 2d video games but Flash itself is programmed like an office application. Therein lies the problem. Adobe isn't gear for making high performance applications.

 

[lyssword]

Yea, basic video card will accelerate even normal tasks like web browsing. Try browsing your internet pages without graphic driver installed, it will look like 1 fps when you scroll.

 

[taltamir]

With both the original Server 2000 OS, as well as with the XP Pro SP3 install that I replaced it with, just running web pages at 800x600 was sluggish, and showed a lot of tearing/redraw on sites with a high amount of images. Youtube was utterly worthless.

Normally I would say that that is an EXTREMELY common set of symptoms that means without a shadow of a doubt that your driver is either not installed or you have a broken install (you need to use some sort of driver wiper and then reinstall it). Windows then renders the 2D desktop environment on the CPU which absolutely KILLS performance of the computer in general and results in those stuttering and tearing.

HOWEVER, the Rage2 card you had is a 60 MHz onboard gpu... so I would say it is possible that it was too slow for rendering modern 2d properly... I mean, damn that is ancient. I mean, it is from Sept 1996...

Does windows XP even HAVE a driver for a rage2 card?

 

[Arkaign]

Normally I would say that that is an EXTREMELY common set of symptoms that means without a shadow of a doubt that your driver is either not installed or you have a broken install (you need to use some sort of driver wiper and then reinstall it). Windows then renders the 2D desktop environment on the CPU which absolutely KILLS performance of the computer in general and results in those stuttering and tearing.

HOWEVER, the Rage2 card you had is a 60 MHz onboard gpu... so I would say it is possible that it was too slow for rendering modern 2d properly... I mean, damn that is ancient. I mean, it is from Sept 1996...

Does windows XP even HAVE a driver for a rage2 card?

Yep, it's built-in for both Win2k and XP, shows up as 'Rage IIc' if I recall correctly. I checked because I thought it might have been in 'standard vga' mode. The Rage 128 is the same thing, only with a 250nm technology and direct3d stuff for DX5, along with hardware mpeg-2 decode acceleration. The 2d 'acceleration' is hopelessly bad if it's not mpeg2 (dvd). It's okay with light office apps and really basic webpages at 1024x768x16, but to get even lightly passable youtube playback, you have to drop down to 800x600x16 and even then it's pretty spotty. Full-screen is an instant slideshow.

Back in the days of 15" and 17" CRTs, 1024x768 was about the highest common resolution, and lots of folks still used 800x600.

I think we've become a bit spoiled by even the bargain-basement cards being able to do high-resolution 32-bit color 2d with no issues, even on dual screens.

 

[NeoPTLD]

I got a new video card. It's a budget Radeon x1000 series with 512MB GDDR2. It's got a fan and a molex conector for extra power, so I'd imagine it's a lot more powerful than passively cooled, slot powered Rage 128 Pro with 32MB SDRAM.

H.264 video clips I record with my digital camera no longer stutters, and FarmVille appears to be performing a hair better, perhaps psychological effect.

 

[jvroig]

H.264 video clips I record with my digital camera no longer stutters, and FarmVille appears to be performing a hair better, perhaps psychological effect.

Then that rules out the vid-card angle, at least for your flash games. Really CPU bound.

Well, at least you got half of your problems solved

 

[Arkaign]

I got a new video card. It's a budget Radeon x1000 series with 512MB GDDR2. It's got a fan and a molex conector for extra power, so I'd imagine it's a lot more powerful than passively cooled, slot powered Rage 128 Pro with 32MB SDRAM.

H.264 video clips I record with my digital camera no longer stutters, and FarmVille appears to be performing a hair better, perhaps psychological effect.

Is your Youtube performance improved?