video card fun

C

campbell5149

NS guy stuck a CSX town
ok guys, time for your expertice.
so, I have a compaq presario SR2170NX. It came with 256mb vid. I installed an additional 256mb NVidia card. now, when the comp boots up, it says i have only the 256mb of the NVidia card, however when i go the NVidia control panel, it says i have 512mb combined power. when i run trainz, it doesnt seem like its running how it should with 512. what am i missing? am i infact only running on 256? please help.
 
The amount of memory your graphics card has doesn't really effect performance, it just allows you to "have more stuff" at one time (which contradicts me, that could improve performance).

What are the card models? Do you have them hooked up via SLI? What is your motherboard model?
 
well, as far as i know, the vid card just plugged into the mother board, i dont know what came with the comp, it was an p.c.i. system. and i have no idea who made the motherboard. irrigaurdless, with a gig of ram and 512 of vid, trainz should run fantastic. but, of course, not for me.:confused:

edit; its an NVidia GEforce 7300 series
 
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It is the same for RAM upgrades as well mine came with 512MBs installed 512MBs still said I only had 144GB on my harddrive but showed that I had 1GB of RAM.So I'm assuming its possible that its the same as graphics cards.
 
campbell5149 said:
well, as far as i know, the vid card just plugged into the mother board, i dont know what came with the comp, it was an p.c.i. system. and i have no idea who made the motherboard. irrigaurdless, with a gig of ram and 512 of vid, trainz should run fantastic. but, of course, not for me.:confused:

edit; its an NVidia GEforce 7300 series
Click to expand...

Do the cards look the same? ;)

And I don't just two different cards plugged into a motherboard is as good as two same cards in SLI configuration, with the motherboard supporting SLI.
 
ok, so i should make this clear, to my knowledge, there wasn't another vid card in any slot, just the one i installed.
 
campbell5149 said:
correct. it is in the motherboard. my bad i shouldve mentioned that. so now thats established, whats next?
Click to expand...

Onboard = garbage.

It only shows that one video card... because you only have one video card.

The control panel shows 512MB combined because you have both the card and the onboard chipset.

Yes, you should be running on the 512MB of memory.
 
campbell5149 said:
so am i drawing off all 512 or just 256?

-sorry for the analogy, it's an electrician thing.
Click to expand...

Memory isn't power, it's storage space. You should notice improved performance when you have a large amount of stuff. i.e., if you use a lot of assets on a route with 256MB, I think it starts to have caching it to it's own "virtual memory" on the hard drive (I think) which can slow things down, but with 512, well you get the point. :cool:

What you're "drawing power from" is the GPU. The 7300 specifically.

Edit: The 7300 isn't that great compared to higher end models such as 7800+. Maybe that's why there's not much improvement in general performance.
 
ok so how im understanding it is that it is only running off the 256 if its slow, and if its fast its on 512? for like a route thats very detailed that is......
 
campbell5149 said:
ok so how im understanding it is that it is only running off the 256 if its slow, and if its fast its on 512? for like a route thats very detailed that is......
Click to expand...

Simply put, it has more room to put "stuff" into.

Let's say Trainz is a FedEx worker. He has lots of boxes, each is a texture. There's three trucks. One is on top of a tall platform with stairs. The others are on the ground. 1 truck = 256 MB, the trucks on the ground are the memory. He first begins putting the stuff into the trucks on the ground. When those trucks are filled, he must begin putting stuff into the truck atop the tall platform, which takes longer because of the stairs. The truck on the platform is hard disk.

Makes sense now?
 
campbell5149 said:
ok so how im understanding it is that it is only running off the 256 if its slow, and if its fast its on 512? for like a route thats very detailed that is......
Click to expand...

Try increasing your Cache size in the Advanced configuration, and yes, the Presario does have on-board video. I have the 64M GeForce4-MX Intergrated GPU on my SR1012SX.
 
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