Is there a difference between a good development video card and general gaming video cards?

Question

For reference, this would be for Visual Studio 2008 with a fair amount of WinForms working with the VS Designer.

Given the same price bracket, would there be certain specs you look for in a development rig vs what one would get for a gaming machine?

Edit: The reason I ask is on my laptop that I can run low-mid end games decently on, there's still a fair amount of time redrawing when switching between apps sometimes.(I keep about 20 tabs open average on a browser and have like 10-15 apps open at a time), and working with the VS designer on things like a TableLayoutPanel takes up to 10-15 seconds for changes and so forth. I'd like a really smooth experience.

Answer 1

Any new video card you could buy today would be more than adequate for non-3D software development. In fact whatever integrated video came with your system is fine. The only exception would be for multiple monitor support, in that case you would need to get an extra $50 video card since most (all?) motherboards only have a single monitor output.

Edit: in response to the edit, the lag you're describing sounds like your machine is out of RAM and is swapping to disk, rather than you being video card limited. You'll want at least 2-3GB of ram in your system if you're running vs2008 plus 20 other applications. That's about the max. you can install if you're running a 32-bit operating system. If you want more than that you'll need to go to a 64-bit OS and you'll need to make sure all your hardware has 64-bit drivers. Also very few laptops out there support more than 4GB of RAM.

Answer 2

Any 100 buck graphics card will do fine for software development, although that's probably about what you'd need to see Aero graphics effects on Vista.

Answer 3

The actual process of development (using VS2008, for you) isn't really taxing to any modern video card. Pretty much all cards on the market are capable 2D cards - you're just not going to run into any situation where the performance of your video card is the bottle-neck. System memory and processor performance are what you'll care about.

A capable machine for gaming will almost certainly be a capable development rig, while a capable development rig might not be a very good gaming machine.

Answer 4

Video card is not an important factor... I would rather invest on CPU and fast hard drives than on video card... At minimum of dual core cpu clocked @ 3GHz and 7200RPM drives...

Answer 5

It sounds like you might be running into other problems, such as memory issues and therefore swapping. Graphics cards have been more than fast enough for Windows' 2D requirements for many many years. Any delay in redrawing your windows is going to be the OS, not the graphics card.

Answer 6

Fast disk will make a difference, also lots of RAM (as much as you can). Laptop disks aren't that fast, although you could consider a SSD if you're feeling flush. Otherwise, a desktop with fast disks like WD Velociraptors or 10K or 15K SAS/SCSI units will be substantially faster than is practical to achieve with a laptop. Video card performance for 2D is a non-issue. Any modern video card will have fast enough 2-D.

If you're using a 32-bit O/S, more than 4GB (actually slightly less than 4GB) is a waste as the O/S won't use it. If you want to go 64-bit you can put more RAM on a machine. I haven't tried this, but this This site (www.windows2008workstation.com) describes using Windows 2008 Server as a desktop O/S. If you're feeling flush, this gives you a sort of leaner, meaner version of Vista that will use Vista drivers but doesn't get underfoot in the way Vista does.

It also comes with a built-in hypervisor and support for the virtualisation features (nested page tables etc.) of current CPUs. Something like a Sun Ultra 20M2 or HP XW4550 (i.e. 2nd gen Opteron based) with 4-8GB of RAM and a couple of fast disks would be about as quick as you can get, and will run VM's quickly. They're also not that expensive - even buying branded memory they are not really any dearer than a high-spec gaming PC.