pouët.net

Hi,

My PC is getting rather old now (about 5 years old), and I'll probably be upgrading next year, but I was wondering if a new card would help with running some of those demos that either refuse to run completely, or run at about 1 frame per second (a few from 2010 onwards, and loads from this year)?

Current system:
core 2 duo e6750 (2.66ghz)
2 gigs ram
geforce 9600gt
dual booting vista and xp

So - whaddya think - new gfx card, or is the rest of my system too out of date?

And if new gfx card - what's recommended these days?

Ta!

Well 2GB of RAM is kind of considered the low-end anymore ... unless we're talking smart phones. Mine has 4 in it, and some people consider where I work 12GB is average.

CPU is probably fine (others might have something else to say on that), though your XP is going to EOL next year. (If you're a Windows guy, why not 7? It's better than Vista.)

I recently got a new card because my nVidia 8800 GT went kaput even after a repaste revival attempt (there's nothing visibly wrong with it that I can see). I ended up with a ZT-60901-10M GTX660 2G R (Zotac) or so my e-mail records indicate. Cost me $200. Seems to work fine, though it doesn't like my primary LCD display going in to time based sleep (as opposed to being explicitly turned on and off) but I don't know if that's a driver issue. I just set the display to never go to sleep and am better at turning it off when I walk a way for a while.

I did have issue running #cbc's neretic at full screen (1680x1050 for me) where I wouldn't get all effects. Worked great at a large windowed size. So you might not be able to run some prods fully ...

Who knows? I didn't want to spend more than $200, you might be different. I also didn't care to spend the crazy amounts some cards go for ($1k) that claim top spot by a small margin and still aren't worth shit in four years like the rest anyway, but there's probably some happy medium between what I paid and top of the line that may be worth it if you game or do any other GPU-intensive stuff a lot.

Correction:

Mine home desktop has 4GB in it and where I work 12GB for a desktop is pretty average.

Most demos todays are more GPU than CPU bound, and GPUs have more evolved than CPUs feature-wise in the last 5 years.

Thus, updating to a recent GPU is likely to give the best tradeof between cost and up-to-date-ness.
Had replaced my 9800 for a 660 (required due to a display change - I picked it because it was the cheapest nvidia card which supports display port) on a machine with a similar CPU, and now most new releases run quite well again.

Note that there always will be releases which are designed for machines which won´t exist until 5 years in the future anyway ;)

However, I´d also recommend:
-adding 2 or better 4 GB more RAM
-using Win7 x64 instead of Vista, since quite a bunch of features were are present in Win7 are incomplete or missing in Vista (in other words: Vista combines the incompatibility of Win7 for old stuff with the incompatibility of XP for new stuff)

Thus, depending on the total cost the difference for a complete upgrade of the whole system might be not that large - especially if you want to go for a full upgrade soon anyway.

As both other posters have said - before spunking for a new card/system chuck an extra couple of gigs of memory in. I'm guessing that at 5 yo. you're looking at ddr2.
Might be a bit hard to find, and is a bit more expensive than dd3 (go figure!) but you'll definitely find that more mem gives you a boost.

Thanks for the responses so far, So let's change the question a little teensy bit

At the moment - there are a few demos from 2010ish, which run ok, but a little slow - (most are 4k intros) - example is hydra http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=53905

There are a few demos (again 2010ish) which are way too slow to be watchable
Farbrausch Magellan - http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=56458
and the Fairlight demos ceasefire and Agenda Circling forth - http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=55558 , http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=54603

As well as a few from this year which need directx11, or a newer opengl version.

I'm not too bothered if I have to run something at a lower res to get a bit of speed (current monitor only goes up to 1280*1024).

So - If I've got around £50-80 to spend on a gfx card upgrade - what could I expect from a geforce gt630,640? what if I could stretch to a gtx650?

lastly - are there likely to be any dificulties installing the card in my current PCI-e slot? (I've installed AGP cards in the past)

hydra i not there. mmh. magellan is cpu heavy. 2 cores won't do that. and the fairlight ones are heavy whatever way.

for your graphics choices: i only got raw specs. the 630 is probably slower if i balance it all. the 640 got more cores but slower memory. if you can, stretch the budget and go for the gtx650. or do even better.

Everything under 660 is not gonna cut it. Memory bandwidth under that gpu is too slow for current deferred renderers in 720p resolution.
I'd look for 760 (Asus OC or similar) or if you're adventurous, try Ati 7950->
Also throw at least 8GB mem to the machine :)

That little? If my new one is still running after at least as long as the one I had before (~4.5 years or so) then the cost was worth the investment. Don't buy yourself short. You want something that's decent or better now so you're not looking around again for an upgrade in a year.

i just thought: budget? wattage? perhaps running an older psu? and the 650 leaves some bux for some addable cheap 2GB of RAM if so. it's not a big shot but works too.

There are very few things in life that cannot be helped with a new graphics card.

my advice: save the 80 bucks for the decent upgrade you're planning in a year. then buy a i7+32gb+770 or better. would be a waste of money to upgrade an out-of-date rig with a halfarsed budget gpu. watch them on youtube for now... IF your current lowend system still pulls that off ;)

what maali said

Thanks for the advice - I've decided to wait for a big machine upgrade, may even try and get father christmas to contribute!

what skomp said

and if you wanna save some money you could look into AMD cpu and gpu for the next upgrade, they're usually a bit cheaper compared to Intel/nvidia hardware with similar performance. but from personal experience with AMD you get what you pay for, so i wouldn't expect it to be a PC for another 5 years in that case.

beware that ati benchmarks are usually done with an intel CPU. the amd cpus are not able to feed their own gfx card properly. so if you want an ati gfx card with "comparable performance", you have to get an intel cpu.

and you can turn your thermostat 3 degrees lower thanks to AMD hardware :)

that also holds for nvidia to be fair

GPU card PSU needs for Geforces can be found here (example 760 specifications) http://www.geforce.com/hardware/desktop-gpus/geforce-gtx-760/specifications

Just buy a PS4 man

buy a new GPU - help saving the economy (of some other country probably)

but that's not how you start flame wars. ;)

Obligatory link for updating hardware http://www.logicalincrements.com/

mog: very cool link. Thanks!