Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Carlos del Vaca]

OK, so they're giving Portal away for the next week, right?  And that's a game I've heard a lot about and sounds quite awesome, so I went and downloaded it (via Steam).  But when I tried to run it, I got a message "Your graphics card is old as dirt, you can't run this, dumbass."  In so many words.

So, despite my being generally knowledgeable about computers, I know fuck-all about graphics cards.  I have a Dell desktop that's a few years old, but I just put an extra gig of RAM in it and it's running pretty well now.  I am not a particularly hardcore PC gamer, but I'd like to play a few things (like Portal frinstance).  What should I be looking for?  Can I pull this off for under a hundred bucks? 

[CortJstr]

When my 5-year-old video card crapped out last month I bought this one from New Egg. And I messed around with Portal over the weekend so I can confirm that it does run without any stutter &c that I could see.

Honestly about 96% of the reason I picked this card is that the connector is uses is PCIe 1.0 which is the same connector my old card used so I knew it would work. I figured the cards that need PCIe 2.0 wouldn't work on my ancient machine.

[Lister]

Modern video cards, like hard drives, are sold by the price point rather than by performance.  There's the "budget" range at $49, a good range around $89-$129, my favorite sweet spot around $169-$229, a high end around $299, and then insanity above that.  Thing to remember is that the $200 card performs like the $300 card from 8 months ago, etc.

So step 1 is to find out what kind of slot your computer has.  It's probably PCI-e if it's less than five years old, but AGP is still out there.

Step 2 is to find something with the most memory in your chosen price range.  If 512 is available, get that, otherwise 256 is OK.

Step 3 is to compare chips within that memory and price.  Higher numbers are generally better than lower ones, though ATI and NVidia have different numbering systems so don't compare them to each other.

Step 4 is not to worry too much.  Anything manufactured within the past year can run Portal just fine.

[Carlos del Vaca]

QUALITY.  Thanks.