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Can a New GPU Rejuvenate a 5 Year Old Gaming PC?
MojoKid writes "New video card launches from AMD and NVIDIA are almost always reviewed on hardware less than 12 months old. That's not an arbitrary decision — it helps reviewers make certain that GPU performance isn't held back by older CPUs and can be particularly important when evaluating the impact of new interfaces or bus designs. That said, an equally interesting perspective might be to compare the performance impact of upgrading a graphics card in an older system that doesn't have access to the substantial performance gains of integrated memory controllers, high speed DDR3 memory, deep multithreading or internal serial links. As it turns out, even using a midrange graphics card like a GeForce GTX 660, substantial gains up to 150 percent can be achieved without the need for a complete system overhaul."
The thing is, most serious gamers willing to plunk down $400 for a video card aren't going to skimp on upgrading the rest of the computer. That's why nobody reviews it: Because you, McThrifty, aren't the target market and nobody's going to send you free hardware to test since your readers are, well... cheap.
Most of those hardware reviews you see online get the newest video cards for free specifically because their reviews are tailored to the guy who has a McDuck-sized vault of cash ready to be spent getting that extra .8 FPS out of Crysis.
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Is Ric Romero posting stuff to Slashdot? "Upgrading the largest bottleneck for game performance can substantially improve your playing experience!" Whether or not it's worth doing is another matter, but anyone who's built their own computer or even reads websites like tom's hardware or benchmarking sites knows this.
One thing that helped boost my older system was switching the drive to an SSD.
I have an i7-920. Still have yet to hit a reason to upgrade.... I bought it on new years eve 2008.
Some games hit the CPU much heavier these days than they used to. Many games really don't perform well if they aren't given multi-core CPUs with reasonable speed.
So how much upgrading a given component makes a difference depends on what else you have in your computer. If your system has a CPU that was top of the line 5 years ago, but an integrated GPU, then ya a new GPU will probably be the best use of money. However if the CPU is underpowered, then a new GPU will do little if anything.
Also you are right in that integrated GPUs have gotten way better. Time was, integrated Intel GPUs sucked even at desktop operations. Back in the P3 days I recommended a discrete GPU to everyone because the integrated ones were that bad. Now with Sandy/Ivy Bridge they are quite good. You can game on them, even new games. No they don't do as well as a discrete GPU, but they really are more powerful than you might think.
Thanks consoles, or thanks Windows XP?
Thanks Microsoft for trying to use DirectX as a stick to force people to switch from XP to Vista. Hey, kind of like Window 8.
I'm still using a core2 quad and am getting by fine (GeForce 9800 gpu). Sure I don't turn the graphics full up on games but I'm doing alright.
this doesn't surprise me one bit.. the GPU does most of the heavy lifting anyway, when it comes to games
still, an i7 will show you substantial performance enhancements
It's a bit more nuanced than that: certain upgrades lean almost entirely on the GPU(say you get a fancy new monitor and want Game X to look good on a 1920x1080 or 2560x1440 instead of a 1280x1024); but you can run into situations where no CPU is really enough CPU(RTS pathfinding in games that permit a lot of units is a particularly hairy case. Supreme Commander, say, can merrily chug along at 60fps with a screen full of units cranking out idle animations; but a few hundred bots scrambling to navigate can bring your CPU to its knees.) It's certainly a less common issue than an inadequate GPU; but it can happen.
Frankly games even to this day use so little CPU that an i7 for gaming is honestly overkill. You can take any $70 Athlon triple and have a great time gaming on it as long as your GPU has a little muscle. Oh and this was one of the nice things about socket AM3 lasting so long on the AMD side as you could buy a dirt cheap dual in 08 and have upgraded to a quad or hexacore right now for very little without having to toss your board and RAM.
If I were building a gaming PC today on a budget I'd probably go for the Thuban Hexacore, not only can it be had for as little as $100 for a true 6 cores (unlike the FX series which frankly the BD/PD chips are just hyperthreaded half cores instead of real cores) but when you are playing most games turbocore kicks in so its like having a really fast triple core but then when you actually need 6 cores for transcoding or the few games that will scale that high you have 6 actual cores.
But playing games on a 5 year old PC really isn't that big a deal as I was selling Phenom quads at that time and they play games just fine and my GPU is nearly that old (an HD4850) and while I'll be upgrading in a couple of months (the HD6850s seem to be the sweet spot ATM) honestly it plays all the games just fine. Just Cause II, Saints Row 3, The Borderlands series, the Crysis series, all play with plenty of bling so I don't see what the "ZOMFG!" is about a 5 year old PC. After all this isn't the MHz wars anymore, since switching to cores programs just haven't kept up with the speed of the hardware, not even close. Hell I often transcode or build DVDs WHILE gaming and I still don't get all laggy as the games just haven't kept up with the hardware.
And if you look at the specs of the next gen consoles I honestly doubt I'll have to build a new system anytime soon, the PS4 looks to be a COTS middle tier AMD APU and if rumors are true MSFT will be going with an AMD octocore which is just a quad with hyperthreading so it don't look like anybody that built a PC in the past few years will have trouble gaming. A word of advice on GPUs though, Geeks has some truly crazy deals on their refurbs and I must have gone through over a hundred at the shop without a single problem, they really are rock solid.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
You're kidding right? My brother is always complaining about having to pay various fees, as he says "To even turn my Xbox on!" sometimes. That and $70 games are enough to put a person in the poor house. The article is correct in saying a new GPU will boost performance on an older system. But don't buy a super high end card for it, eventually the CPU will become too much of a bottleneck.
I think I'll stick to my PC with Xubuntu (I actually BUY games I like). Oh noesss I mentioned Linux, will I be Modded as a Troll again? Beaten into oblivion by Slashdots Secret Society of Microsoft Fanboys AKA SSMF? Tune in next week for the exciting conclusion!. And don't forget to drink your Ovaltine.
Not sure about anyone else - but on my Ubuntu systems SSD made a significant difference to more than just startup times - Web Browsing for example is much snappier - im guessing this is due to the drive more readily capable of writing image / web page data and fetching from disk cache for rendering etc.
Any "runtime" performance that relies heavily on disk based caches will see a benefit here. I've used SSD for I/O intensive applications such as running
Solr / Lucene search engine the improvement here is also very significant. Applications that are heavy on writes will also benefit.
So i kind of disagree with you on that one i guess!
Electronic Music Made Using Linux http://soundcloud.com/polyp
Perhaps it depends on the game. Counter Strike gives an advantage to those that load the map the quickest. Being able to get to the bottom of the ramp in Dust2 to counter snipe the inevitable sniper is huge. Just sayin.
I had a comparable processor, which I bought on the christmas of 2009. However, some new games such as Mechwarrior Online and Planetside 2 are heavily CPU-bound and the machine was lacking when running them. I upgraded to i7-3770K and the improvement was dramatic (30-40 -> 60fps for MWO and 40-50 -> 90fps for Planetside). The graphics card did not change, as it was already rather powerful (Radeon 6970) and not a bottleneck on the detail levels I was using.
This was literally the difference between unplayable and playable, so if you play those games, there absolutely is a reason to upgrade.
I have an i5 with an SSD and an i7 with a traditional HDD, both have very similar GPU's, both run about the same for demanding video games ('world of tanks' at highest quality to be specific). Prior to installing the SSD the i5 was clearly an inferior setup and could not cope with the game without setting the quality slightly above "total crap". I've had that setup for about a year but I also had the SSD replaced under warranty after about 6mths of use, overall I think it's been well worth the dollars and the hassle.
From the credit_where_credit_is_due_dept: the standard Win7 "Performance Information and Tools" really is a very useful "upgrades for dummies" guide as to where you should focus your hardware dollars. With an i5 or better, it's unlikely it would recommend a CPU upgrade.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
I upgraded my Q6600 because I couldn't buy a motherboard for it when my old one died and I was in a financial position to overhaul completely. The whole thing lasted me around 6 years, including 2 graphics cards upgrades, and was still a capable machine when it died. The difference between my old PC and new is staggering, but that doesn't mean the old one wasn't enough. Hopefully I'll get the same use out of this new one. FWIW, you're not missing out much with graphics a little lower than top. Not much at all.
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
Consoles have held back the PC a ridiculous amount. I hope they get their new new generation out soon.
I'm still using a Core2Duo E6300 from 2006 with 4GB of RAM. Until recently I was using a 9800 GTX, which, yeah, was fine as long as you didn't turn everything up to full. I recently traded up for an nvidia GTX 570, which was passed down from another more recent machine. Quite a nice improvement. The article is right that if you're going to upgrade anything on an old machine, the graphics card is probably it. Midrange now (i.e. ~$200) is usually a substantial improvement. On the other hand, I thought that was usually obvious. Graphics is the most common bottleneck.
I've never paid $500+ for the cutting-edge graphics card of the day. It's not worth it. Too much of a premium. When configuring new systems I usually buy the $200-$250 "midrange" card, then wait a few years and buy what is then the $200-$250 card, which by then usually has the performance of what I would have paid $500+ for originally. That way the equivalent costs are spread out over more time, and now I've got two cards (sometimes I can re-sell the old one for $100 or $50, or re-task it in a different machine).
That's true, especially of games that are not properly threaded to take advantage of multicore and manycore configurations. But there's diminishing returns... most games that are CPU bound don't really benefit from more than about 3GHz. Games that are properly threaded will benefit more from an extra execution thread (hyperthreading or an extra core) than they will from a faster clock speed.
Case in point, my gaming machine is a Core i5 2500k, with 16GB of RAM, and a Radeon 6970 graphics card. When I overclocked the processor to 4.8GHz I did not notice a significant improvement in the performance of games. In fact, about the only place where I saw a measurable improvement was in transcoding execution time in Handbrake, which dropped by almost 50%. While there was some improvement in frame rates in games, I use vsync to lock them to 60Hz (what my monitor displays), and there was literally no improvement in gameplay for any of the games I play.
I dispute that claim. I've worked in middleware, where we put insane amounts of effort into utilising multiple cores (kinda required for the PS3/360), and pretty much all 3rd party middleware is now happy to run across multiple cores. The more middleware a game uses, the more likely it is to make *relatively* good use of the cores (certainly much more so than most software products). If you're targetting a game at iOS, then assuming it isn't some tedious zynga-style-freemium game, you've probably put a fair amount of effort into multi-threading it (because that's the only way to locate the extra performance). The issue really comes when you hit PC gaming. If you've ported your game from console to PC, then it will have been designed to use 6 cores at 100%. Since an i7 will wipe the floor with the 360/PS3, chabces are, this game will only result in 30% CPU usage on that system. As it is, a lot of PC developers target a lower specced system (e.g. 2.0Ghz core 2) to maximise their potential market. Once again, if you run this game on an i7, it's barely going to get over 20% usage. Yes there are poorly coded (and older titles) that utilise one core only, but these days that's becomming far less common. If a game is hammering all CPU cores at 100%, it's either porrly coded, or you have a very low specced CPU (e.g. ATOM).
I'm also from the Q6600 /8800 GTS crowd. I built my work computers around an IB i7 and cutting edge GPUs, but my home computer still uses the venerable C2 Quad with no problem.
I think the upshot is that recent computing power is and has been cheap and plentiful. A machine from six years ago is not challenged by everyday computing, only the most demanding eye candy at optional settings in some games. The hardware capabilities have outstripped software requirements.
About a year ago I stuck a GTX 550 Ti in a machine that was at the time pushing five years old.
I generally upgrade video cards at least twice after the initial build of my computers, every 2 years or so. My needs for upgrading other components are generally low, because...really...who needs a top of the line processor? I generally stick to the top of the mid tier and it does anything I might need done for the next 5-6 years. As far as RAM goes, whenever I get a new motherboard I just put as much RAM as it supports in it, and have been known to spend more on RAM than CPU when building a computer.
I just recently rebuilt my computer (new motherboard, CPU, RAM, and a second GPU) for about $550, and that got it to a point where it can play Crysis 2 with max settings. I expect it will be able to play any game the makers throw at it for another two years before performance starts to become a real issue. Maybe longer, because it seems to me that game-makers are getting better at building games that still run (albeit less prettily) on older hardware.
If it hadn't been for some recent hardware failures I'd probably STILL be rocking the last machine, which would be over 6 years old now. I just didn't feel like throwing money down the drain buying a replacement motherboard that used and old-ass socket.
I think the only reason to buy absolute top-of-the-line hardware these days is to stroke your e-peen.
Porquoi?
This is pretty much what I was using before I did a full overhaul during the past few months. Between replacing the CPU+Ram+Mobo, graphics card, and primary harddrive, by far the biggest improvement was replacing my old harddrive with an SSD. The games already ran smoothly on the old hardware on medium-high settings, so the upgraded processor and graphics card really only let me notch up the settings back to max, but ultimately resulting in the same frames per second. But the quick boot/wake and fast level loading made a tremendous difference. Even the split seconds saved in regular desktop use made the user experience change dramatically.
You are absolutely correct. I made this call a couple years ago when I got the 6750 video card. It's a fine card, but my cpu was an older model dual core AMD. Lately I picked up Planetside 2 and started playing it like mad. What I found was the game looked great, but was laggy as all get out because the developers of that game rely heavily on the CPU, probably heavier than they should. After biting the bullet and building a new system with a i5-3570K overclocked to 4300, with an SSD 200gb main drive, and 16gb memory I can safely say that a video card really can't do it all on the newer games coming out. It looks like we are beginning to see a few developers actually begin to push the PC again past what current consoles are capable of.
For example I am heavily vested in the new Chris Roberts game coming out (Star Citizen), and I'm sure that the GPU will be heavily used in this game, but also the CPU for keeping track of massive amounts of data surrounding the player.
If I had it to do again I would have done the same, at least the newer GPU allowed me to enjoy games like Skyrim (even though I didn't enjoy it as much as a lot of people because I thought it was way too easy, and dragons were wusses).
You can play almost everything from last year with quality visuals with an old CPU teamed with a new GPU. But here are the tricks:
* You need at least 2GB of memory. If you don't have this, don't even try.
* The CPU must be dual-code, at least. Single core CPU don't work anymore (tried both on the same machine, difference is night and day, it just happened that I could access a compatible dual-core CPU for free, otherwise it would have been impractical). If the CPU is not dual core, it does prevent decent performance, even with a top notch GPU.
* Upgrade the HDD to SSD. The older HD that comes with your 10 y/o rig will slow everything down. This is the second most beneficial upgrade beside the video card.