Will a Video card upgrade help?

[Ike0069]

Current system specs are listed below. I've been playing NFS Pro Street and played at 1280x800 with medium to low settings and my FPS were in the low 20's on average.

Now I just installed COD4 and I can't even play at 1280x800 with everything else set to it's lowest setting. I don't really want to upgrade from S939 right now (waiting to do a full system rebuild, but it will have to wait for several months at least); so would a simple VC upgrade to an 8800GT/GTS, or similar card, give me any real FPS benefit with my current system?

I was also thinking about getting a S939 dual core CPU, but I don't know if that would help with games at all, and that is really my only issue with this current system.

 

[evolucion8]

erm, there's something wrong with your setup, I was able to max Call of Duty 4 at 1280x1024 and the FPS never went below 30fps, your card has a bigger framebuffer, it should run even better, even my girlfriend's X800XT PE was able to run Call of Duty 4 at 1024x768 with everything on maxed and 4x FSAA and never dipped below 27fps. You should check your Videocard drivers, Chipset drivers etc.

 

[Voidtek69]

Hmm, yea there is definately something wrong with your setup/drivers methinks. I can run COD4 at 1280 on my am2 6000+ system with an old x1650pro 512 AGP card no problem. I upgraded to that 6000+ from an old sempron 754 & it nearly tripled my framerates in all games(as well as going from 1024 to 1280 mode). Personally, I think you would get better performance from upgrading the cpu vs an 8800gt, but thats just my opinion.

 

[SickBeast]

If you get a dual-core 4200+ or so and pair it with an 8800GT, you will have a nice current gaming system. Just make sure you try to get the CPU to at least 2.5ghz or so (which should be pretty easy, even on stock cooling).

 

[Ike0069]

I have updated all my drivers and that made no noticeable difference. I know the new games recommend a dual core CPU, but I figured with my opty running at 2.7 I would be fine. Maybe my CPU is the bottle neck though.

Anyone aware of any articles/tests that compare games on single core vs dual core?

 

[alexthebored]

Completely CPU related here. Bottlenecking is probably the reason; there's nothing wrong with your RAM or GPU.

 

[evolucion8]

But my CPU is also single core and I don't have issues with COD 4 or other games, very few game todays are multi threaded, so throwing a Dual Core CPU in there is not gonna give you magically performance boost. My girlfriend is using my old X800XT PE with a Pentium 4 3.4GHz Northwood and is able to max COD 4 (even though at 1024x768), and runs fine, there's something wrong there, the Opteron are far from being weak CPU's, specially in gaming.

 

[Ike0069]

Thanks for that info evolucion8.

I might try a reformat and start from scratch and see if that helps. It's been quite awhile since I've done that.