I’ve never been much of a gamer. I had a first-generation Playstation, and was a big fan of the Tomb Raider series, but never progressed to the PS2 or PS3. On my computer, the only games i’ve ever played are the Myst series, which were not at all heavy on the 3d graphics and so didn’t require a proper gaming rig.
Recently my 5-year-old Dell started to give a few signs that it’s on the way out, and i figured that it was time to get something more up-to-date. Most of my work is basic internet/email/office stuff, but i also do some Photoshop (including batch processing), and occasional video encoding. For that reason i wanted a decently fast processor (preferably quad-core) for video encoding, and enough memory to deal with Photoshop etc. Video card was a minor consideration
Anyway, here’s the system i ended up with, purchased second-hand:
Intel Core 2 Quad Q8300 @ 2.50GHz
6GB RAM (2x2GB, 2x1GB)
Nvidia GeForce 9500 GS 512MB
1x500GB, 1x1TB HDD
Windows 7 Home Premium
It works great, and has all the power and memory i need for my PS and video work. I’m very happy with the computer so far. I thought that, if it will cope, i might try out one of the big-time games that came out a few years ago (e.g., Half Life 2).
The problem is that, while i know that the Nvidia 9500GS is a low-end card, i can’t find enough information to understand exactly what that means, in terms of what games it will play, and how well it will play them. I’ve looked at a few gamer forums and such where they discuss video cards, but the discussions are almost useless because most of the participants seem to be 16-year-olds who are more interested in comparing the size of their own video cards. All they have to say about low-end cards are juvenile comments like, “LOL crap card. I’ll keep my Radeon 5870 thanks.”
All this is exacerbated by the fact that, because i’ve never been a computer gamer, i don’t really know how to evaluate some of the things people talk about, like frame rates. For example, movies look perfectly good on my computer at 30fps, but gamers talk about frame rates much higher than that.
So, gaming Dopers, help me out here. If i want to mess around with some games on my new computer, where should i draw the line? I assume that the latest generation of graphics-intensive games will be right out. But how far back need i go before i can find some fun stuff that will work on my hardware.
(By the way, as you might have gathered from my Tomb Raider and Myst experience, i like problem-solving games, with some action. A straight-out FPS like Doom isn’t really my thing.)