Is it my video card?

[mpm32]

This may be a stupid question but I know someone here will help me. I got a pc from work for my cab - P2, lots of ram, a crappy Matrox video card w/ 8 mb.  There are actually 2 cards, the pc was running powerdesk with 2 monitors. Mamed games run very choppy (seems to be skipping) and the picture seems very blocky (pixelated ?)  Will a new video card do the trick? I'm just using a vga monitor right now to set-up the pc for mame.  I will also probably use a vga monitor for my cab.  If it's the card, what brand would you recommend?  I should be able to run mame on a P2 right?  I mainly play the classics.

[JustMichael]

PC monitors will make the games look pixelated.  As for the skipping, it might help if people knew which version of Mame you are running, what OS you are running it on and which games this occurs on.

[lightspeed]

It is probably not your video card that is causing the choppiness unless you have hardware stretch enabled.  This will be the only bottle-neck on an older card.  

MAME can be very CPU intensive, but it is not necessary to have a higher-end video card for any reason other that it doens't perform well with hardware stretch.   In most cases, you can get around having to use HW stretch by manually setting the resolutions in the games.

If you wish to invest in a higher-end card and are using a VGA monitor, you should go with a GeForce 2 or ATI Radeon 7500  (again, you definitly DONT need anything more expensive/capable for MAME).  If you're going to use TV-OUT, stick with card manufactured by ATI (don't get a knock-off based on the Radeon chipset)

[mpm32]

Good point,   I am running mame 32 v .58 on NT.  When I run qbert (all the games I try run this way) for example it is very choppy and the edges of the objects are not smooth.  By comparison, when I run the same game with the same monitor on my main system Win ME P3 32 mb video card, it looks better and runs smoothly. So, not being a computer expert, I am guessing it is the vid card.

[RacerX]

Good point,