OaksMokedBacon
Member
+0|6928|Dundee, Scotland
i meant to post this last week until my internet died.

there have been a few posts recently about people blaming their graphics cards for slow down when the games loading at the start of the map, no real fps improvements with their new gfxcards etc.

WHile board at work, i found this intresting artcle on guru3d that might enlighten a few people as to why a new gfx card might not be the best upgrade for your pc.

http://www.guru3d.com/article/article/136/

it is abit old but i feel the principles are still valid today, considering the power of the new gfx cards.


From this article (i use a simular 2.8 p4 with an x800xt pe) i can see that i need to upgrade my cpu and mobo to get the best out the card amnd a longer life. screw upgrading to pci-e when i can get another performance boost for 140 bucks rather than 250+ for the gfx + cpu + mobo (£400). I hope it might be a good starting guide for those like me who want to push the lifespan of their hardware a bit further.
.ACB|_Cutthroat1
No place like 127.0.0.1
+76|6917|Gold Coast,QLD,Australia
one of the best improvements (price wise) If you have <1GB of ram get another gig so you have atleast 2
sixshot
Decepticon Geek
+50|6896|Planet Seibertron ;)
I kinda remember knowing this fact for some of the fast video cards out there.  It never occur to me if people know about these but I don't think many has ever asked whether a said video card would be a good upgrade.  Granted, depending on their setup and config, I can always try to judge and advise of various "good choices" that they can look at.  The options that I would provide would, as I hope they do, provide insights as to whether they should spend the extra bucks for the new toys.

To me it became common sense to me that to get the best out of your video card is to simply get the one that can be coupled easily.  I've read numerous reviews on video cards along with CPU combinations and that is where I learned that in order to bring out the absolute best in some of these high end video cards that you need a blazingly fast CPU to keep the video card going.  But the biggest problem and perhaps biggest obstacle is finding out which particular combination of video card and CPU would give you the best maximum common ground to either 1) Not be CPU bound or 2) not be GPU bound.

Given that BF2 can run on a variety of hardwares, most people with mid-range system with an ATi R9800 Pro or equivalent would have no problem running the game at decent settings and framerates.  I do believe, though, that anything less than an Athlon64 would be limiting the graphics cards.  I found my ancient AthlonXP 2100+ to be a bit slow in crunching info.  It was able to handle everything but alas the load time of some of these games is quite horrendous.  For Intel users, the faster the CPU the better.  Those with less than 2.8GHz for Intel processors ought to look towards upgrading the CPU to something a notch higher.

Finally but not least, the low-spec computers out there... I can only pray that they have saved up a good chunk of cash for a system overhaul.  I just cannot see how they can cope with some of these massive games out there today.  Granted that there are people with differing tastes, all this is assuming that the people reading this are those who are playing BF2 frequently.

Enough blabbering from me.  Have fun finding the magic formula.
kR4MR
3 Tours Of 'Nam And All I Got Was This Lousy Forum
+3|6958|Aus
try this: DL Dacris benchmarks, have play around and you'll find a tool which can be used to find bottlenecks (this can be used in the freeware version) for example my 3500+ is good for my 6600GT, however my RAMs clock of 800MHz is too fast, meaning my processor is a bottleneck, the correct fix would be get a 4800+ or FX57/60
.ACB|_Cutthroat1
No place like 127.0.0.1
+76|6917|Gold Coast,QLD,Australia
cpu can bottleneck ram......bahaha

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