The 2008 Guide to Gaming PC Specs
Trends: The CPUFor a long time, AMD and Intel were locked in fierce battle, producing faster and faster CPUs - and when they finally hit the wall and could no longer bump up the GHz, they started gluing together multiple cores for more processing power. The manufacturers have done it at such a pace that, these days, the CPU is becoming less and less important in gaming. You get the same real world gaming performance with a $150 part as with the $1000 part unless you have a very high end video card to go with it, and even then the differences are minor.  Futuremark's 3DMark06 - two years ago it was heavy on the graphics card, just like games today. Every game box still lists "magical MHz numbers", with most games currently asking for a 2 to 3GHz Pentium 4; the reality is that just about any CPU you can still buy from the stores is adequate to run games at an acceptable frame rate. The whole "MHz number" is increasingly obsolete, as it's useless when comparing old Pentium 4s and Pentium Ds to current Intel Core 2, AMD Athlon 64 X2 and AMD Phenom CPUs. So in the gaming world of today, a good guideline is that if it has two cores, it is fast enough for gaming - even the cheapest dual core CPUs are "fast enough" for almost all games today. 3DMark06 actually predicted the future correctly in this regard. People used to complain that it was heavily limited by the graphics card, while people were used to CPU-limited gaming back then. As games started to really take advantage of DX9 and complex shaders and the resolution most commonly used for gaming went up, the situation flipped around, and games are being limited by the performance of the graphics card. Yes, by going for that 3.0GHz mega-expensive quad core CPU you may see higher performance and better frame rates, but that assumes you combine it with something like a pair of GeForce 8800 GTXs. With a more mainstream video card, almost every single game out there is limited by the video card, while the CPU spends time idling.  Intel demonstrating 8 cores with Lost Planet at IDF. With each core hovering around 20-30% the action runs at solid 60fps. A dual core can do almost the same, at fraction of the price. So, what about more than two cores? While more and more games started to take some advantage of multiple CPU cores in 2007, fully multithreaded engines are still mostly under development. Combine this with the fact that current games just tend not to be CPU bound, and the case for the quad core CPU is about future-proofing your system. There are some exceptions, if you go look for them - Supreme Commander and the Forged Alliance expansion pack are known to be heavy on the CPU and multithreaded. Lost Planet is also happy to use all available cores, even if the performance gains are minor. The UE3 engine also supports multithreading, but the majority of titles tend to place very moderate loads on the CPU cores. Even two cores tend to end up with spare cycles in multithreaded games, let alone four. Naturally if you also do real work on your PC - 3D rendering, video compression or some other CPU-intensive task that easily uses all available cores - quad cores are a good idea, but for the purposes of determining what you need for gaming, a faster dual core CPU will give you better bang for the buck today than a slower quad core one. This may very well change during 2008, so we'll compare the options in more detail on page 5, so you can decide yourself. Trends: The Video CardOn the video card side, things are more complicated. Many games these days still ask only for DirectX 9-compliant hardware as the minimum (Shader Model 2.0, effectively ATI Radeon 9600 or NVIDIA GeForce FX5600 -level hardware) to run, and some even run on something as ancient as a GeForce 4 MX. It's just that none of these cards are capable of rendering anything complex at a high resolution. As soon as you want to play at the native resolution of the common LCD displays, older cards turn out to be inadequate in most cases - they just don't have the fill rate. You also have to factor in the advances in game engines. The new Unreal Engine 3 -powered games have pushed up the effective minimum requirement a lot during 2007 - even if Unreal Tournament III itself proved that you can play a properly developed UE3 game with an older card just fine if you don't care about the shiny bits. In general, developers using the UE3 engine seem to target to a level that runs happily on the Xbox 360, and skip doing work towards optimizing for low end PCs - and that translates to a Radeon X1800 / GeForce 7900 -level hardware when playing at the common PC resolutions (1280x1024). In terms of "cards I can buy today", that would be a Radeon HD 2600 XT or GeForce 8600 GT - not massively expensive, but still pretty high for a minimum to play a game.  EA's Crysis can demand more power than any single graphics card can currently offer. At the high end, the video card manufacturers ensured that the requirements for running games at maximum settings went "off the scale". By promoting the new DirectX 10 API with titles such as Crysis, Lost Planet and Company of Heroes, for the first time in quite a while you effectively can't buy hardware that would be fast enough to run some of the available games at maximum settings - at least when playing at 1600x1200 or at the comparable widescreen resolutions - 1680x1050 or 1920x1200 (these are the resolutions which I consider to be the norm for a gamer that would buy a $500 video card). With the SLI/Crossfire support still plagued with problems, it seems that at the high end, games in 2007 generally outpaced the hardware. Part of the problem may be Vista - it definitely added its own overhead to the mix, and all the talk about how DX10 would increase performance by removing API bottlenecks has failed to turn into reality. Sure, all DX10 games so far have been DX9 games with some DX10 features patched in at the last moment to support the hardware manufacturers, often with development funds supplied by the people who want you to buy their shiny DX10 hardware. We are still waiting for that first DX10 title developed "from ground up" exclusively for DX10 that will show what the API can do - and with the current Vista adoption rate, we may have to wait for that a while longer. In fact, the next 3DMark is going to be a DX10 benchmark, attempting to predict the future in this regard - and it may end up being more forward-looking than the last one. DX10 may bring great things at some point in the future, but right now it is still mostly useless. So, what if you took DX10 off the table for now? No game at the moment requires it. Suddenly the current consumer-priced "gaming" cards such as ATI's Radeon HD 3870 and NVIDIA's GeForce 8800 GT look very good - they offer plenty of power to run anything out there in DX9 mode at (nearly) maximum settings. Many older cards such as NVIDIA GeForce 7900 series and ATI Radeon X1800/X1900 series are also adequate for the vast majority of games at very high quality settings - all they really lack is DX10, which isn't really needed at this point. Trends: RAM Midway's Stranglehold raised the RAM stakes in 2007, requiring 2GB to run on Windows Vista machines. The memory requirements of games have definitely crept up - an year ago, every game at least started with 512MB RAM. Today 1GB is the common minimum requirement, and in most cases even if the box claims you could run the game with 512MB, in practice it just won't be playable. 2007 also saw the first documented case of a game requiring 2GB - by John Woo's Stranglehold. In reality it turned out to require 2GB only on Vista - we got it to work with "only" 1.5GB on Windows XP. Vista is part of the reason - while XP effectively required 512MB for general use, Vista asks for 1GB. So in practice, if a game requires 1GB to run properly on XP, on Vista you have to add 512MB to that to get the same result. I have no idea how Microsoft ended up needing additional 512MB for the operating system, but that's how things are. It's a good thing memory is pretty cheap these days. DDR2 PC2-6400 DIMMs can be purchased at below $35 per gigabyte, so there is really no reason not to have 2GB on your system. Even 4GB would not out of the question, but it brings an additional quirk to the table. 32-bit operating systems and 32-bit applications cannot make full use of 4GB due to underlying technical limitations. All the CPUs these days have 64-bit support, and some motherboards are happy with 8GB, but the software sets the limitation. I'd personally choose to get 2GB today, while making sure that I could drop in additional 2GB (filling additional two memory slots) whenever it becomes necessary.
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