Shared Video Memory

[pcspock]

hi,

got a pretty beefy laptop (presario 3070us) that uses the SIS 650 shared video memory (up to 64M of the 512M available)...i'm betting this will not be a problem for watching DVDs, processing my 5 Megapixel camera pics, maybe even reviewing digital video...

tell me i won't be disappointed

[Peter M]

No it won't. SiS were the first ones to have hardware DVD acceleration in their graphics unit (in 1997!), and also were the first ones to bring this feature into chipset integrated shared-RAM graphics. The 620 had it already, and they didn't remove it in the 650
Viewing camera stills is no problem even for the oldest of old graphics solutions as long as they can produce 24-bit 2D; digital video also hardly ever is limited by the graphics card - rather by CPU and HDD speed as well as available system RAM.

[MrPurple]

I believe that before with lower CPU speeds, slow HDD, and poor graphic cards, DVD hardware acceleration was important, but as speeds increased, in both CPU, and Graphics, plus the ammount of RAM, hardware DVD acceleration no longer plays an important part.
On my old laptop which had 128 MB of RAM, Celeron 400, and an 8 mb Vid Card, DVDs ran pretty well. So one can easliy assume that a newer laptop with 512 MB of ram and a 64 mb video (even if it is shared) will run DVDs flawlessly.

[pcspock]

thank you peter, mr. purple...

i see that battery life and heat are not so much a problem with this particular implementation (this particular model anyway) - suppose the extra dedicated video memory could use a lot of juice and generate some heat - so maybe we even have better MTBF...

whatever,

thanks again...