Video Card Potential

[USNavy]

Ok... So in searching for a new video card there are hundreds of reviews, comparisons, charts, graphs, and everything you need to decide which video card is better. Having said that, these video cards are tested at their maximum potential. The systems they are tested on are or are near the high end machines of the given time.No im not in the market for a video card but i am curious; how do you know whats better for You... For example: I have an AMD 64 3500... gig of ram... and a 6800 gt. What card could i get the highest benifit out of upgrading to it with said cpu. Is there a specific characteristic of the card where you can obviously point too and say... Nope... my machine is too much of a peice for that card.

[mobo57]

Pretty general question for a specific answer. It depends on what slot you have, AGP or PCIe, and what you do with the system.
If it's an AGP, then something like a X19XX series ATI or X7XXX Invidia would be the best you could do. PCIe, right now the 8xxx series by Invidia are the top performers. The CPU you have is a decent one, though not a screamer. There are some games that will be bottle-necked by it, though not to the point of being a show stopper.

[USNavy]

Your kinda missing the point... but not completely. I wasnt being specific for a reason, but you actually said it... bottlenecking... So let me rephrase my question. Is there a way to find out whether or not your gpu potential will be bottlenecked by your processor.

Sorry for the confusion.

[mobo57]

Interesting thought. I don't think I have seen a comparison of CPUs/GPUs and various games or applications. It usually seems to come up as an afterthought in some reviews. Might be an interesting project to gather and parse all the data from the reviews out there and see what arises.

[Midknyte]

you're looking for the silver bullet magic formula, but there just isn't one. unless someone benchmarks each card with each type of system, you won't find reliable data.

[AllGamer]

i'll say go with your Guts feeling ;)
and use your best judgement
also eye perception

what might look good to me, might not look nice to you
example between ATI vs nVidia

[USNavy]

is there a way to know if your cpu will bottleneck the gpu performance?

[mobo57]

Without testing each combination of games/gpu/cpu, I think the only way you can is to get a program like Frapps, set your video card settings on low, load a game and run frapps. Then set your card on high and run frapps again. Do it for each game. If yur frame rate goes up, your cpu is not the bottleneck. If it does not then it is bottlenecked by the cpu.
http://www.fraps.com/

[herosrest]

lf a means of research is of interest,

.................................................. ..........the popular PC magazines run assessments of product groups and analze them pretty well.
There are nuts and bolt inventory which include mobo chipset, graphics, hd etc.... and will give a fair idea how combinations of components perform together.

The issues carrying these articles are few a year and worth gold dust.