CPU vs. Graphics Cards

[Eraador]

I was wondering what point a CPU stops taking advantage of a full graphics card (where they are about even). Could someone at least list a few: Radeon 9700 Pro, Radeon 9500 Pro, GF Ti4600, GF Ti4200.
I have a 1800+ Athlon XP and I was wondering if I should get a 9700 Pro, because I have the money.

 

[LtBlue14]

yeah get the 9700 PRO, it will provide the best graphics by a mile and your cpu shouldn't be much of a bottleneck at all, an 1800 is still lots faster than any average joe's processor
also, why buy a graphics card that's gonna be the bottleneck in your system, upgrade things so they're no LONGER the bottleneck
i'm also pretty sure it depends on what you're doing with your graphics card as to how much of the work gets relegated to the cpu, so there's no exact point like "if you have 600Mhz - 1Ghz, your proc matches a 4600." a 400Mhz and 2Ghz chip may give the exact same performance when rendering one certain image, because it's all done by the graphics card, but when rendering another the performance will differ hugely. in any case the 1800 will cause no major bottlenecks for you, go for the fastest

<A HREF="http://forumz.tomshardware.com/modules.php?name=Forums&file=faq&notfound=1&code=1" target="_new">mubla otohp eht ni ecaf ruoy teg</A>

 

[dUFF_Man]

Also, although 1800+ should not be a bottleneck, just check out the 3dmarks with different graphics cards and the 1800+ at madonion.com so you know what the performance gain would be for buying a 9700 pro.


:tongue: <b>If it aint broke, <font color=red> overclock </font color=red> it</b>.

 

[Col_Kiwi]

Things that depend more greatly upon texture detail and higher resolutions will strain the video card more heavily, whereas applications that depend more on physics realism and geometric detail will strain the CPU equally much or sometimes more.

At any rate, for gaming type applications, an 1800+ should be quite powerful enough to not bottleneck a Radeon9700.

The more likely factor to be performance limiting in such a situation is disk swapping, since nobody with a Radeon 9700 and a CPU that can keep up will use anything but highest detail settings, and in games like UT2003 those are very demanding on memory, so often with even up to 512MB of ram you get HDD swapping.

This isn't too likely to slow you down much, but if you do find you don't get as much performance as you'd like, consider a memory or HD speed upgrade before a new CPU.

-Col.Kiwi