I just have a quick question...

I know that onboard graphics arnt considered good or anything but what I want to know is, why? What is the real difference between onboard 256MB graphics and a card with 256MB graphics? My board has 256MB onboard and when I go to a site like "can you run it?" and check a game like COD 4, it says I can run it no problem and that my card more then meets the requirements for shading and anything else it needs but yet when I run the game, it doesn't run well at all, not even playable. I installed the graphics card i'm currently using (nVidia GeForce 8500GT 512) and I can run games like COD 4, with full graphics and no lag at all.

PC1:
- Asus M2V-MX SE Motherboard
- AMD Athlon 64 4200 X2 Dual Core CPU, 2.2GHz
- 1GB DDR667 Memory Module, DDR2
- nVidia GeForce 8500GT

PC2:
- Core2Duo Laptop/1GB DDR2

You shouldn't even have to ask. Look at the minimum graphics requirements for COD4:

"NVIDIA(R) Geforce(TM) 6600 or better or ATI(R) Radeon(R) 9800 Pro or better"

The recommended requirements are much stiffer:

"Nvidia Geforce 7800 or better or ATI Radeon X1800 or better"

Notice that the amount of memory isn't even mentioned. It's pretty much a given that the minimum amount on cards such as these is 256MB.

Integrated graphics generally has no memory of it's own, so for your K8M890/DeltaChrome to have 256MB, it has to steal it from the system. Your system is then taking a performance hit because it's basically running on 768MB. (On a side note, DDR2-667 is the wrong RAM to be running with an A64 X2, so you're losing performance there too).

If you were to really get into a spec by spec comparison between the DeltaChrome & 8500GT, you'd see that the 8500GT wins out in ALL categories, hands down...faster core, faster memory, more pixel pipelines, etc. That being said, the 8500GT is NOT a very good gaming card...it's very near the bottom of the pile.

http://www23.tomshardware.com/graph...

http://pcworld.about.com/news/Mar11...

if you had a pc with 512mb ram in (256mb of this being on board graphics) and you had the same PC with 256mb ram in and a separate graphics card, then the one with the separate graphics card should be much better. It's not just about the ram, it's about the onboard graphics hogging resources and sharing components all over the motherboard as a whole. A separate graphics card is vastly superior- if its a reasonable card.