[CT27]

W7 is going away early next year so I'll be getting a new computer. 

To play FS/FSO mods/campaigns, what would you say is the minimum level graphics card (NVIDIA please as that's what I'll probably get) I'll need to continue playing mods and campaigns?

On a similar vein, what would be a recommended card to play campaigns/mods at a higher level (shadows for example)?



Specifically, one of the cards I'm looking at is a GTX 1660 TI.  That's not the highest level of card, but it's still in the above-average/pretty good category right?

[Colt]

I'm running on a GTX 1050 TI with max settings. SMAA, post-processing yada-yada. Butter smooth. Large numbers of asteroids in dense fields sometimes cause slowdowns (albeit rarely), so a 1660 TI should be good.

What processor/CPU are you looking to get? I'm not too versed in this but I'd imagine that's important information for others on here with more knowledge to help you out with.

Good luck.

[theperfectdrugsk]

I don't know what I'd recommend...but for reference, I'm on a laptop with a 960M, and I make at least 30fps and usually >45fps  for the vast majority of mods/campaigns on all but the busiest set-piece battles with tons of ships, running 1920x1080 with all the things maxed and all the options in the launcher enabled.

[The E]

The 1660 Ti will be just fine for running FSO with all the bells and whistles.

[slayer tier]

the mods arent very demanding. i have latest mods and media vp on 1070 and usage is less than 50% most of the time, 1440p 60fps constantly. something half as fast will be good, so an old 680 or similar will do.

[Mito [PL]]

Hey there, I'm currently running FSO with all the graphic stuff except SMAA turned on on a 2GB GTX 770, 1920x1080 and I can also say that the performance isn't bad at all. 60FPS most of the time, with the really huge battles (I mean The Aftermath Reboot level huge) requiring me to turn shadows off.

As for the CPU, any FSO mod should be able to run just fine on any modern CPU that isn't some super low energy mobile part. For reference, I'm using a mildly overclocked (@3,4GHz vs stock 3,0GHz) Core 2 Quad Q9650 and I don't really see any big bottlenecks with this part - I'd say that it lets me run my GPU at over 80% usage on average. Not only the cheapest Ryzen on the market (Ryzen 3 1200) blows my CPU out of the water, but actually even the Athlon 200GE outperforms it, so technically any modern CPU will be doing just fine.
If you are tailoring your PC build expecially to accomodate Freespace, remember that FSO utilizes only a single core (with a slight amount of help from a second one), so you can aim for a low core count part with high clocks. But at some point the GPU will be more important so you can save up some money on this one.

As for the RAM, anything starting from 8GB will be absolutely fine to run heavy FSO mods with multiple background programs. I'd say you can even manage with 4GB but that's crazy levels of cheaping out

For reference: GTX 770 vs 1660Ti and Q9650 vs R3 1200