I have an Intel Mother Board D-8645GBF Chipset that includes an
on-board VGA chip in my office.It always keeps 16 MB of RAM for itself
and shows 496 Mb (Total=512) in the System window.I never found any
speed problem during my graphics work using Photoshop (I have 50Mb
each files to work with ).

Still many in the forum recommend that the Motherboard should be
without Video chip(as t automatically reserves memory, even if and
ad-on VGA is inserted ) and one should put in an ad-on Video board .I
ma refering to DV editing so no capturing is involved as I will be
using PCI Firewire card.

I wonder if it would really make a difference in video editing
,rendering or playback if you have lots of RAM.Also most cards from ATI
and others mainly target the games market,which use vector based
graphics as opposed to raster based in videos.Also a 64 Mb Card would
be limited to 64 Mb while on-board chip can borrow as much as
required.As for processor sharing I have been told that add-on cards
also share processor power (how much? I am sot sure, and this may be
the glitch).I am not an expert in any way.

Any comments.If there has to be an add-on card then what should be the
optimum specs regarding RAM , sresolution etc..

HobbyDocumentary wrote:
My system has on-board graphics card. If it is disabled to run a
different card then it uses No memory. The amount of system memory it
uses is set by configuration and is fixed.

I have seen no difference in the on-board vs add-on for similar
capacity cards.

If you use a video card it will free some system memory for system and
applications use and may provide extra features as dual monitor
support, TV- out, video out.

When running applications that use Direct X and OpenGl the video card
rather than the CPU takes a lot of the load. This seems mostly games
and some 3d Graphics packages.