My system is good to go for Baldur's Gate 3.

For Horizon Zero Dawn is a far different matter. Seems as if all video cards any more requires a mother board with PCIE 3.0. My mother board is PCIE 2.0. There fore, a complete new system is needed. I'll have the oldest new game, HZD, on the backburner.

One gamer said, "At the very least, you're going to need a new motherboard". Now I know what he meant.

PCIe is backwards compatible. A new 3.0 card should work fine in a 2.0 slot. Performance loss is hard to estimate (in general) but it shouldn't be dramatic.

Don't ignore power requirements when buying a new GPU. I can give you advise, but not without knowing a lot more about your system.

I'm sure you'll have (a) bottleneck(s), but it doesn't matter if a new GPU will allow you to play the games you want. You can always upgrade other parts at a later, more convenient, date.

i would stick with a 10 series nvidia card or the rx 570 580 line from amd regardless

though in either case a new powersupply would indeed be recommended if the old one does not supply ( though older hardware seems to be just as consumptive as the newer ones



had a 2008 motherboard combined with a 1060 which worked fine, i had to say that there was little to no difference noticeable when i switched to a newer board

the difference between a 1060 and a 2060 was pretty clear though

I see no reason for that. If a 30 series works in his system; it'll still be there after other upgrades. It all depends on WHEN he'll upgrade the rest.
Buying a 10 series now and replacing it with a 30 series 3 months from now is just a waste of money.

Edit: I'm using Nvidia as an example because I have more experience with it.

There was already a lot of surprise with some of my , uhm pc builder buddies, who normally only serve non gamers, that the 10 series card worked quite well on a pci 2 device..

and to be honest i only go as far as that i have experienced

but

if you are certain newer cards will work without a problem then that choice is almost a no brainer, the new 3050 for example should be a treasure of a card even for older systems with high performance, relatively speaking of course and very low powerdraw! worked with a 1050Ti for some time and it was quite the wizzard

I can only say that PCIe is backwards compatible. If I knew the exact system specs, I could do a lot more/better research. Maybe power draw isn't an issue for the OP? I don't know what kind of PSU he has.

Power requirements stated by GPU manufacturers are a general guideline - taking in account the crappiest power supplies in existence.
I have a GTX970 now and I'm pretty sure that I can replace it with an RTX3070, on my Corsair RM550 PSU - no matter what Nvidia says. I wouldn't do the same thing if I had the same wattage in some Dell or Lenovo desktop (just examples).

HZD is not that great PC port concerning optimisation, so getting a good GPU is understandable.

If there's a demo, you should try that on your current PC before upgrading....it might run just fine, and you might be able to avoid having to spend money needlessly. :)

It's not about PCIe 3.0 per se but more about supporting DX12 videocard. Any videocard with DX12 would work in PCIe2.0, even if it is PCIe 3.0 compatibles. In most cases, you MIGHT lose a couple percent performance but it going to be unnoticeable.

I found out that either video card can be used in 2.0 or 3.0 and the other way around! Imagine that. Thanks to everyone.

I'm guessing the main reason the person stated that you'd need a new motherboard is that you've stated you have the following system specs in another Horizon Zero Dawn thread: As that CPU is from 2009, you generally can't replace it on your computer with a modern one without also upgrading the motherboard. Depending on the power supply statistics, you may also need a newer one of those as well.

Regarding playing Horizon Zero Dawn and to put things in perspective, My Intel CPU is from 2012 and is roughly twice as powerful as yours in the total benchmark score, My GPU is the relatively new RTX 2060 super. I get about 60 fps in HZD on "Original" settings in 1920x1080 with the occasional stuttering in new areas. I'm pretty sure that my CPU is the bottleneck and so will likely upgrade in the future.

Having recently set up a cheap modern office computer, I was impressed at how big of a difference a modern CPU and architecture makes to the Win 10 experience. Even a lower spec model. (Though for a gaming PC, you obviously don't want to put in low spec components)

It's been several weeks since borrowing a desktop to play HZDC. Wish I had know that the main hangup was a DX12 video card and a half decent processor.

Normally i'd disagree on the basis of systems being different or unrelated, but the PS4 is an x86 machine. I don't have the gog version of the game, but am actually playing through it now via an accidentally purchased Playstation Now subscription that should be ending soon.

I would like to know more about the issues, though. It would appear that the GPU and CPU are combined together as something called an "APU." In theory, an integrated graphics processor would have an easier time if it had comparable processing power as the GPU. Motherboard bandwidth is the obvious bottleneck, here, as most x86 machines separate the GPU and CPU.

IMO, something they could do about this would be more caching of textures and the like, which is most likely where the issues come from. click here for more information.

My knee-jerk reaction would be that, at the engine level, it could use some optimization in the form of caching. Odds are, any game specifically for the PS4 (and PS5 and similar consoles) is going to take advantage of that bandwidth to be lazy and not cache certain things. As a result, this could significantly lower VRAM requirements at the cost of not running on a PC very well. For the PC version, they need to improve caching or something to offset the difference in bandwidth.