This is no lie above. My sisters boyfriend is a World War II fan and loves to play Battlefield 1942. Well I wanted to see how well his system would perform when I dropped my Radeon 9800 Pro into his system. His system specs are:
AGP 4X Motherboard (not sure about chipset)
Windows XP Home Edition
Intel Celeron 1.7GHz
256Mb SDRAM
GeForce 2 MX
So I figured dropping the Radeon 9800 Pro in his system would accelerate the Battlefield 1942 game right? Wrong! The gameplay was stutering it was a slight step up over his GeForce 2 MX. This was quite a shock. I remember back in the day using GeForce 2, 3, 4, Voodoo II, Voodoo III, etc... All those earlier chips were the GPU did most of the work. Now it seems that if you don't have at least a 2GHz or 2.2GHz chip these high powered cards aren't worth the dong they are asking for.

After the dismal performance of the Radeon 9800 Pro on an older system, I decided to toss in a GeForce 3 card I won off of eBay to see how that would help! When I popped the card in using the latest drivers (44.90) I decided to load up his copy of Battlefield 1942. My draw just dropped when I saw how much of a performance increase over the Radeon 9800 Pro running Battlefield 1942. It was truly a night and day difference.

What did I learned from this?

1) The day of only needing to upgrade the graphics card to get better performance is over on lower end systems.
2) You need to have a fast *** system to utilize the latest GPU's.

It's kinda shocking to see that the CPU plays a HUGE role in the latest graphics cards. 2 years ago that wasn't the case at all. All you needed was to upgrade the graphics card and BAM! Instant increase in frame rate. Today, you need a fast CPU just to get the GPU to move. Things sure have changed and so has the dent in consumers wallets!


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