[quinda]

I had an interesting conversation today with a not-very geek friend. I was laying out my 'upgrade plans' for the year, and he expressed his confusion at why anyone would want to spend more on a pair of graphics cards than most people spend on a whole computer.

To me, it is worth it to be at the upper end of the spectrum - it means great performance in existing games, and confidence that newer stuff will work too.

To him, all he sees is constant expense, issues with buggy drivers, and the feeling of being a 'beta tester' in that you just get the bugs people who wait will be able to avoid.

While I see his point, I still love the feeling of new hardware :)

What do you think?

[CG Man]

I used to be the one who had to have the very best. A few years ago the very best hardware could hardly run the most demanding games at a smooth frame rate. Now I only buy the hardware needed to give me 60 fps no need for any better than that your brain can't see the difference and a TFT screen is limited to 60fps.

Now we have graphics cards that can push the latest games at 70+ frames per second with full graphics on at 1600 x 1200 res now to put two graphics cards in with this amount of power is insane. Film on TV runs at 25 fps 60 fps gives you beter control of the game and cuts out stutter anymore than that is over kill and the benifits will not be noticed till the next generation games are out. When the next gen games are out the over the top hardware will be on sale for half the price and the next gen games won't run on a direct 9 graphics card.

Some people right now are adding in two to four direct 9 £250 GPUs thats alot of cash and this month we see the shipping of the first Vista direct 10 graphics cards so in the next couple of years these over kill computers will be useless. Another thing gamers do is buy dual core processors their is no game coded for dual core so it only makes sence to buy a faster single core and upgrade to quad core when the games coded for quad core come out.

Why quad core you may ask well theirs no games coded for dual core and one on its way for Vista OS and quad core processor only.

I can understand over upgrading it if your running a game like X3 or a war simulator where as time goes by your adding lots more 3d models in to the scenes as you build, better hardware allows you to keep on building with no noticible performance drop.