Onboard video vs. seperate video card.

[cmoses]

I am putting together a MAME machine with the intentions of also playing the following emulators.  Daphne, VPinball, FCEUltra and maybe nullDC.  I have a Pentium D 2.8 that has 8MB of onboard video and 512MB of RAM.  Will I see a difference if I put in a 128MB AGP video card?

[Blanka]

Just try the games you want to play. Do they run smooth? Well then the 8Mb should do. Emulators use videocards not for the image itself, but only for upscaling and overlaying scanline effects. An 8Mb onboard card can be to slow on this. So if you want to run native resolutions the 8Mb will handle, but for upscaling to 1600x1200 or something like that it will lack horsepower. An AGP card will be a good solution. Keep it simple though. A 7300GT or a Radeon 9200 or so will be perfect.

[retrometro]

I agree just play the games you want and see if they get decent FPS's.

In my experience on a couple of computers, even the cheapest AGP/PCIe cards compare very favorably against onboard video like between 25-50% higher from the get go.  However, b/c mame doesn't take advantage of gfx cards, you're not going to see much (if any) improvements from a $40 card vs a $400 one after you leave your onboard video.

[Ummon]

8mb??  I can't imagine that computer to have a measly 8 megs. My old PIII has 24. Put a card in it.

[jharris]

Maybe the original poster can increase the amount of memory dedicated to onboard video. Maybe the OP should check his motherboard manual and figure out how to get into the BIOS and change it to something higher. An increase to 32MB or better wouldn't hurt. He should also have plenty of RAM so that the computer doesn't take away memory from video when more resources are needed by the system.

In my experience some onboard video produces a sort of washed out image (even with properly shielded cables). I also had a motherboard with an onboard NVIDIA chipset that produced crisp clear video quality with none of these problems. I guess it depends on your motherboard and video chipset. If it's for 2D gaming I think it's worth giving it a try.

[cmoses]

I have checked and the board does not offer any ability to change the amount of memory allocated to the onboard video. 

[Ummon]

That's damn odd I think that a Pentium D would have so little - more likely I'd think it'd have none at all in that case - and not even sure if you can get 32-bit video in Windows (or at all). Anyways, that's your answer. Besides, with a card you can play with things like soft15khz.

[richms]

Plenty of server type boards have a rubbish onboard seperate since sharing ram for video reduces your memory bandwidth, and there is usually no need for it to do anything more then sit there displaying a login screen all the time. Back when I needed cheap PCI-X at 133MHz the board I got had some sort of ATI 8 meg onboard which is absolutly useless for anything other then basic windows gui stuff.

I would get a cheap card and put it in, no need for direct-x 10 or anything, just a simple cheap 128 meg of a reasonably recent generation will see you right. Better to get a later card then an old top of the line 128 megger since the old one would have being built for performance so suck the power and make heat, whereas a current crappy new cheapie will prob just have a passive heatsink and not need the additional power hookups or the hairdryer out the back of the case.

[Ummon]

Plenty of server type boards have a rubbish onboard seperate since sharing ram for video reduces your memory bandwidth, and there is usually no need for it to do anything more then sit there displaying a login screen all the time.

Makes sense. I have no experience with servers.