La-----a------g

I was just wondering…

Blender lags a lot when I use a background image, no matter how big or visible it is. Is there a way to make this work smoother, or do I just have to get a decent graphics card? (My current is a 64 MB piece of crap integrated in the motherboard or something.)

With the details you’ve posted, I would imagine that the video card (or lack thereof) is the likely bottleneck here. Depending on how much RAM you’ve got in your computer, you might be able to go into the BIOS and increase the amount of RAM that is dedicated to video tasks.

A little bit more info would be helpful, such as: CPU, amount of RAM, what OS you are using, how heavy are the scenes you are working on, how big are the files that you are trying to use as background images and so on.

There could also be a lot of other contributing factors to this as well. Such as virus/spyware infections or lots programs in memory.

Win XP.
256 + 512 RAM (-64 MB of it which is dedicated to video memory. It can’t be set any higher.)
2.1 Ghz.

The file I was using as a background image was a 15 Kb GIF image. TINY.
The scene lags at once the image is there. Nothing but a lamp and a camera.

No viruses or spyware, or any other big programs than Blender running.

I am sure it’s all depending on the graphics card. I know enough about my computer to know that there is not really anything else that could be the cause.

Bleh.

an ati 64Mb piece of crap?

A VIA/S3G KM400/KN400 piece of crap.

If you are using an ATI graphics card or the one with ATI chipset, turn off the hardware acceleration from your Windows’ Control Panel. I have the same problem too. It run faster without hardware acceleration! Interesting, er! You may also try that on yours, even it is not an ATI. This trick may work.