I recently bought an AMD Phenom II X4 955BE and a M4A77. I'm using my old MSI Radeon HD4850 512mb card and I immediatly felt that it was a huge bottleneck. I didn't gain a lot of performance in gaming compared to my previous X2 6000+.
So what card would perform equally to the 955, so that neither of them really are a bottleneck?
I prefer ATI cards.
Thanks
Depending on what games you wouldn't see much of a difference between those 2 CPU's.
As far as a card goes seeing as you have a 4850 and sticking with ATI, I wouldn't look at anything less that the 5850 or 5870. The 5770 can be faster in a few things, but the difference from a 4850 to a 5770 isn't worth it.
That CPU will show benefits in certain things that can take advantage of it.
Video encoding for example will see a huge improvement over a dual core.
As stormy13 already pointed out, the majority of games will not see any benefit. Most will only use 2 cores.
There are a few however, that will. Dragon Age is a good example. But the game needs to be optimised for Quads, otherwise nothing to be gained.
Contrary to popular belief, more CPU cores doesnt always mean everything is faster.
They only help if the application or game is designed to use them all.
I'm aware of the fact that most games don't fully utilize quad cores yet. However, I do sense that my graphics card needs an upgrade. That's why I'm looking for a card that is affordable and performs well enough to be used with my 955. I don't want my cpu to be a bottleneck and find out that I spend too much money on a card that I can't fully utilize.
Btw, I've now taken Nvidia cards into consideration.
Just one piece of information for you.
NVIDIA's GTX 400s series drivers are VERY raw at the moment.
I've been dealing with all sorts of stutters, glitches, low GPU usage, etc in certain games (Battlefield: Bad Company 2 for the most part).
If I were you, I'd go for an ATI HD 5000s series card (the HD 5850 is a kickass card if you can afford it) or just wait for the HD 6000s in November.
There's a number of games out there that take advantage of quad cores. Games like Shift, Just Cause 2, GTA IV, Assassins Creed 2, Mafia II, Dirt 2, Battlefield Bad Company 2 etc etc.. A lot of the newer more graphically intense games are using almost as much of the CPU as the GPU. If your into serious gaming quad core is the only way to go especially with dev's releasing poor quickly done console ports.
Of course it can depend though on what games your playing. If your playing older titles there won't be much difference if any from a dual to a quad.
I've just ordered an Nvidia GeForce GTX 470 1280mb! :)
My uncle is gonna pay for it, so price wasn't really an issue. I'm curious to see how it performs against my old 4850. Will post findings soon.
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