Graphics Card and Processor Query

[airbolt]

I am currently using a fairly old PC using Windows 98 and an 8MB Graphics Card. I am now able to consider a replacement.

My questions are

* How important is Memory in a Graphics Card - ? most seem to have 128MB . Atre there other factors which determine how smooth gameplay is?

* How important is having a Pentium 4 ? Are the AMD equivalents as Good? I would like to use Graphics Intensive Software such as CALL OF DUTY and similar.

I realise that these are fairly broad questions but any hints/tips would be appreciated.

[wideboy]

Many people (and reviewers) don't seem to think that 256MB is necessary in a graphics card - 128MB will do. However, if you can get 256MB for a reasonable price, why not go for it. As usual, the fastest processor that you can afford is desirable. For games there are lots of other factors like the speed of the graphics processor, pipelines and vertex shaders! Best to get a gaming magazine (or website) and look at their reviews of graphics card, or consider any review that shows ratings like 3D Mark..

[j2buttonsw]

If you are going to do gaming on your PC you need the best that you can afford. I like P4s (Xeons with hyperthreading and 1 MB L3 cache are better, what about a dual xeon = 4 processor system?) but AMDs are pretty good to (though they run VERY hot). Get tons of memory (1-2GB) use SATA hard drives and the biggest bestest graphics card you can get. As said there are lots of magazines which explain the graphics card p1ssing contest better than me

[Mobius1]

Not to be a fanboy, but anybody who knows their salt in the PC world knows that AMD64 CPUs are currently the king of the crop for gaming, offering the best performance and price ratios compared to P4s. Not only that, but most AMD64's with adequate cooling run much cooler than recent P4's, such as the Prescott-based P4 chips. My AMD64 3800+ for example runs around 30-35c with stock cooling. That is by no means "very hot".

AMD64's are the best consumer-level chips for gaming at the moment, and what's more is that they're generally very good for everything else too (although they are often pipped by Intels still when it comes to media encoding and high-level office content creation). You can get an AMD64 CPU quite cheaply too, and they represent far better value for money than any of Intel's P4 chips. Avoid AMD Semprons and old Athlon XP chips now though, not because they're bad, but they're yesterday's technology. The new AMD chips are the 64's/FXs and X2s (dual core chips). So having a Pentium 4 is not in the least bit important, so long as you have a decent alternative.

Memory in graphics cards is more important when considering three factors.

1. The screen resolution you plan to play at (especially important if you're using an LCD panel with a native resolution).


2. Whether you want to use frame buffer intensive features like antialiasing and anisotropic filtering.


3. How fast the GPU's core and memory clockspeeds are.

[Mobius1]

First off, if you're plumping for a mid-range card or a low end card, then anything over 128MB of memory is a total waste. Manufacturer's pile it on to make it sound good, but the fact is that unless the card you're buying is very beefy, it won't have the horsepower necessary to utilise that extra memory whilst maintaining a decent framerate in your games. Low to mid range cards like the Nvidia 6600GT and ATi X800 GT shouldn't be bought with anything more than 128MB.

When it comes to high end cards, then it does matter because they have sufficient rendering power to fully utilise 256MB of memory and, in some cases, like the soon to be available Nvidia 7800GTX 512 - have the ability to make good use of 512MB of frame buffer memory (or 1024MB when two cards are used in SLI configuration).

Good mid-range cards that offer excellent price/performance ratios include:

Nvidia 6600GT - 128MB
Nvidia 6800GS - 256MB
ATi Radeon X800XL - 256MB