This week I upgraded my monitor to a 16:9 widescreen which is much nicer than my old 4:3 display. The downside of that is that I am now running A10C at 1920x1080 and my system is struggling to give me decent frame rates at that resolution. My CPU is an Intel i3 (3.2ghz), 8GB of system RAM and an ATI 5570 graphics card (1GB). The graphics card cost about $120 when I bought the system about 8 months ago. Is the graphics card the bottleneck here of is my i3 processor holding things up? Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

If you only upped the resolution and you are seeing much worse performance, your vid card is almost certainly the issue. Im using an AMD 6950 and the frame rates are great.

Thanks for confirming my suspicions gmohr. I should have added that I was also using a second monitor to output the MFCD's and CDU so that I could use iControl on my iPad. I just ran a test without iControl and just my new monitor and it works much better. I think I will have to look into upgrading the graphics card in the not too distant future...

Yup, I own an HD5570 in my Home Theater PC. I tried it for games at 1920x1080 and it struggles mightily with the graphics intensive ones -- flat out can't play some games.

If its in the budget, go to a card with 2GB of graphics memory (assuming your PC has 64b Windows 7). The most cost effective choice for pure power would be the HD6950 -- under $230 for the lowest cost ones (some unlock to become HD6970). I usually buy the cheapest on a given day -- after reading the user comments. Some folks would avoid HIS brand. Though I have XFX stuff as it is often cheap and never had a problem, read user comments on the particular one you want -- occasionally XFX turns out a bad model for some unknown reason.

Of course, one could always get the best -- HD6970.

I'm an AMD/ATI fan. Nvidia fans might have other ideas


HD6950

Allen, thanks for the excellent info and link. I will probably have to wait a bit as I just blew a good chunk of cash on the monitor and upgrading my TIR. I guess the good thing about having to wait is that the prices will probably come down a bit for the 6950 cards.

They are rumoring September for the HD7xxx series, maybe. That will drop HD6xxx prices even more. Or, one might go with an HD7xxx -- use of a new process technology (28nm) should cause the next really-big jump in per-card power at today's prices.

Hmmmm September. My birthday is in September .

So, several months passed and my Birthday came and went . I just installed my shiny new ATI 6950 2Gb card.. WOW, what a difference. I can now fly with smooth frame rates even in poor weather . .

I'm glad I didn't wait then .

I'm gonna go with a 6950 too before BF3 comes out.