Personally, 25 FPS doesn't seem smooth to me. A few years ago, many of the game developers began getting away from the gross lies they had previously named as minimums, and began using the 25 FPS number, at Medium resolution, as a "Minimum" to shoot for (I think that Half Life and Half Life 2 from Valve was among the first in that trend) at low quality settings, and 60 FPS at the same Medium resolution, but Medium/High (mixed) Quality settings for the "recommended".
I had been a longtime nVIDIA graphics fan at the time, and my grandkids had reached their adolescent years, so I set up two more PCs here, in my family room, for the boys to play each other across my LAN. I had three of the Geforce FX 5n00 graphics cards then. None were adequate for Half Life. None were adequate for Oblivion. nVIDIA had lied to us & Bethesda had swallowed that lie. Valve did not. Their demos in the weeks leading up to Half-Life 2's release were filled with frequent sarcastic remarks about the poor Geforce performance.
http://www.extremete...,1733184,00.asp
I've built my own PCs for most of the last 24 years, and I thought I knew enough not to be taken by BS such as nVIDIA's marketing scam artists were spouting, but I trusted nVIDIA, to my eventual distress. I'd been working, still, up to that summer of 2005, but was making the adjustment to retirement and far less income the following winter, so I had to get replacement parts off of eBay.
NotTheKing was a longtime game player active on Bethesda's forums, with a lot of spare time to compile his lists. My own are inverted from his, with the high performance on top, and minimums on the bottom. The only below minimums covered are those that in prior years were better for the time frame than they are now. Neither NTK now I have included Crossfire or SLI pairs. If I ever knew why he didn't, I've forgotten. My own reason is that I consider it economically poor value. The only place it makes sense to me is when one card of the very highest performance isn't satisfactory, and you match it with a second of the same kind.
The only thing (there are two, but inter-related) I never liked about the 8800s was the waste heat they produce, and that was compounded by the defective firmware that controlled the cooling fan(s). The 9800s, except for the GTX-plus, were exactly the same as the 8800s, cooler running, with the corrected firmware. The GTS250 is that 9800 GTX-plus, once again. Either the 9800 or the 250 would make a good "insurance" bump to get a lowered heat signature.PSU: Corsair HX 520w
Mobo: M2N-SLI Deluxe nForce 570 SLI mcp
CPU: AthlonX2 3000+
Ram: 2 gig Corsair DDR 800 dual channel configuration
GPU: 8800 GTS 640mb
Sound: XFI-Extreme Gamer Fatal1ty
HDisk: Hitachi HTD725032VLA SCI/SATA
Monitor: ViewSonic 19" WideScreen TFT
It
was built for the sole purpose of playing Crysis and it performed well
at max settings but gave only 20 fps - I found your cut off limit of 25
fps a little confusing so perhaps you could explain a little as to why
25 fps should be the minimum?
My request revolves around the
longevity of this system. It seems to just keep chewing up the games
that come its way and as yet I have found no game that I could not
enjoyably play at high settings. Given the current delay in new
consoles and your stated belief that DX9.0C will rule the roost for a
while yet, is it un-reasonable to expect another two years out of this
system? Where would you suggest upgrading this rig? How can I get
the greatest improvement for the least expense?
I have that same Asus mainboard in a PC here, with an X2 6000 in it, and a Radeon HD 4870. The slowest AMD X2 I can recall was the 3600, and I wasn't aware it came in an AM-2 package. I thought that it was s939 only. If you have any AMD slower than a 4200, I would look for something faster while AM-2 CPUs are still relatively easy to find.
Gorath
Modifié par Gorath Alpha, 20 novembre 2010 - 04:46 .
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Ya might wanna wait for Gorath on that one. 
