If someone has the time...

[Frame352]

...could they explain to me in layman's terms, the relationship/correlation/whatever way you want to put it, between CPU ability, GPU ability, resolution, refresh rate, eye candy (for want of a technical term) and fps?

Essentially, a mate is contemplating (just contemplating mind) a new rig, which will be used for gaming 95% of the time. The thing is, he'll be hanging onto his CRT for the foreseeable future. The resolutions he games at are low by today's standards (1280 x 960 and 1600 x 1200), but being a CRT, he can game at 100, 120 and 150 Hz, and he needs/wants higher fps to get the benefit of the higher refresh rate.

So is it a case of throwing more money towards the GPU to get the desirable high fps with decent (obviously not highest) levels of graphical effects enabled? Or are the higher end cards of today better suited to higher resolutions with all effects on, at the expense of triple figure fps? And where does the CPU fit into all this particular scenario? I'm particularly talking about "bottlenecking" which I see mentioned around here in relation to various CPU/GPU combinations.

So, I'm not looking for a spec or anything for him, just general info Even if you have a couple of useful bookmarks on the subject you could share, it would be most appreciated!

 

[Sayso]

for a decent gaming rig minimum is a high clocked dual core (a quad would be preferable) and at that res a i would want
a minimum of a GTX275 or 4890 both can be picked up for under £130 (either a 5850 or the soon to be released 470 would be higher end to aim for) and i would say getting a high res LCD 24" (theres a benq backlit LED on OC for £150) would be near the top of my list aswell.
The minimum specs there would be able to play at the res mentioned with no difficulty, but whether they will still be able to play the latest games...with the eyecandy in 6 months is debatable.

 

[Frame352]

Thanks for taking the time to reply Sayso. I do appreciate it, but it's not really the info I'm looking for.

 

[Freddie1980]

It depends on what demands the game/software puts on a particular piece of hardware. If you read these forums and review sites you will see the word 'bottleneck' used a lot this basically means the performance of the game is being bottlenecked by either the CPU or video card.

Games like Crysis, BF:Bad Company, STALKER CP, Dirt 2 etc are typically limited by the video card even at resolutions that your quoting then on the other hand there are games like GTA IV, Star Trek Onlne and Supreme Commander which tax the CPU more as the software has a lot of pathfinding and AI algorithms to calculate. So really in answer to your question the relationship is down to the individual software and what type of games your friend likes to play.

Refresh rate is the number of times your monitor refreshes itself a second, if you PC is playing a game at 200 FPS and your refresh rate is 150hz then you will get screen tearing (I'm not sure if this is the case with CRT's) at which point you enabled an in game setting called Vsync so the game plays at rate that limited to your monitors refresh rate.

Increasing resolution and eye candy (shadows, pixel shaders, texture levels, bloom, HDR, AA etc but not things like unit sizes and anything that increases the number NPC's, Bots and anything to do with AI) will put more demand onto your video card. How much extra demand is again dependant on what game your playing so you will have read up on individual performance reviews to find out what you want in the form of hardware.

 

[Alex74]

^^ Really good post here.

Would also extend the answer to your post by thinking about the bottlenecks themselves.

If you hit a 'cpu limit', where you have excess graphics card horsepower that's not being utilised, then you can still probably (this is a simplification, not entirely true! ) up the resolution/eye candy to take advantage of this excess power without losing framerate.

The overall idea is to bring all of your components to 100% load. That way you're not getting a bottleneck. That doesnt mean it'll play well, you might still get a low framerate thanks to the cpu, but a bottleneck will be a case where the cpu (for example) isnt allowing the graphics card to be used to its full potential (i.e. not letting it get up to 100% load.

there's more to it and this is a fairly simplified explanation but hopefully it gives you an idea of what a bottleneck means.

Also tearing will happen on CRTs as well as LCDs, it's just that it'll happen less as CRTs have awesome refresh rates

 

[Frame352]

Thanks Alex and Freddie... that was more like what I was after.