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  #11  
Old February 8th 18, 04:43 AM posted to alt.comp.hardware
VanguardLH[_2_]
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Posts: 1,453
Default nVidia GPU reccomendadtion please.

What I've noticed about GPU model numbers is you want the high-end in
each range. The low-end is equivalent to mid-range in the lower number
series. Sorry, but that card makers are going to keep upping their
prices as new games come out that require the higher end cards.

The home PC that I've had since 2013 was a salvaged unit originally
dating back to 2009 (an Acer with an uberboob BIOS so no settings of
note there). I had to replace several components that got fried,
including the video card. Got an AMD Radeon HD 7870 2GB for $145 on a
big discount sale. After 4 years, Newegg (where I bought the HD 7870)
is selling another for $380. Yikes.

I suspect you could toss $1000 USD at a new video card and you'd still
be disappointed with that game. Seems something is screwed up as your
hardware far exceeds their minimum requirements. Have you ran any
benchmarks on your setup to make sure the CPU is running at expected
clock, same for GPU, memory, SSD/HDD, etc? I've seen where a user
complained about a huge drop in performance which turned out to be the
multiplier in BIOS somehow got changed.

Before tossing gobs of money at a new video card, I'd go to multibooting
(but I wouldn't use Microsoft's dual-booting and instead use a
multi-boot manager, like GAG). Create a partition on the SSD for a new
instance of Windows, install a fresh copy of Windows in that new
partition, install the game in that new Windows instance, and test the
game's performance.

Note that the latest video driver may not be the best for old video
games. When I updated to later released of Catalyst, my old Thief and
other old games had problems which went away when I reverted back to an
old version of Catalyst. As I recall, I walked forward through about 17
newer versions of the video driver and then had to back off a few
versions to find a driver that gave me the best old game behavior and
performance along with what fixes the old versions (still newer than my
original old version) gave me. The newest driver isn't always the best
for your particular setup. Newer versions of drivers drop support for
older hardware and older games while adding new code for new hardware
and hew games. Right now I cannot move off of Catalyst v15 because
going forward means I loss all control of resetting the color and gamma
with an easy menu entry and would have to resort to manually making all
the adjustments. After The Dark Mod crashes, it leaves the colors and
gamma as they were in the game. With Catalyst v15, I just go into that
tool and reset color calibration back to Catalyst's defaults. Users
have complained that later versions dropped hardware and software
options that were convenient in the older versions.