Need advice: Mobile ATI card with 'shared' memory - EXA performance?

[Michel Dänzer]

On Thu, 2005-12-08 at 12:05 +1100, Dan wrote:
> 
> I'm on the verge of buying a Turion ( mobile Athlon 64 ) notebook. As 
> far as I can tell, there are NO ATI cards for the Turion with dedicated 
> RAM. The only cards worth talking about with dedicated RAM are nVidia 
> cards. I'd prefer to use an ATI if possible.
> 
> While this will be primarily a purchase for coding work, I'd also like 
> to use EXA. I've been using it on my Powerbook, and I'm quite impressed 
> so far. I know that one of the big issues at the moment with EXA is 
> memory consumption, and that people are recommending using a card with 
> stacks of memory for EXA with lots of windows open. Where does this put 
> users who have cards that share video RAM with the motherboard? Is it 
> going to be horrible performance, as if I'd run out of dedicated RAM, or 
> will EXA be able to use shared RAM at a respectable pace?

This should not be an issue, as others pointed out already. An issue
might be that there's no RENDER acceleration for R300 class cards yet.


-- 
Earthling Michel Dänzer      |     Debian (powerpc), X and DRI developer
Libre software enthusiast    |   http://svcs.affero.net/rm.php?r=daenzer