Just a complement: you can even do alpha blending on 256 colors (aka 8 bit) resolutions - I did it once on a DOS game prototype (simulating darker and lighter areas in the game) - the only drawback is that both imagest can't use all colors - you need at least some colors free to calculate the resulting colors when the images overlap ;)
Also there's no way a 4Mb card can achieve "decent" 1280 x 1024 on windows -- unless it's using shared RAM, but even then, it should be too slow for any real use...
Also there's no way a 4Mb card can achieve "decent" 1280 x 1024 on windows -- unless it's using shared RAM, but even then, it should be too slow for any real use...