Just how important is your video card?

All right, I confess, I have some VERY old hardware on one my computers. This computer has an ancient 3dFX Voodoo 3 from 1999, it has a whopping 16 MB of VRAM. This is paired with a 950 Mhz Duron and 384 MB of RAM. I normally use this machine to test out tricks and tips (btw, there will be a massive update in that section very soon), I don’t really use it for playing the latest games.

Anyways, Windows XP was running pretty sluggish on the computer - the translucent selection rectangle was choppy and Sim City 4 (my favorite game) barely ran at all.

So I popped in an old 64MB graphics card - and guess what. It works just fine for what I want it to.

A pointless story perhaps, but it was surprising to me how much of a difference a boost in graphics card made to the feel of the computer, I had thought the graphics card was only important for 3D games. If you find that translucent selection retangle is slow and choppy - you know it is if you have this condition - you may want to pop in a $20 video card and save the trouble of buying a new computer.