[EN] Is it worth to change nvidia 6100 onboard against GeForce 8600 GT PCI-e

[michaa7]

The video performance here is rather limited (mostly german TV-stream ARD/ZDF). I assume, but I have no real clue about it, that a better graphic device might be helpfull.
I have a Graphics:  Card: NVIDIA C51G [GeForce 6100] onboard

Would it it be worth to spent 20€/28$ for a GeForce 8600 GT 256mb?

From a benchmark on the net for the onboard device I see a rating of 24 points (whatever the points mean), whereas the GF8600gt has more than250 points.
http://www.videocardbenchmark.net/video_lookup.php?gpu=GeForce+6100+nForce+400&id=1182
http://www.videocardbenchmark.net/video_lookup.php?gpu=GeForce+8600+GT&id=64

My assumtion is (but may be completly wrong) that a much better card (=faster card) would be able to render in better quality without stutters.

What's your well informed opinion?

[piper]

Yes, plus it won't take away from your ram


Onboard video uses system ram

[michaa7]

Yes, plus it won't take away from your ram


Onboard video uses system ram

Yes, this additional effect is very welcome on my 1GB RAM system. Plus, the new (but used) card supports vdpau, the onboard device does not.

I bought the card, so I'll see in a few days ...

thx

[piper]

Good luck, I think your doing a good thing

[ReinerS]

I use such a card with passive cooling on my Multimedia-Box for tv-recording (no HDTV yet)  and playing.
It ist more than fast enough and gives good quality.

regards

Reiner

[musca]

Hello michaa7,

according to the nvidia driver matrix the GeForce 8600 GT still can be used with driver version 340.xx while the older GeForce 6100 is supported only by the legacy-304.xx driver. So you have more features and more time left, until the support for new xorg releases will be dropped.

Beware: soon™ a new legacy package nvidia-legacy-340xx-driver will appear, that you will have to use as the 343 release already dropped the support for anything older than Fermi.

greetings
musca

[michaa7]

@ musca
Thanks for the heads up concerning driver .340 <-> .343 and nvidia 8600 GT

So far it seems a good choice. The new card has DVI, the old was VGA, so the image is more brilliant. I have 5% more RAM available, video content seem to load faster (flash).

After some trouble with the driver (304 -> 340, worked ... until reboot. Turns out I forgott to purge the old one) now all seems to work well with one exception: flash (on some TV channels) shows wrong colors. It used to work with the old card, even today when I looked a soccer game (ZDF). In the pause I change the card and the colors went sick.

Towo told me to disable hardware acceleration in flash, but I connot reach this setting in the flash context menue. It freezes or does not accept changing tabs. (In the past I had flash versions who's settings I could change and versions who's settings dialog freezes everytime I tried to change something. The last version .400 seems to belong to the latter group)
Is there a way to disable hardware acceleration in flash within a config file? What else could I try?

Other than that, the new card seems a good investment.

Edit:
wrong colors in flash problem is related to Opera browser 12.16.
/Edit

Edit2:
wrong colors in flash problem is not related only to Opera. Midor and qupzilla showed wrong colors, too FF/IW didn't. But with midori, I could access the flash context menue and disable hw accelleration. Now all browser show right colors and I can use Opera again but all mentioned browsers now constantly need 90% to 100%  CPU power which makes me feel a bit concerned about CPU lifetime.