I broke down today, my birthday, and bought a new video card for my PC. Only about four weeks after having bought the last (and most unsatisfactory) card.
This one is the GeForce 7600 GS (I like Nvidia products) and I was speculating that my video card, and not my CPU or RAM was holding me back performance-wise on Company of Heroes.
Before the upgrade, at minimum settings, I was getting 6-9 FPS (frames per second) of video. With the new card in place, I'm getting 65 FPS - more than satisfactory. Upping the quality settings to middle-of-the-road, I still get a quite acceptable 20 FPS.
So for the expenditure of about $139, I've saved myself yet again from a large capital outlay for an entirely new system.
Truth be told, if Apple made an iMac with a replaceable video card I would have popped for the $1500-2000 for the top-end iMac. It's got a nice video card in it right now but if you load it up with RAM and high-end Nvidia 7600 GT card you're looking at $2500. Quite bloody pricey.
My system is an Athlon XP 2500+ with 1.25Gb of RAM.
Oh, and Company of Heroes is one of the few games to exceed my expectations. Great buy for $20!
Posted by artandscience at November 30, 2006 08:29 PM