AGP Graphics card for older PC to improve YouTube?

[nicholas]

A Radeon 4670 is a good AGP card, IIRC the 3850 is PCI-E only.  You should install the maximum RAM your motherboard can handle and replace your hard drive with an SSD too to get the best performance out of the machine.  Though for the amount that will all cost you could probably buy a new PC with better performance.

[nicholas]

Nope Nik, you're wrong there.
I had a 3850 AGP card (it exists - there are a few on eBay right now), the performance is a little smoother than the 4670 or 4650.

Cool, I did a quick check of eBay.ca and there were only PCI-E cards for sale so I assumed there were no agp ones.

@ral-clan

Enable HTML5 mode for YouTube to disable Flash and see if that helps.

http://youtube.com/html5

[nicholas]

Flash uses GPU accelerated video decoding on supported cards.

[nicholas]

I actually did try enabling HTML5 for YouTube, and the performance is actually worse.

That's a shame.

HTML5 video works a treat on my PowerBook G4 which only has a 1.67GHz CPU, admittedly the Radeon 9700 video card is better than your Intel IGP but under MorphOS there is no GPU accelerated decoding to help play the video so theoretically your 2.8GHz Pentium should play the same videos.

[nicholas]

In glad you've got it sorted.

Have you tried AROS on that PC btw?  It'll fly compared to Windows, but web browsing leaves a lot to be desired; though once Odyssey is opensourced and ported that should make AROS a great choice for old machines.

[nicholas]

All this tells us one thing: Flash and HTML 5 suck big turds! Hurray for utterly brain dead standards.

Nope, it tells is that CPU driven video playback on a 2.8GHz Windows machine is worse than MorphOS running on a CPU half it's speed.