CPU vs RAM vs VIDEO CARD

[BigGoose2006]

CPU vs RAM vs VIDEO CARD

Which is more important to a good gaming performance, or maybe a balance?

 

[Falcon(Nate)]

It's all about the balance.

If you don't have a good enough CPU, your vid card isn't going to get enough information to process. If your RAM can't hold very much, your CPU has to keep waiting for the hard disk or CD-ROM drive to fetch info. If your vid card isn't very good, then your CPU just sits there waiting.

Also, the amount of bandwidth available to each matters, which is where the motherboard comes into play.

And let's not forget about sound processing, especially with games such as HL2 and Doom3 having realtime 5.1+ processing. If you're one of the people who still has their SoundBlaster 16 because they don't care much about sound, your framerate WILL suffer from it.

 

[obsidian]

yes its about balance until a certain level is reached. so if u have a 1gb ram, 3ghz cpu then the gfx card will probably be the bottleneck.

 

[antimatter]

It's all about the balance.

If you don't have a good enough CPU, your vid card isn't going to get enough information to process. If your RAM can't hold very much, your CPU has to keep waiting for the hard disk or CD-ROM drive to fetch info. If your vid card isn't very good, then your CPU just sits there waiting.

Also, the amount of bandwidth available to each matters, which is where the motherboard comes into play.

And let's not forget about sound processing, especially with games such as HL2 and Doom3 having realtime 5.1+ processing. If you're one of the people who still has their SoundBlaster 16 because they don't care much about sound, your framerate WILL suffer from it.

Bingo. :imu:

 

[Sparta]

It's all about the balance.

If you don't have a good enough CPU, your vid card isn't going to get enough information to process. If your RAM can't hold very much, your CPU has to keep waiting for the hard disk or CD-ROM drive to fetch info. If your vid card isn't very good, then your CPU just sits there waiting.

Also, the amount of bandwidth available to each matters, which is where the motherboard comes into play.

And let's not forget about sound processing, especially with games such as HL2 and Doom3 having realtime 5.1+ processing. If you're one of the people who still has their SoundBlaster 16 because they don't care much about sound, your framerate WILL suffer from it.

But wouldn't you be able to turn off the 5.1 EAX effect and just leave it on Stereo?
P.S : Antimatter, your avatar is Dinyictis avatar on DeviantArt. You can't just take it man, its not fair to the guy who made it

 

[Falcon(Nate)]

Even without EAX on, sound processing takes more power these days. More sounds playing at once, higher quality sound files, etc. Onboard sound on nForce2 mobos is just as good as an Audigy2, but anything less will cause a slight framerate hit on newer games (and a larger hit the farther down the sound card spectrum you go).

So if you had a Radeon 9800 Pro, 3.0GHz P4, 1 GB of RAM, and onboard sound, your sound processing would be limiting you.

Granted not many people should have SoundBlaster 16's anymore, but a few of my friends do and it actually has caused WarCraft III to lag a bit. It goes noticably faster with sound turned off. *grin*

 

[BigGoose2006]

lets say that I have decided to buy a 2.8ghz w a radeon 9800pro 128mb, would 512 mb be good enough?

 

[Asus]

Balance, yes.
But there is somewhat of an order.

A game will almost always benefit from a new GFX card, whether its faster FPS or new graphic features.
Upgrading a CPU may do nothing for your frame rate with some games while others take advantage of every ounce of power.
Some games benefit from faster or more memory while others don't mind too much.

 

[antimatter]

But wouldn't you be able to turn off the 5.1 EAX effect and just leave it on Stereo?
P.S : Antimatter, your avatar is Dinyictis avatar on DeviantArt. You can't just take it man, its not fair to the guy who made it

woops. I didnt know. it was sent to me by a friend so i dont know who it was made by. aright i'll take it off.

 

[Falcon(Nate)]

BigGoose, the system you've described would be great. Unless you have a need for video editing purposes or 3D modelling, then I would recommend 1 GB of RAM.

Depending on your mobo, you may want to get 2 sticks of 256 or 1 stick of 512. If you're planning to up your RAM to 1 GB in the somewhat near future, go with 1 x 512 and get another 512. If not, get the 2 x 256 so you can take advantage of DDR.

 

[obsidian]

once the cpu can do the AI, and other CPU dependent features, u only need slight increases to keep up with the gfx card. hl2 will be limited by gfx cards so the sound isnt an issue with the fast processors that are around.

 

[huffer]

deviant art is the shitnit

 

[PigeonRat]

It's more CPU than soundcard when it comes to sound... until you bring EAX into the situation, of course.

 

[henrym]

Yeah PigeonRat, in fact, I'm sure I read something about HL2 doing most/all of their sound processing in software, so a sound card wouldn't help much.

 

[Ahnteis]

Note on nforce sound -- only SOME of the nforce motherboards use the high quality sound (can't think of name at 1:20 in the morning--sorry). The others use a fairly generic onboard sound chip (that still does 6.1 or so sound, but relies on the CPU for a lot of the processing power).

 

[EVIL]

can some one move this? this topic belongs in the "Hardware, Software & Troubleshooting" forum

 

[Quamin]

If anyone has played Star Wars Galaxies you'd quickly discover that the true bottleneck in your computer is the hard drive. I'd recommend getting a RAID 0 setup of two hard drives and get much faster load speeds. It's a start until they start perfecting solid-state harddrives that do not have to search for the data (like RAM but better). I'll be getting RAID as soon as I have enough money.

 

[darkmistx]

You must have an Ati card if you want to run Half Life2 as it won't run on an Nvidia card.

 

[Varsity]

And let's not forget about sound processing, especially with games such as HL2 and Doom3 having realtime 5.1+ processing. If you're one of the people who still has their SoundBlaster 16 because they don't care much about sound, your framerate WILL suffer from it.

That made me laugh.

 

[Mac]

BigGoose, the system you've described would be great. Unless you have a need for video editing purposes or 3D modelling, then I would recommend 1 GB of RAM.

Depending on your mobo, you may want to get 2 sticks of 256 or 1 stick of 512. If you're planning to up your RAM to 1 GB in the somewhat near future, go with 1 x 512 and get another 512. If not, get the 2 x 256 so you can take advantage of DDR.

incorrect nate. you dont need two sticks of ram to take advantage of ddr.
you need two sticks of ram to take advantage of Dual Channel that is if your motherboard supports it.

if your ram is ddr, then its ddr.. no need for two sticks to take advantage of ddr. (double data rate)

 

[Asus]

Note on nforce sound -- only SOME of the nforce motherboards use the high quality sound (can't think of name at 1:20 in the morning--sorry). The others use a fairly generic onboard sound chip (that still does 6.1 or so sound, but relies on the CPU for a lot of the processing power).

I'll help you remember mate. Would this be Soundstorm! rather than AC'97.
Only Soundstorm has DICE. Unfortunatly, if you use an analogue connection, then you WILL be using the Realtek 650 chip on there.

 

[The.Spiral]

Damn, I'd didn't know the that the soundcard could be a bottleneck... is a SoudBlaster Live! Value is allright? (I hope so...)

 

[Seppo]

So are you saying that a soundcard can also affect the frame rate? That's something I didn't know.