[GTALUG] Has the graphics-card world gone mad?

[Evan Leibovitch]

I'll side with Gilles here.

I have an RPi 4 and it's useful for many things, but a replacement for my
desktop it's not.
This is not just a gaming issue; I often need dozens of browser tabs open
at once and the system is used for video, audio and graphics editing as
well as communications (not just Zoom but also MS Teams, Signal, Telegram,
WhatsApp and the occasional Webex and Skype). Even 16GB RAM isn't enough
without swapping.

In any case, my desktop with the underpowered video isn't non-functional,
just flickers enough to be annoying; I have the luxury of being able to
back-order a 1660S and wait until video card sanity returns. I could
probably throttle down my video to match the Pi's spec but long term that's
not why I bought these monitors.

- Evan



On Tue, 30 Mar 2021 at 15:40, Anthony de Boer via talk <talk at gtalug.org>
wrote:

> Giles Orr wrote:
> > On Tue, 30 Mar 2021 at 13:08, Anthony de Boer via talk <talk at gtalug.org>
> wrote:
> > >  ...
> > > If all else fails, a Raspberry Pi 4 will drive a pair of high-end
> > > monitors, probably not with the grunt that any modern game would want,
> > > but enough to be the new X Terminal.
> >
> > That just shifts the problem.  He has a good computer with a
> > not-entirely-working video card.  You're suggesting something that
> > would put him in a situation where he'd have a passable video card
> > with a not-entirely-working computer attached to it.
>
> At no point did I suggest this would outperform anything, other than a
> lack of a usable video card on the good computer vs the Pi being able to
> light lots'n'lots of pixels.
>
> Back in the day it used to be customary to run X applications on the big
> grunty server in the machine room, talking over the network to a
> relatively underpowered desktop X Terminal that knew little more than how
> to paint stuff on the screen, and that's still a possible fallback today,
> with the big PC using the RPi as a terminal.
>
> Awesome PC video card > RPi4 > crappy or no video at all.
>
> > Don't get me wrong: I use Raspberry Pis for a lot of things.  But I
> > don't use them as my daily driver, because they don't have the
> > horsepower.  Shifting to ARM would also break most games.
>
> They're more powerful than most of the machines us oldtimers have used,
> not an entirely bad modest desktop experience in their own right, and a
> possible silent-computer frontend to noisy spinning rust in another
> room.
>
> Granted, the ancient X protocol didn't include sound and this is probably
> going to be a much more viable setup for a non-gamer.  But back then we
> had 10 Mbit thinnet shared with everyone else on the floor, while
> nowadays we have to make do with GigE, so the experience might actually
> be better than remembered.
>
> --
> Anthony de Boer
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