Dragon said:
ok what about the x1550 pro 512mb card, I know my processor is not brill but
I will not bother with Rainbow six but will this card help me run some of my
older games better like sims 2. I don't play a great majority of games so
its not worth upgrading my CPU yet.
Dave
Aim higher than that. You want your new video card to be X times as fast
as the old. If they get too near to one another in performance, the
upgrade will be a waste of money. I call that approach the "dribbling
upgrade" approach, as you buy one $100 video card after another.
Do the same kind of analysis I just demonstrated. Find articles where SIMS 2
are benchmarked, determine if the game is limited by the CPU or the GPU,
and that will tell you whether a new video card is going to help. A new
graphics card, can allow you to turn up the "detail level" in games
(with a slight cost in CPU to do it). Or allow slightly higher resolution,
if you've been playing at 800x600 or 640x480. On some games, those
differences can be important, for example in a first person shooter, being
able to see further or make a more accurate shot. But for the poorly written
games, where the game bogs when the action is intense, no amount of hardware
can help.
To give an example, there are flight sim enthusiasts. They've been using
Microsoft FSX, which is a detailed flight sim. Some have poured thousands
of dollars into their systems, put in 4GB of RAM, high end SLI video,
and got next to no improvement in frame rate. If they flew at low altitude
through a city, it was like a slide show. Microsoft issued a Service Pack
for the game, and that did more for performance than any amount of current
hardware. So in some cases, the users are just banging their heads against
the wall.
If a game has hard limits, sometimes it takes a lot of money to overcome
them. And that is why you need to find the articles that benchmark and
tell you what is limiting the game, to understand whether you can afford
to improve game performance or not.
Paul
