A Very Useful Crib Sheet On Graphics Cards

Our thanks to DawnLBrown for reposting the following link on the EA forum, which gives us a sort of legitimate excuse to print it after all this time of being around and perhaps save you all some time and hassles the next time you are considering what graphic card to get next.

Now let’s be clear about this. The above from Mod The Sims is neither comprehensive nor foolproof. Red doesn’t necessarily mean dead.

For one, the part about integrated graphic chips is as long out of date as the old fashioned moans about integrated sound card over dedicated – those integrated graphics cards within many of the modern Sony Vaio series for starters. It’s a tale that no longer holds true, so do your own research.

We can also dismiss the part about the NVidia Dedicated GEForce8400 series card showing performance too poor due to power and heat issues in the G84 and G86 core series. Quite a number of screenshots appearing in The Mare’s Nest over the past four years have come from a battered old Dell XPS M1330 laptop (the original and utterly notorious model!) with an NVidia Dedicated GEForce 8400, and 4 Gigs of RAM with an 2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo – a museum piece.

But it runs all the Expansion Packs and Sims 3 lags no significantly worse than on the bang up to date Desktops with 2012 graphics cards, quad-cores and more RAM than an agricultural show – courtesy of EA’s crappy coding (it struggles on the big worlds, obviously!). The old story if you know what you’re doing with your computer and are prepared to put the work in…

(By the way, the G84 and G86 core issues also had a lot to do with the laptops they were specifically bunged into, a number of which were notorious for motherboard burnouts due to piss-poor heat extraction that were design faults of the laptops, not specifically the graphics cards, but that’s another long and boring tale…)

Nevertheless, as a quick ready reckoner to give you some idea whether you’ll be cruising or struggling with a particular card, this is excellent, far surpassing EA’s own user-unfriendly effort. As they stress, a good CPU and the most RAM you can are essential (from a personal point of view, switching to a Solid State Drive over a click-click-whirr drive also makes for a happier gaming experience all round!)

Here’s the link to the page in question on Mod The Sims, which we’ll assume will be updated from time to time, so well worth bookmarking if you are on the hunt for getting a new graphic card any time in the near or distant future.