Posted April 05, 2011
mushy101: It is due to you lack of experience with games of this generation that you think 512MB GFX card ram is 'an awful lot'. One look at steam hardware survey has the highest owned card, the 9800 GT. Which has 512MB of GFX ram. PC hardware moves on, since we game on a platform that is tied with it.
hedwards: You don't really need to phrase it like that. Considering how many games are console ports, it seems really silly in a sense to have to upgrade a perfectly decent card for a small handful of games.
OTOH if so many games weren't console ports, it wouldn't bother me as much. Buying a new video card just to run a couple games, is kind of decedent.
OTOOH if my mainboard wasn't straining to handle this card, it wouldn't be much of an issue. What with it's x8 worth of bandwidth on the PCIe slot.
Regarding you other points, yes I can fully understand why it can suck upgrading your vid card for a few games, but I find selling the previous one (if in good condition) can offset the costs of that. Plus the higher frame rate, added AA and AF and higher detail and resolution can make a console port outpace the console version quite well.
I find 60FPS probably the biggest advantage a PC game can have over it's console version since I'm quite sensitive to Frame rates and slowdown. Of course it depends all on your preferences. I cannot recommend paying hundreds for prettying up what is essentially a higher res version of a game, but upgrading from, let's say a 5650 to a 6850 is worth it, IMHO.
8x PCI slot? How about a 4670 1GB AGP version? That could most likely handle TW2 good enough on low settings.