VGA performance and mobo

[preet]

Nowadays mobo are manufactured with up to 256MB of graphics and also with a pci express slot. Is there any diffference in performance while using a VGA card in non-integrated mobo and in an integrated one, equiped with 256MB of RAM?

[saphalline]

Without getting too worked up, I will say yes. :p ;)

But of course it really depends on the usage. For something like gaming, of which I am a huge fan, onboard video is anemic to the point of actually not supporting some games or running them extremely slowly. Dedicated vid cards are much preferred for gaming, with more expensive ones giving better performance. However, if you want to run Linux (even with Beryl themes) on a modern onboard video-based system, it will run just fine (albeit ever so slightly faster with a dedicated vid card due to system resource alleviation). For WinXP doing web-surfing and email, you are not likely to notice a difference either way unless you play a lot of online Java-based games (again, dedicated vid cards are slightly faster).