Is the problem my video card?

[fog]

Sorry if this is a really dumb question, I've never been big into video cards.

I run a dual-head setup (a GeForce dual-head card), currently with xfce4. For fun, I set the "Composite" option to true in /etc/X11/xorg.conf, so I get the nice drop shadows and all in xfce.

My machine is unusably slow, though. (A dual 1.4 GHz AthlonMP system, 768 MB RAM.) Even with nothing but my window manager running, I've got a 30+% CPU load. Moving windows around is painful, and even typing sometimes lags.

I'm guessing that the problem lies with my video card, a whopping 16MB card. (I don't really do anything graphics-intensive, so I never see the need for a good video card.) But now that my system is slowed to a crawl by trivial effects, I'm wondering if it's time to upgrade. Will the huge CPU load (drawing the shadows, presumably) be shifted to my graphics card, or do I have other problems?

[chrismortimore]

the problem lies with composite being very iffy. i don't know all the details, but it has only ever given me trouble, so i got rid of it.

[ianegg]

First of all, is your card compatible with the latest binary nVidia drivers, and if so, did you also set the option "RenderAccel" to true in the Device section for your card?

16Mb is a relatively pitiful amount of video RAM these days, but it is enough for basic 2D use. I'm not sure what the minimum is for composiste though; I imagine the problem is the age of your card rather than the amount of memory.

If you get a recent enough nVidia card, the binary drivers will allow composite to run smoothly. Otherwise the performance is grenerally pretty bad - something that EXA will supposedly fix. Only my Geforce 6, composite is amazing - everything is a LOT smoother than the standard settings. BUT, it crashes randomly a lot, and there are specific situations where it crashes every time. In other words, it's probably not worth upgrading simply for the sake of composite yet, but it will be soon.