a friend gave me a viper tnt2 with 3Mb mem. windows recognises it automatically. the card doesn’t seem to affect the render time of Zbrush at all. is this normal?
can it help? how?
TIA,
christos
Your Viper is for gaming acceleration. Renders/refreshes fast during game play.
The main benefit of the TNT2 lies within its ability to utilize larger texture sizes. It was a buzz in 99. Nice gift.
Here’s some info:
http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.html?i=961
RAM is the key to ZBrush. Lots and Lots of RAM. 
ZBrush uses Software rendering rather than hardware rendering. So the 3D acceleration in your card won’t help you out. However, I think that any RAM on the video card will be used by your system while rendering.
As Kathy said, the more regular RAM your computer has, the better off you’ll be. And of course, a fast CPU.
mmm. perfect. I have 4x128mbRam.
and a pIII@1000
it STILL isn’t enough 
thanks guys!
well, it sure won’t help you with the render times, it might speed up things like rotating and scaling a mesh, depending on what your old card was.
tnt2 does support openGL, but i think Z does indeed use software rendering mode and actually you dont need any hardware acceleration most of the time.
if that card really has 3mb, where did the other 29 go?
hmm, this made me come up with another geek question: does Z support dual processors?
btw: i’m stuck with a crappy old k6/2 500 with 128mb over here, i’m almost glad, i cant increase document size 
correct!!! 32Mb, sorry!
I was wondering about the amount of memory you said was on that card. We have similar systems I have a P111, 1000 with 768 ram. 32 on the video card the same as the one you just got, even with that Z closes down unvoluntarily sometimes. You could try one with 64 on the card to see a significant difference. It is however a very nice gift.
Nope, el_pix. No dual processor support. But who knows what’s planned for the future?