Not sure how to interpret that.jeffpn said:The single biggest thing you can do to boost overall performance is to put in a better video card. I doubt that would help your original problem much, though.
pgoelz said:While we're at it..... what is a good PCI-e video card these days that is inexpensive and doesn't have a noisy dust buster (r) for a blower? I want something that isn't audible outside the case. The PCI-e card in the FAQ seems to be affordable but discontinued (at least Newegg says it is inactive) and I'm not sure what the best replacement would be. I know some video cards make quite a racket.
I have been contemplating a dual monitor setup for video editing, so maybe I can talk myself into a discrete video card after all
Paul
pgoelz said:Back to the original question for a moment......
I have played around with settings and find that smoke and shadows are my worst enemy. Both cut the frame rate about in half. With minimum smoke and no shadows, I get around 60FPS. If I enable shadows, that drops to about 32FPS give or take. Which raises the question.... seems to me that shadows should be harder to compute than to image. So is the bottleneck more likely the CPU vs. the graphics card? Or does the program offload the shadow calculation to the graphics processor? Last I looked, the CPU was nowhere near 100% utilization....
Paul