I have an ATI HD 4890, and I'm wondering if I need a new card

[AMDPwred]

I started playing Star Wars recently and I'm getting pretty poor FPS (~10-20 indoors). I know a lot of people are experiencing similar issues, but I also know some with better hardware are getting great performance. I've read that Star Wars is a heavily GPU dependent game, so my first thought was to upgrade my video card but I've also been told this 4890 is plenty (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16814102830).

My CPU is a Core 2 Duo 3ghz (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16813128358). I'm wondering, any thoughts on which piece may be the bottleneck? If it's effectively both, which upgrade would yield the most performance? I can likely upgrade the CPU/motherboard or the video card, but probably couldn't do both right now.

 

[Awkward]

GPU is fine, the CPU would be a bottleneck for anything much more powerful than that. OC the CPU a bit, or dial down your settings. Resolution on your monitor? If it were me I'd upgrade the CPU/motherboard/RAM first, then get a 7950 or something from the 78xx SKU when they launch.

 

[GaiaHunter]

At what resolution and settings do you play?

Are you using the most recent drivers for the card?

 

[AMDPwred]

Sorry, I should have included that. I play with all the settings on low (defaulted that way for me) and at 1920x1200 (sometimes in windowed mode, other in full screen). I'll try lower resolutions, hadn't really considered that. I have drivers from August or so, last time I tried to update them the process failed. I'll run that again.

If I upgrade my CPU/motherboard, will Windows require me to reinstall? In fact, I should probably do that anyway since it's been about 2 years on this install, but I need to find that disk first.

 

[GaiaHunter]

Sorry, I should have included that. I play with all the settings on low (defaulted that way for me) and at 1920x1200 (sometimes in windowed mode, other in full screen). I'll try lower resolutions, hadn't really considered that. I have drivers from August or so, last time I tried to update them the process failed. I'll run that again.

If I upgrade my CPU/motherboard, will Windows require me to reinstall? In fact, I should probably do that anyway since it's been about 2 years on this install, but I need to find that disk first.

Probably it is driver problems.

On another thread about SWTOR one guy was commenting that AMD cards were having performance problems during the BETA. It seems latest drivers improved performance.

You should go to www.amd.com and download the latest drivers.

The latest ones that support the 4890 are the 11.12 (which are also the latest ones for the most recent cards).

The 4890 should offer similar or higher performance than the 5770.

Next is how different CPUs perform (your E8400 should offer similar performance to that Phenom II X2).

For now though, new drivers for your graphic card.

 

[AMDPwred]

Thanks for the info, I'll upgrade and see how it goes.

Somewhat related, has there been any spec info on Diablo 3? I'm wondering if my system will stand up to that game as well. Perhaps I need to start planning some upgrades...

 

[GaiaHunter]

A quad core CPU should be on the list for the near future, although probably not for D3.