Replacement for my nvidia GT 610 - what would you suggest.

this will be a long post...

This is an interesting problem, which I am sure is relevant to many people running older hardware, and not wanting to spend a fortune upgrading just to play new games. Posters have been pulling in 3 different directions: upgrade OS & RAM; upgrade GPU; or install SSD. I am going to expand on these options and hopefully help you decide.

1st option - upgrade OS and RAM. If your OS was installed on your PC when you got it, you probably have the OEM version of Windows 10, not the full version. The difference is that people who own the full version of windows can install either 32 bit or 64 bit version, and change for free if they want. If you only own the OEM version, you cannot do this and would have to buy Windows 10 in addition to whatever RAM you are going to add.

You should also know that, in general 32 bit OS's are more efficient with the RAM at at their disposal, because they only write 32 bits at a time. So a boolean value (True or False) would be 31 zeros followed by a 0 or 1 for True or False. On a 64 bit system, that same value would be 63 zeros followed by a 0 or 1 for True or False, because 64 bit OS's write 64 bits at a time to memory, regardless of how small the value to be saved is.

2nd option - upgrade GPU (but not OS & RAM.) Assuming what Flashorn posted is true about 4GB RAM limit including Video RAM also, then a beefier video card would likely cut into the RAM available for running the software. The more memory the GPU used for graphics performance, the less you would have available to run the software. Hard for me to say for sure whether that would make a big difference or not.

I have looked at benchmarks that compare your GPU to the GT 1030 posters have recommended, and the 1030 seems much better (like 6 to 8 times better). But I am fairly certain those results are from 64 bit systems, where there was no need to share RAM addresses with the OS.

3rd option - Install SSD. Unlike the other options, you should be able to just add this in - the other two options are swapping old for new. So you would still have your HDD. SSDs are just better technology than HDDs, and if they were cheaper, no one would even buy HDDs anymore. As long as you have a spare SATA port and a spare power connector, you should think about adding an SSD to this machine at some point. However, to really get the most out of your SSD you will need to transfer your OS to the SSD, so you can boot from it, which might be a bit of work.

As far as which to choose, personally I think either a new GPU or adding an SSD will get you the best results. I can only offer the following guidance:

Upgrading your GPU will help if playing games at the lowest possible quality settings, gives you adequate performance - but you want higher quality.

Using an SSD will help if games are just taking too long to load the game assets from the hard drive into RAM.



PS - whatever you decide, post again and let us know how it went.

yu gnomi said:

this will be a long post...

This is an interesting problem, which I am sure is relevant to many people running older hardware, and not wanting to spend a fortune upgrading just to play new games. Posters have been pulling in 3 different directions: upgrade OS & RAM; upgrade GPU; or install SSD. I am going to expand on these options and hopefully help you decide.

1st option - upgrade OS and RAM. If your OS was installed on your PC when you got it, you probably have the OEM version of Windows 10, not the full version. The difference is that people who own the full version of windows can install either 32 bit or 64 bit version, and change for free if they want. If you only own the OEM version, you cannot do this and would have to buy Windows 10 in addition to whatever RAM you are going to add.

You should also know that, in general 32 bit OS's are more efficient with the RAM at at their disposal, because they only write 32 bits at a time. So a boolean value (True or False) would be 31 zeros followed by a 0 or 1 for True or False. On a 64 bit system, that same value would be 63 zeros followed by a 0 or 1 for True or False, because 64 bit OS's write 64 bits at a time to memory, regardless of how small the value to be saved is.

2nd option - upgrade GPU (but not OS & RAM.) Assuming what Flashorn posted is true about 4GB RAM limit including Video RAM also, then a beefier video card would likely cut into the RAM available for running the software. The more memory the GPU used for graphics performance, the less you would have available to run the software. Hard for me to say for sure whether that would make a big difference or not.

I have looked at benchmarks that compare your GPU to the GT 1030 posters have recommended, and the 1030 seems much better (like 6 to 8 times better). But I am fairly certain those results are from 64 bit systems, where there was no need to share RAM addresses with the OS.

3rd option - Install SSD. Unlike the other options, you should be able to just add this in - the other two options are swapping old for new. So you would still have your HDD. SSDs are just better technology than HDDs, and if they were cheaper, no one would even buy HDDs anymore. As long as you have a spare SATA port and a spare power connector, you should think about adding an SSD to this machine at some point. However, to really get the most out of your SSD you will need to transfer your OS to the SSD, so you can boot from it, which might be a bit of work.

As far as which to choose, personally I think either a new GPU or adding an SSD will get you the best results. I can only offer the following guidance:

Upgrading your GPU will help if playing games at the lowest possible quality settings, gives you adequate performance - but you want higher quality.

Using an SSD will help if games are just taking too long to load the game assets from the hard drive into RAM.



PS - whatever you decide, post again and let us know how it went.

Don't take my word for it:

How much RAM does your version of Windows support?

Memory Limits for Windows and Windows Server Releases (Windows)

Don't forget, that 4 G of RAM includes everything on the PC that uses RAM at some point in it's operation.
So, the 32 bit OS [any OS] will be presented with what's left.

I also only suggested to upgrade the OS , not the RAM.


Flashorn

@ Flashorn - I was not actually disagreeing with you or even doubting you, it had simply never occurred to me that GPU and CPU would share memory addressing before I read your post, and so was a bit cautious. I have come around, and I believe you are right on about that.

The bigger picture here is that 32 bit computing reached it's limits (at least for desktops) some time ago, and has been superseded by 64 bit computing. New hardware and high-end games are made for 64 bit CPUs with 64 bit OS's. However, millions of people (probably 10's or 100's of millions) still use 32 bit OS's with older CPUs that might be 32 bit or 64 bit processors.

However, my own experience of running Windows XP (32 bit) and Debian (Wheezy) Linux (64 bit) on the same system in a dual-boot situation, leads me to believe that just changing from 32-bit to 64 bit, with the same hardware, gives no improvements. This is based on comparing performance of some cross-platform softwares I installed on both OS's -e.g. Eclipse IDE, Code::Blocks IDE, GIMP and Opera browser. That is why I don't endorse upgrading the OS to 64 bit windows, unless he can do it cost free.

In my view, this is a matter of shoe-horning the right hardware into what is essentially an obsolete system (I hope no one's feelings are hurt by me framing the issue this way.) In that light I still think that either adding an SSD or upgrading the GPU is the best way.

However, I think that, if you stay with 32 bit windows, you should probably only look at GPUs that come with 1GB or less of RAM. A GPU that comes with 2 GB or more will cut into the amount of available RAM you have for general use. AMD made some GPUs (7850, 7770, etc.) that are quite powerful, but only have 1GB RAM. They are a few years old, and you can probably only get them from websites like Amazon or Newegg.

I would either go with the GeForce GTX 1050 Ti or the 1060 as a midrange GPU upgrade. That way you get the awesome Pascal architecture and all the improvements that come along with all architectures since Fermi.

And of course if you want to upgrade to high-end later on, the 1070, 1080 or 1080 Ti are great GPUs.

Skofab said:

My only remaining query (arises from one of the posts) relates to graphics card memory - as far as I am aware this memory is there to assist the ram. The card provides this addition to spare the initial 'drainage' from the starting nominal ram figure.
Therefore a card with 2Gb memory is better than a card with 1Gb memory.
Have I been wrong for many years on this issue?

Explaining this will unavoidably get technical. For a 64 bit OS with 64 bit CPU, the more RAM on a GPU, the better. Situation is different for 32 bit OS because of the limit of number of possible memory addresses.

A standard write to memory for 32 bit OS is copying the entire contents of a 32 bit register on the CPU, to a memory address found in a separate 32 bit register. A standard read from memory is copying 32 bits worth of data from memory address found in a specific 32 bit register to a separate register found on the CPU.

The number of possible memory addresses is limited by possible unique values in 32 bit register, which is 2 to the 32nd power (2^32), which is around 4 billion, which translates to 4 GB RAM.

From https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/lib...its_windows_10

How graphics cards and other devices affect memory limits

Devices have to map their memory below 4 GB for compatibility with non-PAE-aware Windows releases. Therefore, if the system has 4GB of RAM, some of it is either disabled or is remapped above 4GB by the BIOS. If the memory is remapped, X64 Windows can use this memory. X86 client versions of Windows don’t support physical memory above the 4GB mark, so they can’t access these remapped regions. Any X64 Windows or X86 Server release can.
X86 client versions with PAE enabled do have a usable 37-bit (128 GB) physical address space. The limit that these versions impose is the highest permitted physical RAM address, not the size of the IO space. That means PAE-aware drivers can actually use physical space above 4 GB if they want. For example, drivers could map the "lost" memory regions located above 4 GB and expose this memory as a RAM disk.

Windows 10 does not support PAE (from https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/lib...(v=vs.85).aspx)

So, because of the 4 billion limit on number of possible memory addresses, the more RAM your GPU has, the more addresses your BIOS will re-map to the GPU, the less of your installed RAM will be available to your OS.

64 bit OS would not have this issue.