Annoying Hardware in Gaming

[xorinite]

Processor: All that matters is the number of cores and the GHZ (which is the speed measurment)
Video Card: All that matters is the size (Megabytes, Gigabytes, ect) of the video memory
RAM: Again, size of the memory. 4-8Gigs of RAM will serve pretty much anything.

I know other people have already explained why this is wrong, so I shall attempt to do what it is I think you were trying to do, which is explain how best to actually determine which processor, video card, and RAM is best.

The answer is; comparison review websites like toms hardware or that one that compares notebook graphics cards, google is your friend here, you can almost always find a hierarchy chart which shows how processors and graphics cards perform in both benchmarking programs and in actual games.

As for RAM its a matter of getting the fastest RAM that your motherboard can handle, various websites like crucial memory will scan your motherboard remotely if you let them to tell you what that is, or you can install a system analysis utility to do that for you.

If you are reading all this and thinking that this is way too much hassle, well perhaps it is, but there is a nice feeling on building your own killer PC at budget.

OT: I know its obvious but.. Motion controls. They never seem to work correctly, their implementation is so often gimmicky and when it is it detracts from the game its present in.

 

[xorinite]

Well yeah It is not that simple. I don't know much about hardware stuff but I can give an example. My 4 year old laptop have difficulty running console ports(and good ones) on medium settings even if it is supposed to be superior to the seven year old consoles on paper with its specs

Laptops have their abilities gimped to conserve power and prevent overheating in their small size. For example mobile graphics chip sets always under perform their equivalent non mobile brethren, that little extra M is their tell.

Edit additional: I once bought a gaming laptop. It was pretty expensive. It didn't run as fast as my stand alone PC, and eventually the fricking graphics chip melted its own solder and came off the main board so I have since decided laptop gaming is some kind of conspiracy to steal our happiness.

 

[Exius Xavarus]

Wii Sensor Bar. Why's the cable on that thing nearly as long as my hose? The cable alone makes it a hassle to put away and set back up.

As someone else said, wireless controllers. I don't see a problem with wired controllers. Unless it's that utterly ridiculous Suckbox 360 controller. It comes wireless and you have to spend $20 more if you want to get a cable for it. That's just a downright cash grab.

 

[bafrali]

Well yeah It is not that simple. I don't know much about hardware stuff but I can give an example. My 4 year old laptop have difficulty running console ports(and good ones) on medium settings even if it is supposed to be superior to the seven year old consoles on paper with its specs

Laptops have their abilities gimped to conserve power and prevent overheating in their small size. For example mobile graphics chip sets always under perform their equivalent non mobile brethren, that little extra M is their tell.

Yeah I know but my example also applies to my brothers desktop. In thory it is supposed to work like magic running console ports but it doesn't.

 

[MercurySteam]

Uhh... No.
There is a reason why everyone will say "I need to know more than "I've got a 1Gb Video Card"". The VRAM capacity of a card is largely meaningless - especially since a number of cards don't have the transfer rate to actually utilize all of it.

Tell people with multi-monitor setups that VRAM is meaningless and and see how long they can go without laughing at you. And when I play Metro 2033 on Ultra at 1920x1200 pretty much 95% of my 1.28GB of VRAM is utilised. GPU designers wouldn't load a certain number of VRAM into each of their cards if they didn't think it wouldn't be able to be fully utilise it. Also not using up all you're VRAM can be a good thing, it means you've got more headroom for even more demanding games.

 

[xorinite]

Yeah I know but my example also applies to my brothers desktop. In thory it is supposed to work like magic running console ports but it doesn't.

Well ports by their very nature are something of a special case. You often get poor optimisation which just relies on the fact that the PC can compensate for emulated functions with its superior power. Which I think is a sort of rational laziness. They could optimize it to run with a smaller footprint, or just say well.. PCs have big boots so lets not bother.

It may be other stuff too. The OS and how well it functions, or whatever else it may be running will steal resources including processor slices from games. Which means if you are, like me, on a really old rig, you have to dig through it to make sure its not running background stuff including unneeded services.

The worst thing about that is when you state how something doesn't work and some jerk says "well it worked fine on mine, your PC obviously sucks" and you just have to laugh, because the game should run comfortably in your machine and that guys missing the point. Its like you're trying to play a port of pong, it doesn't need the latest graphics chipset, its PONG.

 

[Lugbzurg]

Isn't it amazing that I saw this thread while I was here?
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/121382-EA-Shows-Off-Dead-Space-3-Kinect-Commands

 

[MercurySteam]

old cards can regularly knock the socks of news ones

Go look at benches of every Nvidia Geforce 6xx series card then go look at benches of each Geforce 5xx cards that were replaced and tell me if you can find even one case where the older cards outperform the newer ones. Then go do the same for the AMD Radeon 7xxx and 6xxx series' cards and see if it happens there either.

You just simply wont, not with how GPU architectures have been advancing over the past few years.

 

[bafrali]

Yeah I know but my example also applies to my brothers desktop. In thory it is supposed to work like magic running console ports but it doesn't.

Well ports by their very nature are something of a special case. You often get poor optimisation which just relies on the fact that the PC can compensate for emulated functions with its superior power. Which I think is a sort of rational laziness. They could optimize it to run with a smaller footprint, or just say well.. PCs have big boots so lets not bother.

It may be other stuff too. The OS and how well it functions, or whatever else it may be running will steal resources including processor slices from games. Which means if you are, like me, on a really old rig, you have to dig through it to make sure its not running background stuff including unneeded services.

The worst thing about that is when you state how something doesn't work and some jerk says "well it worked fine on mine, your PC obviously sucks" and you just have to laugh, because the game should run comfortably in your machine and that guys missing the point. Its like you're trying to play a port of pong, it doesn't need the latest graphics chipset, its PONG.

Yeah well I am sort of content with reduced graphics as long as it plays smoothly. But sometimes I feel that I am missing out on some feature that would increase my immersion greatly. I mean one spark here another flower there isn't much of a big deal but worst offender is lighting and shadows (or lack there of. Bioshock was the worst case really.

Oh well I am planning to upgrade sometime soon. I seriously need to because steam sales made me buy lots of-anti hardware games.

 

[Joccaren]

Uhh... No.
There is a reason why everyone will say "I need to know more than "I've got a 1Gb Video Card"". The VRAM capacity of a card is largely meaningless - especially since a number of cards don't have the transfer rate to actually utilize all of it.

Tell people with multi-monitor setups that VRAM is meaningless and and see how long they can go without laughing at you. And when I play Metro 2033 on Ultra at 1920x1200 pretty much 95% of my 1.28GB of VRAM is utilised. GPU designers wouldn't load a certain number of VRAM into each of their cards if they didn't think it wouldn't be able to be fully utilise it. Also not using up all you're VRAM can be a good thing, it means you've got more headroom for even more demanding games.

I'm not saying that VRAM is useless and meaningless in terms of how a card functions, but in terms of "I have a 1Gb Graphics card, is it good or bad?".
1Gb Graphics card? Well, that narrows it down... NOT. You could have a good, decent card from the mid 500 series or early 600 series Nvidia, or you could have a PoS from the 200 series. VRAM in this context is meaningless, and is certainly not the thing you should be looking at for buying a CPU.
I get the fact that at least decent VRAM is needed, I run a 2560*1440 screen and have to cards with 2Gb VRAM in SLI, and their VRAM usage typically remains high, or goes through the roof when playing some heavily graphics modded Skyrim.

As for putting more VRAM on a card than it can utilise, it does happen. Partially because it helps sell a card - people are more likely to buy a 2Gb card than a 1Gb card if they follow the whole "Look at the VRAM" mentality. Other parts of it will come down to things like it being cheaper to buy 2Gb of RAM as opposed to 1.75Gb of RAM, so you grab the 2Gb even though not all of it will be used, then there's things like a 560Ti and a 560Ti 2Gb [I haven't researched the two cards so I'm not specifically saying they are ones with a problem, I'd need to actually check], where a card designed for a lower memory capacity is given a higher one, even though it isn't able to fully utilize it.
It would be rather rare to have a whole Gb that isn't being used, but there are cards out there that aren't able to utilise a fair portion of the extra Gb they've been given for one of a variety of reasons.

 

[xorinite]

VRAM in this context is meaningless.

You're quite right, without appropriate context the VRAM capacity is useless in determining the graphics cards overall quality.

A good example would be the difference between The 545 DDR3 with its 1.5gb ram being outperformed by the 545 DDR5 with its 1.0gb ram, its the clock speed that makes the latter better.


Or if you want to go even starker the 1.5gb 545 DDR3 is outperformed by the 768mb 8800 Ultra.

 

[Ravesy]

I hate how hardware is named, I'm pretty sure my video card is 5 numbers followed by 10 letters without any vowels. I'm sure the system makes sense to enthusiasts and peope who follow the latest trends, but I'll be goddamned if I can figure out which processor is faster or what kind of ram i need to feed my harddrive.

Processor: All that matters is the number of cores and the GHZ (which is the speed measurment)
Video Card: All that matters is the size (Megabytes, Gigabytes, ect) of the video memory
RAM: Again, size of the memory. 4-8Gigs of RAM will serve pretty much anything.

As already mentioned this advice is kind of wrong on all accounts.

The intel Q6600 was released in 2007, has 4 cores and runs at 2.4Ghz - Id like to see this compete with any modern I5 with the same... Model number means a massive amount.

Video Card - over 1-2GB the graphics memory really only makes a large difference on higher resolutions. Model number is Key.

RAM - Again, Id like to see the 4GB of DDR1 RAM i had years ago go up against 4GB of the modern DDR3 stuff...its not even close.

Bad post is bad.

Alright, let me clarify.

If you're the kind of PC Gamer that won't play anything that doesn't run at a constant and unchanging 60fps on maximum possible settings, then yes all that shit is important.

If you're not nearly as picky or obsessive (ie: Most of the gaming community, even on PC) then going into the store and comparing two processors by core numbers and clock speed will do. I highly doubt places like Future Shop is still selling PC chips from 6 years ago.

Go pick two video cards off the shelf of any store, and your decision on which of the two is actually better is almost entirely based on VRAM size. Not everyone is some massive hardcore techhead.

Of all 3 of your comments the VRAM one is the worst, these days if your going into a store the model number is BY FAR the most important for a graphics card, for most people playing 1920x1080 or less its almost pointless looking at it for mid range and below as the difference between 2GB and 3GB wouldnt even be noticeable for the most part.

While the difference between the current gen CPUs (and there is a difference) might not be the end of the world, using what you have said to measure a modern day graphics card is completely incorrect and very misleading.

 

[MysticToast]

Fans.

Ever since I built my PC I noticed this. Why do they have to be so freaking loud!?


EDIT: To clarify, I meant case fans. Not like, gaming fans, like all you guys. Although sometimes you people are pretty loud too.

 

[MysticToast]

Fans.

Ever since I built my PC I noticed this. Why do they have to be so freaking loud!?


EDIT: To clarify, I meant case fans. Not like, gaming fans, like all you guys. Although sometimes you people are pretty loud too.

The good people of Germany have, as ever, risen to this particular technical gaming challenge: http://www.bequiet.com/en

Very intriguing. Thanks for sharing this.

 

[Ravesy]

Snip

Let me put it this way.

My laptop runs at a max resolution of 1366x768
4 core processor at 1.9ghz a core
Dual video cards totaling 1.5 GB VRAM
6GB of RAM
Windows 8 Pro

Every game released this year that I've tried has run at a full 60fps. These specs are considered "Crap and worthless" by others who have analysed my computer. So I think it's safe to say you can take the word of hardcore PC Gamers with a grain of salt in this regard.

You being able to play games isn?t really what this is about though is it? I'm not here to have a pissing contest, your laptop is obviously a gaming laptop due to the build, running on a low resolution compared to normal monitors.

What you?ve said depends very much on your model of processor and the models of the graphics cards and more importantly what games you were actually playing.

This argument wasn?t about what graphics cards are playable, its about how to measure how good they are in the card hierarchy. VRAM is a bad way of trying to measure this.