im coming into some money soon, and am tired of getting piss poor frame rate on every game ever. can anyone suggest the best single improvement i can make to my system (the lowest cost-boost ratio). stats (please keep in mind i dont know anything about hardware, so please forgive me if i provide too much or not enough information.): RAM:512 processor: AMD Athlon, MMX, 3DNow, 1.2GHz video card: XGI Volari, V8 Rev 00 sound card: NVIDIA
Anyway for empires I'd suggest Ati cards at the moment Best is to wait another month, because new cards are getting released and the older ones will drop in price a bit (again)
ill be able to afford $100-150ish. i had an NVIDIA video card for a while, but when it crapped out i decided to save 15 bucks by getting the volari. ive been kicking myself in the ass ever sence.
That really isn't enough money dude...to get that system up again, and get a good CPU and GPU, you'd probably need a new motherboard, more/different RAM, etc.
Bottlenecking isn't the main issue. Performance is. He's gonna get a bigger bang for his buck if he gets a better graphics card. Get a 1280x1024 screen and compare 1280's and 1024's performances on all high setting. You should have only a 1-2 FPS drop. However, there is a point where bottlenecking will screw you up. My old specs: AMD Sempron @ 1.8 GHz ATi 9200 SE 1024 RAM I get 10-30 FPS on all low settings 1024x768 New Specs AMD Sempron @ 1.8 GHz nVidia 7600 GS 1024 RAM 40-70 FPS on all high settings + HDR 1024x768 It drastically improved my performance even though the CPU is obviously bottlenecking it. BTW, this is based on the FPS I get on Empires, not CSS or HL2. For the latter 2, I always get 80-100 FPS. Oh and, I think it's best to save up 200-300 more to buy a decent PCI-E comp. But if you need better performance now, buy a good GPU
