Playing Mainstream Games

[Kidfork]

So Im looking to just play regular games such as Left 4 Dead, Crysis, Call of Duty Modern Warefare, BioShock 2. Medium-High Settings. Please let me know how my setup would preform, like I said I'm not looking to play Crysis on Highest settings, ill settle for medium.

Gigabyte G31M-ES2L Intel G31 Socket 775 MB
Intel Pentium Dual-Core E5400 2.7Ghz 2M 800Mhz 775
2GB DDR2 PC2-5300
EVGA GeForce 9500 GT 1GB DDR2


Thank You Very Much

 

[RST101]

you should be fine playing those games but be aware that it will be with low to medium settings.

 

[nbkp]

COD4 runs fine on highest setting no AA at 1280x1024. And I only have a 8600GT.

 

[Kidfork]

you should be fine playing those games but be aware that it will be with low to medium settings.

Thank You for your response, that is what i was looking for. Although I am pretty satisfied, what would you say a weak spot is?

 

[Kidfork]

Bump

 

[Fumz]

you should be fine playing those games but be aware that it will be with low to medium settings.

Thank You for your response, that is what i was looking for. Although I am pretty satisfied, what would you say a weak spot is?

At your resolution, your "weak spot" is the cpu and RAM.

 

[smarteyeball]

COD4 runs fine on highest setting no AA at 1280x1024. And I only have a 8600GT.

COD4 isn't really a spec intensive game and is also one of those rare games that actually feels quite smooth and playable @ sub 30FPS.

At your resolution, your "weak spot" is the cpu and RAM.

Yep.

It's not so much the speed of the RAM that's the issue, but the quantity.

With some titles (ie Crysis), you'll be hitting the pagefile pretty hard which will cause a fair bit of 'stuttering' and periodic slow downs as the physical memory is exhausted and swaps in and out of the virtual memory on the HDD.

Although the lower mhz will also have a negative impact as well.

And at 1024x768, the CPU will be doing the vast majority of the work, rather than the video card.


Your mileage will vary from title to title, but I echo the others in saying that it will be more low-medium settings than medium-high.

 

[Kidfork]

COD4 runs fine on highest setting no AA at 1280x1024. And I only have a 8600GT.

COD4 isn't really a spec intensive game and is also one of those rare games that actually feels quite smooth and playable @ sub 30FPS.

At your resolution, your "weak spot" is the cpu and RAM.

Yep.

It's not so much the speed of the RAM that's the issue, but the quantity.

With some titles (ie Crysis), you'll be hitting the pagefile pretty hard which will cause a fair bit of 'stuttering' and periodic slow downs as the physical memory is exhausted and swaps in and out of the virtual memory on the HDD.

Although the lower mhz will also have a negative impact as well.

And at 1024x768, the CPU will be doing the vast majority of the work, rather than the video card.


Your mileage will vary from title to title, but I echo the others in saying that it will be more low-medium settings than medium-high.

WOW! I'm a little bit surprised, I always thought RAM was the least important part of gaming. My monitor also supports 1920 x 1080. Will I be able to play at maybe medium settings and maintain a decent frame rate at that resolution?

 

[Fumz]

WOW! I'm a little bit surprised, I always thought RAM was the least important part of gaming. My monitor also supports 1920 x 1080. Will I be able to play at maybe medium settings and maintain a decent frame rate at that resolution?

Well, that's partly true...with a caveat: you've got to have enough of it in the first place.

Will you be able to play at medium settings at 1920x1080 with decent fps? Probably not with many modern games. While your cpu is strong enough for most titles at 2.7GHz, this time it's the card that will be holding you back. The 9500 GT was a low-end to mid-range card even in its prime.

I have no doubt that you will able to run some games at 1920 on medium, like the very system friendly CoD4, but others, like Bad Company 2, which are core hungry and poorly optimized, no.

GeForce 9500 GT review
Keep in mind that although this shows fps of ~ 20, it's with 4xAA, which you won't be using (gpu isn't sufficiently strong), and max settings. Lowered to medium, with shadows set to low, and you may end up above the 30 mark... although you can't hold me to that.

Battlefield: Bad Company 2 GPU Performance In-depth > 1920x1200 – High/Medium/Low - TechSpot
With Bad Company and the like, you're limited to low settings until you upgrade the entire rig.

 

[Kidfork]

WOW! I'm a little bit surprised, I always thought RAM was the least important part of gaming. My monitor also supports 1920 x 1080. Will I be able to play at maybe medium settings and maintain a decent frame rate at that resolution?

Well, that's partly true...with a caveat: you've got to have enough of it in the first place.

Will you be able to play at medium settings at 1920x1080 with decent fps? Probably not with many modern games. While your cpu is strong enough for most titles at 2.7GHz, this time it's the card that will be holding you back. The 9500 GT was a low-end to mid-range card even in its prime.

I have no doubt that you will able to run some games at 1920 on medium, like the very system friendly CoD4, but others, like Bad Company 2, which are core hungry and poorly optimized, no.

GeForce 9500 GT review
Keep in mind that although this shows fps of ~ 20, it's with 4xAA, which you won't be using (gpu isn't sufficiently strong), and max settings. Lowered to medium, with shadows set to low, and you may end up above the 30 mark... although you can't hold me to that.

Battlefield: Bad Company 2 GPU Performance In-depth > 1920x1200 – High/Medium/Low - TechSpot
With Bad Company and the like, you're limited to low settings until you upgrade the entire rig.

Yep you were right, I got all the parts in the mail. Popped in Crysis . I got decent frames in the beginning but then as i progressed I noticed quite a bit of "shuttering". I then minimized the window and found my ram was at 95%. Would you say 4GB would do the job?

 

[Fumz]

Yes, 4GB's is more than enough to run any game. Keep in mind, it's not going to solve all your problems, but it will go a long way.

 

[smarteyeball]

It will certainly help. On an 8GB machine - the highest amount of RAM I've seen Crysis utilise is about 3.25GB-3.5GB after several hours of play.

That's pretty rare for PC games though since the majority of games won't use over 2GB just for the game alone. (unless they have bad memory leaks)