Advice on Graphics Cards

[ispano]

Wow, could you actually play 1.0 on that?

Many people aren't as critical as to what good performance or quality is. I've seen many people call something smooth or whatnot, and I look at it and go wtf? That looks like garbage.

But anyways, you most likely won't get a huge boost with just a GPU upgrade. You should notice something, but not nearly what you would if you could upgrade the rest of the system as well.

[AdorraEloom]

Considering your current system already has an ATI card, I would get the 6670 for $50 as some else stated earlier, it would give you a nice boost, for fairly cheap. Anything more power full than the 6670 and you would be burning your money as the rest of your computer would bottleneck it.

[Nix]

Yeah, with no problems! Weird. lol

Also, how can you tell which graphics cards are more powerful? I wish I could do that...

I usually just whore the charts over at Tom's Hardware^^: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/...ew,3107-7.html

[Solace]

Yea don't spend too much. You'd have to upgrade the mobo and chipset + cpu to break the bottleneck.. Trust the ATI recommendation.

[SkyeWindbinder]

Considering your current system already has an ATI card, I would get the 6670 for ~$50 as some else stated earlier, it would give you a nice boost, for fairly cheap.

No lag, no slowdown, no poblems at all. Heck, I even compared my performance to those who had better rigs on youtube, I saw no difference. I dunno. I do treat my machine like a baby though (regular cleaning, maintenance, ect.) Maybe that has soemthing to do with it.

Anyways, I think I'll just go with the graphics card and power supply. Lat time I updated, it went from non-playable to smooth like butter. I just wanted to know which one I should go for. Heck, I may not even need a new power supply if I get a good enough card for 400W! Not looking for movie screen quality, just nice enough to show pretty pictures without exploding. ^^

My computer may be a crapbox, but it holds up well.

[SkyeWindbinder]

I usually just whore the charts over at Tom's Hardware^^: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/...ew,3107-7.html

Thanks!

Bookmarked!

[ispano]

PassMark's site is good as well.

http://www.videocardbenchmark.net/high_end_gpus.html

They also have charts for CPUs as well. You do have to be careful reading them though. The GPU charts, you'll see on high end, 680 is above 690. The 690 is actually two chips in one, so with SLI on it should outperform the 680. Depends on the game and drivers, etc.

On the CPU side, they seem to use a bench that actually uses all cores. So a 6 core could be higher than a given quad core, but because the quad is faster per core, it would perform better in games.

So, grain of salt stuff.

[AdorraEloom]

No lag, no slowdown, no poblems at all. Heck, I even compared my performance to those who had better rigs on youtube, I saw no difference. I dunno. I do treat my machine like a baby though (regular cleaning, maintenance, ect.) Maybe that has soemthing to do with it.

Anyways, I think I'll just go with the graphics card and power supply. Lat time I updated, it went from non-playable to smooth like butter. I just wanted to know which one I should go for. Heck, I may not even need a new power supply if I get a good enough card for 400W! Not looking for movie screen quality, just nice enough to show pretty pictures without exploding. ^^

My computer may be a crapbox, but it holds up well.

Looks like the 6670 card requires min 400W power supply so you would not even have to upgrade your power supply.

I'm basing this from this site.

http://www.flipkart.com/sapphire-amd...md4f6shhvfzhum

[Shura]

No lag, no slowdown, no poblems at all. Heck, I even compared my performance to those who had better rigs on youtube, I saw no difference. I dunno. I do treat my machine like a baby though (regular cleaning, maintenance, ect.) Maybe that has soemthing to do with it.

Anyways, I think I'll just go with the graphics card and power supply. Lat time I updated, it went from non-playable to smooth like butter. I just wanted to know which one I should go for. Heck, I may not even need a new power supply if I get a good enough card for 400W! Not looking for movie screen quality, just nice enough to show pretty pictures without exploding. ^^

My computer may be a crapbox, but it holds up well.

What settings are you running the benchmark at? based on the info you provided, your monitor resolution is pretty low, that could be why you can run 1.0 without a problem. Maybe try playing around with the benchmark settings, rather then using the default settings provided. Also as others have said already, even if you don't already have a PS3, buying one might be cheaper overall then upgrading your GPU/PSU.

The main issue with upgrading your PC is your CPU, its pretty old and upgrading the GPU is not gonna make much of a difference, the CPU will bottleneck the GPU. Your original GPU was a NVIDIA GeForce 6150 SE, with 128mb dedicated ram(which is useless really) so when you upgraded to the 5450, you saw a big difference; and the CPU did not bottleneck the 5450. If you upgrade just the videocard further, the CPU will bottleneck it so you won't see a performance increase like you did during your first upgrade.

If your really intent on playing on PC as opposed to PS3, then my suggestion to you is to try and save some money up in the next few months and upgrade your entire PC. If a new PC is completely out of the question, then as AdorraEloom said, a 6670 is your best bet without having to upgrade your power supply. If you do change your power supply too, then go with a 6850 the highest you can go without upgrading your CPU. Honestly even the 6850 is pushing it, but since you play on a low resolution screen, it should be fine.

[Abriael]

I suggest getting a Gigabyte Geforce GTX 660 Windforce. It's affordable, it's powerful but not excessively so in a way that your CPU will bottleneck it too much, and it's not too power-hungry. If your power supply is a 450 or higher with a single connector it should be ok.

PS: Yes, upgrading your GPU WILL very sizably upgrade your performance. Whatever people say, FFXIV: ARR's engine is very GPU intensive and very little CPU intensive. There may be some bottlenecking but not nearly enough to snuff the power of a good GPU.

Adding one gigabyte of ram and bringing your system to 4 will also help, since you run a 64 bit OS.