8600GT good enough?

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kpmwrestler

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My neighbor just built a new computer and when i told him about the unreal 3 demo, he downloaded it right away and the graphics were amazing, and he had them on medium-high settings.

What i know about his computer is that it has 2gb ram, brand new core 2 duo (i think 2.8ghz)
I have both of those things in mine, but what he has that i don't is a nice graphic card. It was an Nvidia GeForce 7(something)00 and it had 256mb dedicated video ram, but somehow he got it to share with the system's ram and it went up to 1gb of video ram.

I don't have much extra money, but i found the GeForce 8600GT and it looks a little better than his and isn't too expensive, but what i was wondering is if all the GeForce cards can share the system memory like his did, or if it was just his card.

and will it play unreal 3 any better than his card?
 
Video ram doesn't actually matter to much unless your planning on playing at a high res but if your on a budget that probably wouldn't happen. I believe Nvidia calls its memory sharing turbocache and the card needs to have that feature for you to share system memory.
The 8600gt should play UT3 fine (not fully maxed though) but theres other non-dx10 cards that you can get that are faster for about the same cost. ati x1950 is a good card.
 
wow, those two links are nice deals.

i was wondering if unreal 3 would perform better with an Nvidia, because when you start up unreal, one of the startup screens is the "Built for Nvidia" screen.

On the requirements page for ut3, it also says ATI x1300 is recommended. how does the x1950 compare?

Recommended System Requirements
- 2.4+ GHZ Dual Core Processor
- 1 GBytes of System RAM
- NVIDIA 7800GTX+ or ATI x1300+ Video Card
- 8 GB of Free Hard Drive Space

and also, does the 8600 support turbocache?
 
I'm pretty sure the 8600gt doesn't have that. Thats usually found on lower end cards or intergrated cards.

And all the other cards listed are waaaaaaaaaay better than a x1300 and 7500.
 
alright i see, but if i were to buy a lower end card and share the memory with the system memory and make it a 1gb card, would that be better than these other ones?

if not, then out of the two links posted and the 8600gt, which of the three would be the best for playing unreal 3?
 
With your budget ram doesn't matter as much. The ram will only be helpful in high resolution but the cards won't be fast enough to run them at high resolutions anyway. At lower resolution the extra ram won't help at all. Look up comparisons of the 8800gts 320mb and 640mb. Your see that they perform the same usually up to about 1600x1200.

I would go with either the 8600gts or the x1950gt that was posted.
 
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