On Sun, 22 Aug 2004 05:01:32 GMT, "Larry L."
wrote:

I realize that a P4 2.5/400 with 1GB RDRAM (Rambus) is not terribly fast
anymore, but I'm wondering just how "bad" it is for modern games like Doom3,
and how much difference I'll get going to a better videocard. Will I get
much more going from a GF4 Ti4600 to a 6800GT on this system, or am I so CPU
limited that I won't notice much difference other than having access to
higher resolutions? I've tried to find comparisons that might give
information on this, but I've yet to see comparisons showing these cards on
a CPU of this speed, so I'm unclear what to expect.

To upgrade to a faster CPU, I'd have to get a new motherboard, and new
memory as well, which is a fairly large expense. A 6800GT, on the other
hand, is an easy upgrade that's not as expensive. Will a 6800GT breath a
little more life into this system, allowing me to hold off on a full system
upgrade? On one hand I realize that a new system will be faster, but if
just the graphics card will help to some extent for the time being, it would
be nice to wait a bit longer to upgrade the rest of the system. I figure
that a 6800GT will still be decent card for a while, so when I DO upgrade
the rest of the system, I won't need a new graphics card.

Thanks for any opinions on this,

Larry

I just made that upgrade. Well almost. I'm running a P4 2.53 and
Ti4400. I couldn't play Doom 3 at 800 x 600 at Medium settings. To
get playable framerates I had to turn off too much stuff... especially
shadows... and that more or less kills the enjoyment of the game. So,
I upgraded to a 6800 GT.

Befo 800 x 600 at Medium settings, demo1 was averaging 28 FPS
After: 1024 x 768 at High settings, now averaging 57 FPS.

So the game went from unplayable at Medium settings and low resolution
to very playable at High settings and decent resolution.

As an aside, this upgrade did absolutely nothing for UT2004... my
framerates stayed the same at 1024 x 768, the only difference is that
now I can play at 1600 x 1200 while maintaining the same framerates.
The Unreal engine is truly CPU bound.