Graphics Card question

Get a card. I've been using a PC with a video chip. A card will make the game play better. You can get a decent one for a good price. Get more ram too if you need it.

drivers wont help with those issues, drivers only really help if you are having compatibility problems. Getting a new card will help a lot, espcially if your using onboard graphics. You can get a big improvement relativly cheaply say 50-100$, checks out newegg.com for good deals, also make sure what kind of gpu slot you have, newer computer probably pci-express, system more then 1-2 years old probably agp type slot. memory will improve overall smoothness of game and speed, if i had choice id get the gpu though, since the newer ones have onboard memory which will cover both ends espcially as it is dedicated, if ur running other background programs however get both ram and gpu

if the problems not that bad, i would just wait and get a new comp when u can instead of dumping money for a graphics card alone, for $300-400 you can a really smooth system..keep in mind ur graphics will only really be as good as you monitor as well, so best to look for a pretty basic system with a decent graphics card, and really nice monitor...

Kurimao - Lost City wrote: »

Actually playing games gives the stress to the graphics card... monitor has nothing to do with gaming performance of the rig.
as for the monitor, the bigger the monitor the more powerful your Graphics card must be just so to support the native resolution.
Adding a Graphics card to an old rig is much cheaper and practical than getting a whole system, unless you have the monies to spare or an enthusiast. (as long as your using a PCI-E)
updating the driver certainly help with the performance as it has new sets of instructions and bug fixes.

yeah i didnt mean monitor improves performance, but imo having a good graphics card and crappy little monitor is a waste of money, yes i 50$ gpu will improve your performance a lot, but for 350$ u can get a whle new system with 17-20 inch flat screen is a much better value..drivers will help a lot if u have a newer/after market gpu, but for imbedded/system graphics they dont really update them and they wont really improve performance much if there is one, they may fix bugs/comptability as i said, but they certainly wont address his problem of lag when theres a lot players onscreen..just trying to say that rather then spend 50-100$ on a new gpu for a older system (dont know if this was case here) it makes more sense to save a little and update the whole system espcially as older/weak systems are rapidly becoming obselete to the newer games

Both games run off the same engine and have about the same system requirements.

You can run this game on an on board graphics card just fine, the problem is this game only uses a single core on the processor and most of us now days have a dual core or better but yet the game will only use 1 core. This is where you lag is coming from when multiple players are around expesualy in arch.

For those that still runa single core processor they will benifit more having no lag as every bit of the processor is being used to run the game. For those running dual cores or better if it isnt a 3.0 gig or better you will suffer in heavy populater areas as the game will only be using 1.0 gig of processing speed or lower depending on what processor you have.

The funny thing is i use to play lord of the rings online and age of conan both of which are 10 times better in graphics quality then this game and both ran a lot smoother cause they utilized the full potential of the processors power.

my rig isnt the greatest but still able to run DX10 games just fine
AMD athalon 64 X2 4400+ 2.3 gig
9800GT 512 meg Nvidia
3gig DDR2 Ram

LOTRO - DX10 max graphics - 30-45 FPS (frame per second)
Age of Conan - DX10 max graphics - 25-40 FPS
Perfect World - DX8 max graphics 5 (in arch)- 40 (non arch) FPS

So with that said if you want to try and reduce lag dont bother upgrading your video card as it wont help much. Invest in a better processor such as 3.0 gig or higher dual core or just revert back to a single core 2.6+ if you only play this game.

i think it is bad advice to say he needs a new cpu verse gpu, if he has embedded graphics his first bottle neck is at the gpu, any decent gpu say like a 9500gt---->9800gt has its own cpu dedicated for games and its own ram dedicated for games which will take the load of his cpu..any system which has embedded grapihcs is probably not running dual core cpu so i doubt this is the problem..yes you can run the game relatively well with onboard graphics with all settings down, but if want performance & more detailed graphics higher resolutions you need a graphics card, buying a cpu will help performance but a gpu is dedicated and has the specific architecture for processing graphics data which a cpu does not have...this is why u can not run a monitor without some form of either onboard or slot based graphics, a cpu can not efficiently process this type of information. now if u have a great graphics card and crappy cpu and want to really get the best performance, then ur bottleneck would be the processor and u would want to get a better cpu to further improve performance by better processing non graphical data from the game, but i dont think this is his issue..after that u may want better loading times so u would get a faster hard drive..but with games, ur best performance boost if ur talking about system with onbaord graphics would be first to get a dedicated gpu..he said he has and HP, my guess is its probably a single core 2.4-3.0, with 512-1gig ram, and the onboard graphics, definately want new gpu as rest of specs are just fine for this game

Well as i said i dont think hes running a dual core, as his system has onboard graphics its probably a low end, somewhat older system...i dont want this to be flame thread, i would just ask a admins opinion on this...if you have onboard graphics and say a p4 2.4ghz(or a dual core 2.4 for that matter), and are getting game lag issues in crowded areas should you upgrade cpu and stay with onboard graphics, or upgrade to a say 9800gt and keep the cpu, for best improved performance in this game?? if im wrong fine i will accept and we can finish this thread..ive been building gaming rigs for years and just find it very hard to swallow that you would upgrade a cpu before getting a gpu for any game issues when u are stuck with embedded graphics, unless u have lika p3 something. maybe darthpanda can clear this up for us or someone associated with the game can clear this up for us as ill amidt im not a real expert on this particular game but sticking with onboard graphics and upgrading cpu really doesnt make sense to me at all...also you can set the affinity i think to help the dual core run the game more effficiently.


btw for original poster here a couple tricks i learned if u have low end system and want to maximize performance:

click start, click run, type msconfig, go to startup tab, uncheck all tabs, apply restart.

also this ones good will free up like 25% of ur system resources but after game u will need restart computer to function normally. this invloves shutting down explorer and just running game. open game in windowed mode, open task manager, find explorer.exe (note not iexplorer.exe, but explorer.exe) right click, end. switch back to game, take off windowed mode.

you can also press ctrl+f9 in game before u get to city to automatically optimize setting for less lag and not have to go in and manually chan ge settings, then just press it again when u leave to return to previous settings