ATI HD4450 good enough?

[KS95]

Is an ATI HD4450 good enough to run Racer smoothly? (yes.. I know.. it's an ATI)

Sadly I'm on a budget and the budget has been lowered... :|

 

[FiftyOrange]

What have you got at the moment?

I can't believe eBay doesn't have an nVidia card that you can afford. 8800s are about €35 brand new, and that'll run Racer fine.

 

[KS95]

Well my preference was a nVidia 9500GT. And this is a new PC that I'm building so I can actually run recent Racer versions (CG Shaders) instead of 0654.

I'll consider ebay but I was hoping to buy everything from the one place (www.novatech.co.uk)

 

[FiftyOrange]

In that case, you want this:

www.novatech.co.uk/Components/Graphics-Nvidia/9400GT1GB.html

That's a fantastic price for a 1GB nVidia card. It'll be faster that the ATi card, more stable, run Racer better, and is a tiny bit cheaper. Buy it soon, the cost of graphics cards is, weirdly, going UP all the time.

 

[KS95]

That's ironic as that was the one I ended up looking at. I compared it with the ATI although I think the ATI has some better points but yeah, I am after nVidia..

 

[Stereo]

I have a HD4350 and it runs Racer fine, still a few issues with cg (auto exposure is broken) but the basic stuff (.cg shaders, hdr/bloom) works alright. I don't have a fast enough processor to really judge how it does on the framerate, but I can get it to 60fps with reasonable settings.

 

[GizmoPower]

The 9400 is a very low budget card dude! And the 1gb ram is bull! No way u gonna use so much. You dont need more than 512!
Spend a little more and buy this one: http://www.novatech.co.uk/novatech/...ia/Nvidia9600Series/Novatech/9600GT512MB.html

I have that one! No prblems running Racer. 100-200++ fps on almost all tracks!
I run Grid, Shift and Dirt on that without problems..
Edit: 1 in stock so hurry!!

 

[KS95]

Too late, the bugger took it! I'm really not sure but I'll be ordering something today, so we'll see lol.

 

[Tiberius]

You don't really need a top end card for Racer. Sure, more power will give you better framerates and a lot of people run games at higher resolutions now, but for most stuff an older good card will be plenty. If you're playing commercial games then it's a different matter, some newer games will stutter and slow down even on high end hardware.

If you're on a budget, you could go to good old Fleabay and pick up a processor+gfx second hand, as long as you buy from someone with good feedback you should be fine - I tend to sell my old computer parts for a few ££ when I upgrade, seems a waste to bin them, someone gets some good parts cheap. Not sure I'd chance buying second hand RAM but for other stuff it's fine.

Just my humble opinion but a 9800 is the lowest I'd go, go higher than that if you can. More memory comes in handy if you load lots of textures, or have a lot of large textures, I remember the difference that going from 64-128mb made when I used to play Unreal Tournament..

 

[KS95]

Well everything but the graphics card and hard drive has been ordered. Sadly this is a really low budget PC.. but I'll see. It's only really temporary until I can rake more money in.. somehow. I'm thinking about the 9400GT then in the future I'll go for the GTS250's or something like that..9800+ basically

 

[GizmoPower]

9800 is not the same as the geforce9800. 9800 is very outdated now. Geforce9800gt is awsome for most games.

 

[FiftyOrange]

Geforce9800gt is awsome for most games.

This is what I'm using, and it works fine.

A great site for testing your PC's cojones is http://cyri.systemrequirementslab.com/CYRI/intro.aspx - then select Battlefield: Bad Company 2 from the drop-down menu, and let it run the tests. If you can run it at all, then you have a fairly high-end gaming system.

 

[Mr Whippy]

Nvidia ftw.

You pay less for a reason with ATI I have found over the years... never had a bad Nvidia, had plenty of ATI cards I wish I'd never bought (despite still being expensive ones)

My 9800 GTX (i think) was £230 new, but equivalents can be had for £100 these days, if that. And that monsters Racer in 1600x1200 with 100fps+ on most tracks... and you have to remember most current Racer tracks are far from optimised (LOD's shaders etc)


Nvidia *used to have a really nice feature too, where you could make a desktop window transparrent ish, which was nice for overlaying over a scaled dyno plot, then just draw straight over in curved for torque curves :smile:

Dave

 

[KS95]

Cheers Whippy, I'll look into an older GTX maybe. Good news, my package* has arrived today (ordered sunday), despite the fact it's not supposed to arrive until next Monday!! I chose the free postage option too!!

*Contains: case, psu, mobo, cpu, ram.

 

[KS95]

How about a GeForce 210, will that do the job? lol

Edit: Or even cheaper! Would a GeForce 8400GS 512Mb be able to run racer?

 

[FiftyOrange]

How about a GeForce 210, will that do the job? lol

Edit: Or even cheaper! Would a GeForce 8400GS 512Mb be able to run racer?

Both will, but the 8xxx are on their way out for compatibility.

 

[KS95]

Ah, I figured. GeForce 210 it is then. Btw, my PC has green LEDs on the front! *happy*

Edit: Btw, anyone fancy donating about £70 so I can get a HDD and a GPU?

 

[GizmoPower]

Too late, just donated to Racedepartment! Buy a guitar or something and play on youre favorite corner. Might bring some cash!!

 

[KS95]

Gizmo, I have 2 1/2 guitars already (1 is stripped and in need of all new parts and 1 is shared with my band's drummer)

Come on, one of you guys must have a bit of money to share

 

[Harey]

This is what I'm using, and it works fine.

A great site for testing your PC's cojones is http://cyri.systemrequirementslab.com/CYRI/intro.aspx - then select Battlefield: Bad Company 2 from the drop-down menu, and let it run the tests. If you can run it at all, then you have a fairly high-end gaming system.

I decided to do that with the game you suggested lol, I failed the minimum requirements for the game, but my graphics card was more than enough for it, (the problem was my cpu and ram)