How good of a computer could a video card make?
 

I heard something from MS, that in vista, if you have a good video card, and you are not putting stress on the video card, but you are on everything else, it'll use the memory and gpu of the video card.

Have anyof you heard this? How good could a video cards gpu and memory handel things anyway?

Specs of the ATI x1950xtx ($400 on newegg)(Best card):
Clock speed: 650MHz
Memory clock: 2000MHz
Memory size: 512MB
Memory Interface: 256-bit
Memory Type: GDDR4

If using the above as a computer by itself, how good could that do?

Yes in theory but it would be very slow because the video memory would be sloed down by the bios and personally that sound stupid.. You can not runa whol computer on a graphics card.

Well considering the symbiotic relationship the video card has with the cpu, probably not too good.

I'm not surprised MS would come up with rubbish like that.

Afterall, they think that flash memory is ok to use as cache:

http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=32718

hm....flash drives would replace beer cans as the most common garbage on the streets....

Where Did You Hear That?
 

I know there are video cards that will make use of system memory to improve video performance, but I've not heard of resource sharing the other way round. Can you cite any reference for this? I haven't found one, but I admit to not looking very hard.

I have heard that Creative are playing with extra functionality on their audio proccessor. As for graphics? Don't think so. On board graphics will steal main system memory, that is why we use dedicated graphics cards. I did not know that they can some times steal sys memory.
The new "cell" proccessor from IBM, will share jobbing, and can be utilized by the system for almost any compute task, so I have read, at least. But a graphics card that can do the lot? NOT LIKELY, in my opinion at least. Remembering, that I am a Steam Ship Engineer, retired, so not a computing expert.
At my local ISP, they have a tiny Macputer, about the size of a child's school lunch box. OOh, how I like that machine. Don't need one, but sure would like one.

Shorty943.

registered Linux user 437639

The only thing I know for sure, is I don't know how much I don't know.

Let me clear this out:
There are video cards that can and do take chunks of system memory when they run out of their own (like most laptop/integrated graphical chipsets, nVidia cards with the Turbo Cache feature or ATI cards with their HyperMemory counterfeature). BUT that's under a high performance penalty because the data needs to travel back and forth to the RAM modules through the motheboard lines, called Front Side Bus (FSB), this is really slow and will not improve data transfers in any way.

Hey Raska. Thanks man. That info helped me a bit just then. I now know why I did not like the 6600tc card by nvidea, and went back to my old 5500 with 256 Mb of memory.
Did you notice the age of the original poster? Like all 14 year old boys, I think young Colin, did not actually hear what was said, or reinterpreted it to his own understanding, or lack thereof.
Not putting it on you Colin, I was a 14 year old boy once. About 50 years ago, if my memory serves me right. And we all make the same little mistakes during our youth. I made some doozies.

Regards and best wishes to all.

Shorty943.

PS. You can't be overcaffienated unless you hook up an IV drip feeder to the percolator.

Lims
 

Not so different from the LIMS expanded memory specification of ..... many moons ago. The same logic still applies, slow memory is still orders of magnitude faster than disc access. Unlike Microsoft, ATI and nVidia are in a competitive, knock-down, drag-em out fight for dominance. I find it hard to believe that both of them would implement such technology in their low end cards if it didn't have a positive effect on performance. I appreciate the links, cleared up a few questions I had about how this was supposed to work. I think I'll hold out until I can afford my new SLI system ;)

BTW: Colin has been a very positive and creative poster in this forum. Ask him about learning to drive a stick shift car. Have you learned how to break yet?

That's because both of them can be marketing bastards, trying to catch people that won't pay attention to details, e.g. you can find some cheap video cards in the market with a lot of memory (say 256 Mb) but with the slowest memory interface of 64-bits, that video card would suck in anything but most people only check about memory quantity.

That is a gorgeous albeit aging piece of hardware (a little better than mine eVGA e-GeForce 7900GTX), if you want it for Vista and for games (if you don't play games you don't need a $400 card just for Vista) it's a better idea to get a DirectX-10 capable video card (currently only nVidia's GeForce 8 series).
I really recommend you to wait until everything gets a lot more stable (at least when Vista's first service pack comes out) or when DirectX-10 cards become mainstream