Hard Light Productions Forums
Off-Topic Discussion => Gaming Discussion => Topic started by: Thisisaverylongusername on July 21, 2014, 09:08:26 pm
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So, say for whatever reason (primarily being my current video card sucks) I want a new video card. What are some good, affordable video cards that can, say, run Space Race from Just Another Day 2.2 Xtreme Arcade at a reasonable framerate?
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What price range are you looking at? For less than 200 USD I would recommend either an R9 270x or GTX 760. If you're willing to pay more (between 250 and 350 USD) you could upgrade to a 280x or 770. These cards will run pretty much anything if FSO at decent, if not glorious, framerates.
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FSO doesn't really require a very high-end video card; most of the time, you'll be CPU-limited by the collision detection code, rather than GPU-limited by fancy graphics.
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What price range are you looking at? For less than 200 USD I would recommend either an R9 270x or GTX 760. If you're willing to pay more (between 250 and 350 USD) you could upgrade to a 280x or 770. These cards will run pretty much anything if FSO at decent, if not glorious, framerates.
while 270x is decent, its power management is rather flaky, and the drivers dont have an easy way to tweak it into submission, so i'd reccomend the nvidia any day, any time.
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Step 1: Examine your motherboard's manual to see what slots it has where video card goes. The motherboard should have PCI Express 2.0 or newer to really even consider a GPU upgrade for gaming purposes.
Step 2: Examine your power supply and how much juice it can output. Older power supplies may not be enough to power the most power hungry GPU's or may lack required cables, especially true in OEM systems.
Step 3: Further examine your current hardware to see whether you have a bottleneck elsewhere. In some cases CPU, RAM or HDD/SSD upgrade can have bigger benefit than GPU upgrade.
Step 4: Figure out how much money you can comfortably put down for a single piece of hardware, in this case a GPU.
Step 5: Explore online retailer websites that sell computer hardware to find GPUs in the price range.
Step 6: Go to websites such as tomshardware.com or anandtech.com that have benchmarking charts where you can compare performance, power consumption, noise levels, etc.
Step 7: Go place an order on one, where ever you can find it cheapest.
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if price is a significant factor, i'm always an advocate for buying a generation behind. it can save you a boatload of money with little to no practical loss in performance or usable features. my nvidia gtx 670 is still going just fine. the only problems i get are micro stuttering, which is almost always the fault of shoddy game coding or being tuned for the other GPU brand.
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I refer to this a lot: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/gaming-graphics-card-review,3107.html
According to the hierarchy chart near the end, my GTX480 ranks up there with current-gen GTX750Ti or Radeon R7 265.