Thursday, June 25th 2009
Consider a GPU Upgrade Before CPU: NVIDIA
Ahead of the bulk of the crucial summer shopping season, NVIDIA sent a circular urging consumers to focus their PC upgrades on GPUs, rather than CPU and its platform. It thinks that if you have a reasonably good platform from last year or the year before, a GPU upgrade serves as a better price for performance increment when it comes to games. A slide explaining NVIDIA's advice was leaked (perhaps ahead of its formal publication, as it seems to be targeted at end-users and not intermediate customers or distributors).
Quite simply, the slide shows how upgrading the GPU is a more cost-effective way of increasing performance of a gaming PC, compared to upgrading the platform (CPU, compatible motherboard and memory). The side specifically targets the Intel Core i7 platform, and pits the upgrade path against upgrading the graphics components, keeping the rest of the PC constant, based on the common Core 2 Duo E8400. The price of this base system along with a GeForce GTS 250 GPU is measured at $506. A $159 upgrade to GeForce GTS 250 SLI sends the average FPS (application not mentioned) up to 54 from 42, likewise as you look further up the options NVIDIA provides. Upgrading the rest of the platform is making no performance impact on this application. The general idea conveyed is that for a gaming PC with recent generation hardware, better graphics is a better incremental upgrade. Choose with your wallet.
Source:
DonanimHaber
Quite simply, the slide shows how upgrading the GPU is a more cost-effective way of increasing performance of a gaming PC, compared to upgrading the platform (CPU, compatible motherboard and memory). The side specifically targets the Intel Core i7 platform, and pits the upgrade path against upgrading the graphics components, keeping the rest of the PC constant, based on the common Core 2 Duo E8400. The price of this base system along with a GeForce GTS 250 GPU is measured at $506. A $159 upgrade to GeForce GTS 250 SLI sends the average FPS (application not mentioned) up to 54 from 42, likewise as you look further up the options NVIDIA provides. Upgrading the rest of the platform is making no performance impact on this application. The general idea conveyed is that for a gaming PC with recent generation hardware, better graphics is a better incremental upgrade. Choose with your wallet.
84 Comments on Consider a GPU Upgrade Before CPU: NVIDIA
1920x1200 is a hard resolution for most games to run at . . . sure 1 4870 can run at that res, but your quality settings will be marginal. 2 4870s can run that res, and your IQ will be better, and your overall framerates will be better . . . but they can still dip low. 3 helps out even further, but things can still tank occasionally.
I prefer my FPS rates to remain above 40-50 FPS, depending on game.
TBH, we shouldn't need driver optimizations for games - that merely says that the developers didn't spend enough time optimizing their software for the hardware (pure example: Crysis - runs poorly on ATI cards, even with countless driver updates).
Continuing to rely on driver optimizations simply means that game devs can become lazier and lazier in how they code their projects. I for one would rather see games running more optimized than they already do, and we wouldn't necessarily have to update our video drivers every month in hopes of better performance.