In a lot of the threads asking for advice on what to upgrade their GPU to or what GPU someone should get for their new build, I always see people saying stuff like 'The 5770 would be OK, but the Minimum you would really want is a 5850.' When you guys say minimum, do you mean minimum for Full-High setting @60FPS, or what? It might just because I got used to 10FPS on my laptop for most games, but I get around 50FPS in MW2 With the setting all the way up and low AA with my 9600GSO 512 and I see nothing wrong with that. The 9600GSO hardly compares to the 5850/5770, but I see you guys recommending the 5850/5770 as the 'minimum' for most upgrades/ new builds. Wat. Edit: If this barely makes any sense I apologize, It's nearly 0300 where I am, and I should really be in bed.
What's your screen resolution? Also MW2 is a pretty light game, runs rather well even on lesser setups. Anyway right now the 5850 does offer a nice stopgap/best bang for buck for most gaming builds, thus the recommendations. Also right now it plays MOST games at 1920x1080 with fine graphics, so it's a good buy. 5770 is OK as well if you can't afford the 5850, but anything under that... Well, it's a budget build, not gaming-.
I always think thus: the producers wanted the game to look like it does on Very High with 4xAA, 4xAF etc so this is the bar to aim at. Places like PC world seem to count 'playable' as 'will play' ie will give some non-zero amount of frames per second
It varies, although I think personally that - when people talk about the "minimum" needed - they are referring to the 'minimum' graphics card that can play a game on high settings with >20/25 fps at the monitor's native screen resolution. Regarding the fps point - a few sources (CustomPC, Tom's Hardware I think?) say that a game is only "playable" with a *minimum* fps of 25, even if the average is a lot higher. I personally disagree with this (I'd be happy with a minimum of 20 or even a little bit lower if it seldom hit the minimum fps), however I can see where they are coming from. But yeah, I think that when people say "minimum" they usually refer to graphics quality, (native) screen resolution *and* a 'suitable' fps rate [with some of the most demanding games on the market]. Naturally, if you are happy playing at your current settings and with your current card, then that's fine.
When I hear/see that I interpret it as this is the minimum card you will want to get to be able to play most games (excluding Crysis) with decent settings so they look good. It wont be based on hard numbers. just an estimation. Also The way the developers wanted the game to look like is if you looked out the window and could not tell the difference, but our current tech cannot do that.
There's no true minimum bandwidth is what cripples most cards at high Rez If you own 4870 4870x2 4890 260 270 280 295 of last gen you can game at 1920x 1080 on max settings in most games 4870x2 and 295 are still top performing cards 4890 270 280 still competing with the 5850 3-4 fps at best behind 10 fps ahead in some. Games 260 4870 is still beating the 5770 only real issue you have to pick the latter is stock
What do you mean by bandwidth limited? GFX cards barely break PCI-E 1.0 16x bandwidth, most motherboards have gen 2.0 PCI-E slots giving them the equivalent of a 32x gen 1 slot. If they were bandwidth limited you would get massive peformance loss when you used SLI/crossfire on most boards since they split the 16 slot into 2 8 slots. Do you mean memory bandwidth?
rollo's probably talking about the memory interface width and the graphics ram speed. You'll see that the GTX285 uses a wide 512bit memory interface, but relatively slow GDDR3 memory. The ATI cards of the same generation used 'thinner' memory interfaces, but faster RAM. Basically the calculation is how much data you can fit down the pipe multiplied by how many times you are able to put data down the pipe per second. At higher screen resolutions and quality settings, the memory bandwidth needs to be quite high. The PCI-E bandwidth isn't really the issue.
.. and back to the original question. I think the 'minimum' most people refer to is 25+ FPS minimums, 35+ FPS averages, and high settings in just about every top game. There is a bit of an element of future proofing as well. MW2 was a funny one - great looking game, but it was a console port so was made to work with lower-spec systems. They did very well. I imagine that you are on a very low resolution however skreenname - 1280x1024? I imagine trying to run something like Metro 2033 on a 22-inch monitor would seriously strain your 9600 and lead to the sort of quality compromises that we just don't like to deal with.
Ah, after a quick Google you are right in the terms of amount of memory bandwidth staying the similar through generations. However the architecture has improved and tessellation has been added which can definitely boost frame rates and/or image quality.
Jipa, Roosauce; I game at 1600x900. And in DiRT2 with setting on high except for AA I get 38-48FPS in the benchmark. I am curious to see what Metro 2033 would do to my card, but I don't want to buy it as I have a feeling it might make me want to upgrade.
In my opinion minimum is a card which can play Crysis on native resolution, very high at a playable framerate (20+).
this is interesting to me, seems performance increases are slowing down considerably. my GTX280 is doing fine atm but with a native res of 1920x1200 there will always be a point at which you have to either upgrade or knock down that resolution ( and lets face it non-native res is horrible). tbh though, looking at what is on the way, i dont see anything making me need to upgrade within the next year/2 years. unless i wanted less heat/power
for me minimum means MIN 30FPS+ at the native res of the monitor with all settings @ MAX when the card starts to struggle the first thing to go is usally the AA and AF followed by maybe some of the more fancy (very intensive features).
Personally minimum for me is highest settings with some (2x/4x) AA and AF and a framerate of at least 25fps whilst running at 1920*1080
