CPU/GF/Radeon.

ot something to ask. i`ve recently heard something about Geforces are very sensitive to the speed of the CPU, while Radeons are much less CPU dependent. the guy who told me this said sometihng about with a p4 2.0, the GF4 Ti is better than radeon8500, but with a p3-600, radeon 8500 will show faster performance in games.

this may be useless to discuss because who would use a Rad8500 on a p3? (sorry if anyone out there is doing this)

what matters is after 2,3 years, when CPUs are much more faster, outdated GF4 Ti may be still useful, while the radeon(if it is true that it is pretty much independent from the CPU performance) might need a upgrade.


i experienced something like this. with a tbird 1.4@1.6 and a outdated matrox g450 16SDR, games like high heat baseball would run fine(it didn`t when i used a p2-450)

better post this on the graphic card forum too...

Be nice.

*sighs* okay, this is going to take a while it would seem

You have to remember, the Radeon8500 is a medium to high level card, the Ti4600 is prety much just high end. Both cards are much less sensitive to CPU speed than say, a Geforce2, because they are simple that much more powerful. This is not in contradiction of the fact however, that some games rely more on CPU power than the graphics card. The best examples I can think of are Quake 3, the Unreal engine, and Serious Sam. At that point, even a medium level card, being perhaps a Radeon or Geforce2 can provide enough power for the CPU.

The big problem is that in games in applications, the video card and CPU are always bottlenecking each other in some aspect. The ideal solution would be of course some combination that doesn't bottleneck each other, but the two rarely line up due to the different requirements of each application.

Regardless of this, hardware will ALWAYS be falling behind what's "new" and "best" at the moment. Yes, a Geforce4 may be outdated in 4 years, but so will the Radeon 8500, even though both will perform well. The best example I could think of is a poll. If you look at an archive of pollsat <A HREF="http://www.Hardocp.com" target="_new">http://www.Hardocp.com</A>, you will notice the majority of users are still using a Geforce2 card, being either the GTS, GTS-V, MX, or Ti. Almost strange, but the Geforce2 does provide adequate power to some games and relatively all simple office applications. Shame, companies like Dell are still putting crappy Gf2 Mx-200s in their models, and lesser Tnt2 M64s in even lower end computers.

The most dangerous part of my computer ended up being my floppy power cable *shudders*

it also depends a fair amount on which particular game your using.
example: UT loves lots of mem bandwidth and FPU power, other games less so, but in varying degrees. some games also have 3dnow+, SSE and SSE2 apps, thus favoring one cpu more than another.

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