A question about dedicated video cards

My current desktop has an integrated video card and I occasionally have buffering problems when watching videos.

I'm considering buying a Dell XPS 8300 with a dedicated video card - a AMD Radeon™ HD 6450 1GB DDR3 video card to be exact.

I won't be using the new computer for gaming, all I want from the video card is to watch DVDs, streaming TV, and YouTube videos without the buffering. Am I right in assuming that the above card will put an end to all my buffering problems?

 

I think that the 6450 would be fine for that usage, the DDR5 version would be better though.

If you can buy the Dell w/o the card, and get the card via an etailer, you might save some cash. Dell (like the other big companies) have to make a profit somewhere, a big chunk comes from the options (which are often not as well specced as the retail alternatives).

 

Sometimes the buffering can be an Internet connection issue while streaming. The dedicated Video card may improve the playback but wouldn't really improve your Internet connection speed.

 

Agreed - but older integrated cards, especially the VIA and early Intel chips can barely cope with a subset of DX9, even playing ripped movies from the hard drive they struggle.

 

Yup, I agree. The onboard GPU's are usually very slow, I suspect mostly because they share System RAM. I just didn't want him to go buy something new and still have a problem. I would recommend running a speed test.

Also the new computer may not be as bogged down as the old one as far as Internet activity goes so that might help as well but then again Dell really loads the junk on their new systems.

 

Well, it does depend on the motherboard. Note there are MANY excellent integrated systems today that are used in Home Theater PCs specifically for watching movies, as a DVR or the like. So it is not necessarily that they share RAM, but often that there is not enough RAM to share.

Also, since the PF is frequently used to buffer the video, a crowded hard disk, along with low amounts of system RAM, can cause stuttering problems. An older HD with only a 2Mb buffer can be a bottleneck too. A new drive with 32 or even 64Mb buffer can make a big difference.

Note if you have stuttering problems now while watching DVDs, that has nothing to do with your Internet connection.

 

That's a good explanation. I usually work with business computers so I really don't get too much into the high end stuff. I know I setup a system for my son-in-law that had an onboard Intel video controller. He tried to play WOW with it and the screen refresh was absolutely horrible. It had 4gb of system RAM with 512mb to the video. We added a PCIe card with 512mb of RAM and it solved everything. I just concluded that the shared RAM was the culprit.

 

Well, I am not really talking about high-end stuff. Note there are many mini-ITX motherboards with integrated that are fully integrated (with graphics and surface mount CPUs too) that are used in quality HTPCs.

Gaming is one of the most demanding task we can ask of our systems as there are layers of independently controlled "objects" that are controlled by the program and interactively by the player's input. Totally different ballgame from simply watching a video.

More likely much more than that. Remember, a card, in most cases, has (1) a faster GPU than an integrated graphics solution and (2) a card has it's own dedicated graphics RAM (often GDDR5) that is tweaked for graphics processing. Plus, (3) when you add a card, you free up that previously stolen... err, I mean shared system RAM thus, in effect, giving the CPU and Windows more RAM (workspace) to play in so (4) the Page File on the ssslllloooowww (compared to RAM) hard drive is not banged on as often.

It really takes very little CPU horsepower to hand off graphics tasks, and when viewing videos, that does not take much in graphics horsepower either - you are mostly moving data, not converting or crunching it as you are with running a graphics intensive program like a big 3D animated game.