Planning on switching cards, questions.

[MukiEX]

I'm hoping I'm asking in the right place.

I'm switching from a FireGL T2-128 (AGP, Radeon 9600-based core).

My box is a Sempron +2200 with 2GB RAM. I primarily run Kubuntu Edgy, but I have a small WinXP partition "just in case".

I'm thinking of moving to a GeForce AGP 6600 or 7600 (they're about 50 bucks apart on Newegg), and I was hoping I'd find someone who's been in this situation. (e.g. switching)

I primarily run Blender on this machine, and that's really where I'm hoping to get performance gains.

1. How big of a jump, performance-wise, could I expect? Am I gonna be more limited by my processor than video card in this situation? (I plan on using blender's sculpting tools, but I'm not sure if a faster video card helps them)

2. How good is support for :
a. XvMC (is there any for H.264, similar to Purevideo in Windows? The last thread I saw on the subject was dated over a year ago)
b. AIGLX e.g. Compiz/Beryl. Can I run a 3D app in that environment without expecting a massive (over 50%) performance drop?
c. A 2nd X session with 3D accell (I heard this was only a problem with the fglrx driver)

Any information, either as an answer to questions asked here, or otherwise, would be greatly appreciated.

[whig]

I can't answer all questions, although beryl causes a varying performance drop. In Quake 3 I went from 395 fps (too high to be real) to 250 (still too high to be a real indicator). UT2004 is a better indicator: about 75 to 70 fps at a guess. nb: the GT in the spec to the left is quite important.

[MukiEX]

385 is rather realistic. I got 110-90 back when I had a Pentium 1.4ghz and a Radeon 8500 in Windows (a deadly combination for OpenGL AFAIK), os if you're in 5xxx-7xxx GeForce land, 400 seems quite feasible.

However, 75 to 70 implies
1. it's still being accellerated in Beryl (I don't believe I've found a way to do that, even in XGL, for my Radeon)
2. The performance hit is negligible. o_o

Thanks so much for the info! =3 What should I be looking at, as far as those letters? I didn't even know that terminology very well shopping for Radeons in the past.

[whig]

That's right, the beryl speed hit isn't significant. Concerning nvidia cards the GT indicates more performance than normal. This can be verified if you look at GPU clock speeds, comparing stock, GS and GT models. The other big factor is memory interface, here we are talking about 128-bit cards. Other factors are there but don't matter as much as those big two (overclocking aside).

Very high fps results are quite misleading. The 395 I was getting is probably an understatement because the bottleneck isn't the graphics but elsewhere like system cpu, memory or something. And pointless. No monitor can go that fast. My monitor goes at 85Hz, any fps above that is wasted. Of course I want to try to keep the stream healthily above it. UT2004 not quite there, but I bumped quality. Take away the quality and it would be faster.