Graphics Card Advice

[Jannak]

What is the best graphics card to run today's games especially the Unreal 3 engine?

Here is my specs.

Operating System
MS Windows 7 32-bit
CPU
Intel Pentium E2180 @ 2.00GHz 46 °C
Conroe 65nm Technology
RAM
4.0GB Dual-Channel DDR2 @ 332MHz (5-5-5-15)
Motherboard
Intel Corporation D945GCNL (LGA 775)
Graphics
DELL S2309W @ 1920x1080
ATI Radeon HD 4600 Series (VISIONTEK) 56 °C
Hard Drives
313GB Seagate ST3320620SV ATA Device (Unknown Interface) 40 °C
Optical Drives
ATAPI DVD A DH20A4H ATA Device
Audio
ATI High Definition Audio Device

Any suggestions?

[exl]

You may run into a CPU bottleneck with some games with that CPU, but nothing to worry about much. What is your budget though? Three HD6990's will definitely run Unreal 3 games, but also burn down your house and your wallet.

[Belial]

My HD4850 had no trouble running Bulletstorm at 1600x1200, max settings, no AA.

[Quast]

Jannak said:

today's games [/B]
[B]Unreal 3 engine

? those are 2 separate questions.

Literally anything above a geforce 5900 would run ut3. If not cards even older.

[AirRaid]

No they aren't. A lot of today's games are built on UE3. Just because the engine has been around for a while doesn't mean it's not still being licensed.

Bulletstorm is the latest example, but there's been a fairly steady stream of UE3 games.

I doubt a 5900 would run Bulletstorm satisfactorily though. My GTS 250 handles it okay at 1280x1024, and it's a year old now.

[Xeros612]

Upgrade your processor. 2.0 GHz will surely bottleneck you on most anything. Hell, my laptop's processor is 0.2 GHz faster than that and it gets choked up rendering 480p videos or playing Minecraft.

What's your budget? If you've got a lot to spare, GeForce GTX 580 would probably be able to handle anything you throw at it, provided your other specs are up to par. (For that money, it had better.)

More RAM wouldn't be a bad idea as well. Neither would upgrading to a 64 bit OS, at the very least to be able to actually use all 4 GB of RAM you currently have. (32 bit OS seems to limit itself to 3.25 GB of usable RAM. At the current state, you're wasting away .75 GB.)

Of course, if your budget is a bit lower, a GTX460 would do. (I've had much, much better experience with NVIDIA in terms of performance, support, and control panel abilities than ATI personally, hence why I'm pushing the NVIDIA label.)

[Scripten]

Hell, you could get away with a GTX440 if you really wanted to. I'm running one in my rig right now, and while it doesn't play everything at maximum, it's pretty decent for the price.

[chungy]

Xeros612 said:

Upgrade your processor. 2.0 GHz will surely bottleneck you on most anything. Hell, my laptop's processor is 0.2 GHz faster than that and it gets choked up rendering 480p videos or playing Minecraft.

Your CPU has next to nothing to do with either of these. My laptop has a 1.4GHz CPU and does even 1080p (scaled down) videos just fine... :P

[DuckReconMajor]

Minecraft is very CPU intensive I hear.

[Xeros612]

chungy said:

Your CPU has next to nothing to do with either of these. My laptop has a 1.4GHz CPU and does even 1080p (scaled down) videos just fine... :P

But is that actually rendering or just viewing?
With Aero shut off it does perform better, enough to watch 720p videos without getting framey, but rendering takes a lot of resources to do and essentially shuts out running demanding programs such as games.

[John Smith]

As CPU bottlenecked as that would be with a high end card I'd say consider a 512MB GeForce GTS 250 for $100 or at most a Radeon HD 5770 for $130. Facts of the matter are your CPU is going to be an incredible bottleneck even at 1080p, and it desperately needs an upgrade, to something like a Pentium E6800 ($100) before graphics solutions even like a GTX 460 or Radeon HD 6850 come into the realm of usefulness.

Also if you're going to do anything more than change the processor and graphics card just get a new computer. LGA 775 is beyond dead, and it was a terrible platform to begin with. Nothing good will come out of keeping your platform on life support.