Video card that important?!?

[Giovanni]

Question for Vlado&co.

Sometime ago I got a HP off-the-shelf system, AMD 4400 2X.
Compared to another Gateway system, intel D 830, the HP has consistently been 10 to 20% faster.

Yesterday I had to rip the ATI video card out of the HP, because it fried.
So, the machine is now using the on-board video card, but it appears it's performances suffered.
Now it renders 5 to 10% SLOWER than the Gateways...

So, is it possible that the video card made up for that 15 to 30% speed increase?

I thought video card had little or no effects on v-ray rendering performances, but this little accident seems to demonstrate otherwise...

Any thoughts?

thank you

regards

Gio

[DaForce]

Video cards have nothing and i repeat nothing to do with rendering times. renders are PURELY cpu and ram.

Its possible the shitty onboard video card is sucking up more cpu cycles thus leaving less for the rendering.

[vlado]

The video card is probably not important, but the video drivers certainly can take up a portion of the CPU's time.

Bets regards,
Vlado

[instinct]

in addition some onboard Videocards use so-called "shared memory" wich basically "borrows" parts of your RAM as videoram. This can cause additional performance impacts (less ram = more paging)

Regards,
Thorsten

[andrewjohn81]

if you render with mental ray, especially in XSI and MAYA (since the mental ray options are so much better there), then video card can matter since mental ray can render shadows using the video card gpu. I wouldn't recommend doing that, but I thought i'd mention it.

[DaForce]

yeah thats right, also Maya can render particles..etc.. via the video card.

But since this was in reference to vray i didnt want to confuse things.