I don’t understand graphics cards.

J

jhellwig

Joined
Jul 1, 2013
Messages
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Location
Ottumwa, Iowa
Is there someone that can explain these things to me in simple terms? I don’t understand the specs or why they are so blasted expensive. I don’t see an easy way to compare any specs to figure out what I need.

We got my son Farming Simulator 25 for Christmas. I have a free year old dell desktop that has an i7, 16gb ram, and an m.2 ssd. It runs the game fine but the graphics are a little jumpy. I assume this is due to the onboard graphics not being good enough. The game specs a minimum 1050ti or Radeon rx470. It looks to me like these are older chips but still not cheap even on no name cards.

I am only looking for a low to mid spec card at a decent price that will run this game decently.
 
You gotta know what you're doing. Everything can fit, plug in and "run" only to find out the power supply in the desktop needs upgraded.

Graphics cards are heavily used in bitcoin mining which has driven them up in cost. Used cards sold on eBay are often cards that were used hard 24/7 in bitcoin mining and you might want to avoid those.

I had a Nvidia 8800GT card die which was in a gaming computer I bought new. I played Crysis. "But can it run Crysis" lol.
 
jhellwig said:
Is there someone that can explain these things to me in simple terms? I don’t understand the specs or why they are so blasted expensive. I don’t see an easy way to compare any specs to figure out what I need.

We got my son Farming Simulator 25 for Christmas. I have a free year old dell desktop that has an i7, 16gb ram, and an m.2 ssd. It runs the game fine but the graphics are a little jumpy. I assume this is due to the onboard graphics not being good enough. The game specs a minimum 1050ti or Radeon rx470. It looks to me like these are older chips but still not cheap even on no name cards.

I am only looking for a low to mid spec card at a decent price that will run this game decently.
Click to expand...
You don’t have to understand much of the specs, just look at reviews and benchmarks. Lots of sites have average performance comparisons across many games. Look at 1% or 0.1% lows first because that is the better indicator of the gaming experience.

Don’t buy anything with less than 10gb of ram. Video cards are very expensive because crypto mining and AI have driven up demand.
 
Turn down anything that says "shadows" and that might make the game run faster.

Download hwinfo64 https://www.hwinfo.com/download/ and it will give you an inventory of what your computer hardware currently has, you can start googling from there to see how your video card compares to others on the market.
 
You may be regulated to cards that don't require an extra power connection if the PSU in there does not have an extra 6+2 PCI-E power connection.

If so, RTX3050

What's the model of your Dell? It may also be a SFF case.
 
Yeah it needs a video card.
you could get something like an RX580 for $90

but you have to have the proper space in the case and power supply..
so we need more pc details.
Using a discrete video card will also free up system ram for game usage.
It requires 12GB system ram.. and a video card with 3GB video ram.
 
First off, check the computer itself, to see if it's set up for a gaming video card. You need a power supply with enough power, extra power leads coming from the power supply to the video card (currently, tied back), and the motherboard itself must have the required video card slot. Assuming the machine can handle it, finding a card shouldn't be difficult. Check ebay and computer hardware sites that have a for sale forum.
 
Me either, I lost track a while ago. I had an OG 3DFX card in the 1990s and the first time I fired up GL Quake on my Pentium MMX 233, it was glorious.

Hey I saw on XDA that the new Intel graphics cards don't suck (for once) and they start at $250, maybe one of those would suit your fancy?
 
I guess more specs are needed. It is a dell inspiron 3020 large case. It does have a pice 16x slot with a blank next to it for a video card. When I looked up this computers specs it did have a graphics card option. PSU is on the smaller side though. Only around 400 watts if I remember. Don’t know if it has a connector for a video card. Could get dug enough into specs on a mid grade card to get that far. I don’t know the current graphics specs but my guess it is typical motherboard stuff.

When I say the game is slow I just mean the rendering on the graphics. Stuff takes time to pop up clearly unless it is immediately in front of you as you move around. Not enough to affect game play but just isn’t as satisfying as it could be. It was worse when I has a second monitor hooked up. The monitor is only 23” 1080p so I don’t need overkill resolution. I would just like better.

I do not have anything else running in the background other than whatever standard stuff on windows. Looking at the resource monitor with the game running it is using much. Ram was around 53% with hardly any hard faults and the cpu wasn’t very loaded.
 
If you have the power connections, buy a used 1080ti on ebay. Can be had for around $150 and will still play most games out these days.

I rebuilt and bought a 4090, the wife got my old 1080ti... she plays all kinda games with no lag.
 
I'm no expert, but I believe you can see the temperatures, loads, frequencies on the CPU and GPU through the advanced settings in windows? Or maybe Dell has an app for their gaming machines? Then you can watch in real time to see what's going on. The odd glitch might be a background process messing things up. Or a heat sink falling off the CPU or GPU could have it throttling due to temps.
My ASUS gaming laptop has some settings to prioritize the game played over the rest of the windows processes, and a app to track what the CPU and GPU are doing. Mine started running worse and worse and I could see it was throttling due to overheating, and the heat sink had popped off the CPU and GPU chips. I dug into it and its back to working well, running War Thunder on low detail at 100fps.
Also that is another option, turn down the details, see if that helps.
 
Mama uses a 2080Ti in her gaming rig. Is it good enough for her 4K gaming? Not really. But it's pretty darn good.

Also, don't forget to hook up the additional power supply cable. Failure to do so might fry the motherboard tracings like happened to me in my old rig. Although I was able to use another slot successfully once I remembered to hook up the cable.

As a general rule, 1080, 2080, 3080, 4080 (80 series) are enough for most games of their respective era's. Stepping down to the 70 or 50 series introduces limitations.
 
There are a few super low end Chinese modified cards like the rtx4010 that are low power and “adequate “ as a gpu.

First thing I would try is turning all graphics settings down with the onboard graphics.

GPUs sadly all suck and are overpriced
 
Thank you for all the help and suggestions. I was wrong on the power supply. It is only the 180 watt one with no extra connectors. There is a 460watt one for these but it seems unobtainable. I might just turn down the game settings a bit since it works fine otherwise.

I have unfortunately gotten addicted to this game so may have to build a pc at some point and buy another copy of the game. I liked the Sim farm game as a kid and this is a better modern version of it.
 
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