[sclug] Graphics cards

[Dickon Hood]

On Sat, Sep 14, 2013 at 00:46:53 +0100, David Given wrote:
: Can anyone recommend what to look for in a decent graphics card these
: days? I've totally lost touch with what's good these days, and even the
: bottom end cards look hopelessly high end to me. I'm not a high end
: gamer but I do want something reasonably future proof that's capable of
: 3D on dual-headed HD with a decent frame rate. NVidia preferably.

When my last framebuffers' fans started clogging up, I bought a Zotac GT
640 Zone Edition from BT (they were the cheapest at the time).  Nice card;
fanless (so silent), and drives all three monitors at their native
resolutions.  Despite the lack of fan, playing 3x1080p VDPAU-accelerated
complex[0] H.264 streams doesn't seem to get the temperature above about
50 degrees C.


[0] My reference streams for this sort of thing are the blu-ray images of
the opening battle sequence in Star Wars III (thousands of flying droidy
things attacking a few heavy-duty cruisers; best bit of an otherwise
terrible film), and any of the low-light sequences of Cloverfield (where
the encoder seems to've decided that each speckle of noise is an object
worth tracking).  The Pi struggles on both...

Dickon Hood
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