Minimum frame rate - cpu or gpu?

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Warbie

Warbie

Warbie

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I thinking of building a Conroe based system and am not sure where to spend my cash.

I don't often play at a high res (never more than 1280*1024) and like a frame rate that stays above 60 at all times. I'd rather drop the res right down than have fps that drop into the 40's.

In order to achieve the highest minimum framerate possible, in as many games as possible, do you think it best to splash out on the cpu or the gpu - or a bit of both? I read that cpu often has more affect on the minimum rate, but also that this varies from game to game.

At the mo i'm thinking of a 6600 and x1900, but would happily skimp on one and boost the other if it'll help keep a consistent rate when playing at 1280*1024.

Whatcha think?
 
It's swings and roundabouts with regards to getting the best framerates in games. Some games love a powerful CPU with lots of memory, and a graphics card will only allow the game to go so far, but then you get games that love to have a beast of a graphics card but aren't too affected by the power of the CPU and memory.

I'd say it would be better to plost in General Hardware about this, as you'd probably get a lot more accurate response, though there are still quite a few hardware peeps that hang around the gaming forum.
 
For MINIMUM framerate, cpu definitely matters.

When you read your typical review of hardware, with the benchmarks etc, they are nearly always looking at average framerates, which can be highly GPU dependent due to excessive peaks when you are gpu limited and there is not much action.

Back in 2004 I made an extremely intensive custom Doom3 benchmarking demo to illustrate the fact that games can be EXTREMELY cpu dependent, so much so that changing the resolution can make next to no difference to min framerate. http://www.hangtime.nildram.co.uk/nicefps2.rar for anyone interested.

Of course, there is a balance to be struck and you still need a good graphics card, just not at the expense of the cpu. Personally I would say an E6600 paired with a x1900xt would be an excellent choice, better than say getting a s939 cpu and a more powerful gfx card.
 
The gain of CPU power is always very small, but with that said the maximum and minimum frame rate you get is quite dependant on the power of the CPU. A good example of this is GTR, I had a 6800 standard and the gain in frame rate to a 7800gt was around 4. Yet a small overclock from 1800 to 2160 provided a good 20fps extra.
 
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