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What is the best way to improve performance get new graphics card or more ram? (This is for compiz and wobblie windows.)

I have a G- force twoo card and 512mb ddr of ram. PLease advise.

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A short, practical checklist for that builds on 's bottleneck idea: determine whether the slowdown is caused by paging (low system RAM) or by lack of hardware 3D acceleration (GPU/driver). Quick checks to see what the X stack is actually using:

glxinfo | grep "direct rendering"
glxinfo | grep "OpenGL renderer"
lspci -nnk | grep -A3 VGA

If those show "direct rendering: Yes" and an actual vendor renderer string, the GPU is doing hardware GL. If the renderer is a software path (for example "llvmpipe" or a generic Mesa software rasterizer), desktop compositing will be much slower.

Check overall memory and swap behavior with:

free -m
vmstat 1
swapon -s

Sustained nonzero "si/so" in vmstat or heavy swap usage under normal desktop load points to RAM as the cheapest, highest-impact upgrade. In the compiz era a 1GB system is commonly the minimum for comfortable compositing; 2GB gives noticeably more headroom when running several apps.

If hardware GL is missing or drivers are flaky, fix the driver or replace the card with one that has well-supported 3D drivers for the target distro. A very old GeForce2 may rely on legacy/proprietary drivers that are difficult to keep working on modern kernels/Xorg; check driver compatibility before buying. Practical rule: upgrade RAM first if swapping is the issue; upgrade the GPU only if glxinfo shows software rendering or effects remain choppy after the RAM upgrade.

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Member Avatar for John A

You definitely need more RAM.

Member Avatar for Sturm

Um just wondering iamthwee but why are you speaking like a newb?

Member Avatar for Member #46692

well my school friend said the ram won't do much, he said it was all down to the graphics card. Its a prety old graphic card.

If I get more ram will 1GB be ok?

Member Avatar for John A

>well my school friend said the ram won't do much, he said it was all down to the graphics card
What you need to understand is that a single component of hardware doesn't determine the entire speed of the machine. You're only as fast as your slowest bottleneck, and the key is to eliminate that. In your case, your RAM is a major bottleneck, so you're going to need to upgrade that to at least 1 gigabyte. Your old video card is probably another bottleneck. Upgrade that. Eventually you'll get to the point where the cost of upgrading components to eliminate all the bottlenecks becomes so great that it would be cheaper to just buy a new computer, so use discretion when upgrading parts in your computer.

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