Will it improve performance to install an older videocard?

Question

I've got a 22 and a 15 inches monitor plugged to a Geforce 9500. If I install an older videocard into an empty PCI slot and plug the 15' monitor in it, could it actually improve graphics performance by "lessening the burden" on the GF 9500?

EDIT:I'm curious enough to try it out in the next few days, I'll update some time next week with results. Though I honestly don't even know if the old card I've got is even PCI.

EDIT2: Took me a lot more than a few days, and in the end it turns out the old card isn't even compatible. Too bad =(

Answer 1

Yes, it should. With a 9500, you most likely won't see major improvements, but you could see some.

Also depends what the older video card is. If it an older nvidia card, the will most likely be ok, but it may complain a bit having say an old ati, matrox, etc. User experience this will vary. As long as the OS supports both cards, I would say you should be ok, but mixed video drivers can sometimes get interesting.

Answer 2

I had an old AGP + PCI setup -- two displays on AGP, one single display on the PCI. I saw a split-second pause when moving windows from monitors on one card, to monitors on the other.

This lag might be gone in PCI-Express -- but the handover from the AGP's video buffer to the PCI's video buffer might've been the bottleneck.

Also, depending on the age of the PCI card (ie, S3 Trio-vintage cards) -- some old cards will not initialize unless they're set as the primary adapter in the BIOS. Newer cards won't have this problem. A symptom of a card being too old is you'll receive a "device cannot start" upon installing drivers -- that's the story in Windows at least.