Video card upgrade info

[Daniel Conroy]

Hi,
I recently got Star wars Knights of the old republic, and it is not running
smoothly even at 800x600 with 2x AA on my AMD athlon 2100+, GeForce 4
4600Ti, 512Mb DDR2100.

I want to upgrade to get this game working more acceptably, and be able to
use 4x or 8x AA, and have looked into the prices/my options. I can get a
Radeon 9800 pro (128Mb), or a Nvidia Geforce FX 5900XT for about £150.

In the past, when 3dfx and PowerVR cards were around, it used to be, that if
your PC wasn't powerful enough to start with, then the 3d card wouldn't make
much of a difference. Is this still the case?

Is buying one of these cards (radeon or geforceFX) going to make my game run
much smoother, over my current Geforce4, or am I going to have to upgrade
other components too? I have found I could get a P4E 3GHz, motherboard, RAM
and one of the above cards for around £450, but I don't really want to spend
all that just for this one game.

Does it matter that my motherboard only supports up to 4x AGP

Thanks,
Daniel

 

[Cuzman]

" I recently got Star wars Knights of the old republic, and it is not
running smoothly even at 800x600 with 2x AA on my AMD athlon 2100+, GeForce
4 4600Ti, 512Mb DDR2100. "


According to the following website, the recommended specs are 1.6Ghz CPU,
512MB RAM, 128MB VRAM, 3D sound card. However, it states *Stability: Major
problems*, which doesn't make things too clear.

http://www.gamespot.com/pc/rpg/starwarsknightsoftor/techinfo.html

 

[~misfit~]

Hi,
I recently got Star wars Knights of the old republic, and it is not
running smoothly even at 800x600 with 2x AA on my AMD athlon 2100+,
GeForce 4 4600Ti, 512Mb DDR2100.

I want to upgrade to get this game working more acceptably, and be
able to use 4x or 8x AA, and have looked into the prices/my options.
I can get a Radeon 9800 pro (128Mb), or a Nvidia Geforce FX 5900XT
for about £150.

In the past, when 3dfx and PowerVR cards were around, it used to be,
that if your PC wasn't powerful enough to start with, then the 3d
card wouldn't make much of a difference. Is this still the case?

Yes and no. It varies from game to game. Obviously if you were using a
Celeron 400Mhz then it would be a probelm. Some games use a lot of CPU and
some don't. I'm not familiar with your game. An XP2100+ is still a
reasonably powerful CPU but there is a chance that it could be a bottle-neck
with a high-end card and certain games.

Is buying one of these cards (radeon or geforceFX) going to make my
game run much smoother, over my current Geforce4, or am I going to
have to upgrade other components too?

Fairly hard to answer. Those ti4x00 cards are pretty good cards, I'm running
a ti4200 and am still happy with it. However, I don't have the wherewithall
to buy all the latest games. It runs everything I throw at it at perfectly
acceptable frame-rates, and that includes the Far Cry demo. My CPU is a bit
gruntier than yours though. It's an XP1800+ but I'm running it at 2.1Ghz on
a 200Mhz (400DDR) FSB with PC3200 RAM on an nForce2 Ultra 400 mobo. It's
about equal to an XP2600+ in AMD-speak Mhz wise. Better in fact when you
take into account the 200Mhz FSB and dual-channel memory.

I have found I could get a P4E
3GHz, motherboard, RAM and one of the above cards for around £450,
but I don't really want to spend all that just for this one game.

That is a bit extreme (pun intended). If you are in the habit of
playing/buying a few games then the upgrade could be justified. However. if
it's for one game then it's a bit silly. What is your motherboard capable
of? Maybe just a CPU upgrade would do it. It's a shame your RAM is only
PC2100. Oh, and for gaming, I wouldn't even look at Intel. AMD hold the
crown for gaming. For video compression etc then Intel maybe worth the
price-premium due to the SSE2 instruction-set but not form gaming. If I was
going to spend the money you're talking about above on a gaming platform
then I would be looking at AMD64.

Does it matter that my motherboard only supports up to 4x AGP

No, not as far as graphics performance goes with currently available
graphics cards. There isn't a card on the market that can saturate an AGP 4x
bus. It does however date your mobo, making it unlikely that a CPU-only
upgrade is a feasable option.