1st Upgrade in a while

I recently installed the new CS4 edition of Photoshop, which supports hardware acceleration from supported video cards.

Seems my Nvidia GeForce 7300 GT is not one of those supported cards!  Mind you it is a pretty old card now – almost 3 years old and it was only £65 new…

NVIDIA GeForce 7300 GS
Texture Fill Rate (Per Second) - 2.2 billion
Maximum Memory Bandwidth       - 6.5 GB/s
Memory Size                    - 256 MB
Supported DirectX Version      - 9.0c
HDR Lighting                   - 64 bit

According to Nvidia’s web site, this is a card in the “Business User, Casual Gamer, Home PC User” category, and the best card in that group is a 9500GT DDR3 (£38 +VAT)!

NVIDIA GeForce 9500 GT (GDDR3)
Texture Fill Rate (Per Second) - 8.8 billion
Maximum Memory Bandwidth       - 25.6 GB/s
Memory Size                    - 256 MB
Supported DirectX Version      - 10
HDR Lighting                   - 128 bit

So, it should be about 4 times quicker, not bad for less than £50, may even manage to run “Microsoft Flight Sim X” at a reasonable frame rate now ;-)