Hey everyone!

I'm planning to do some upgrades on my Computer, but thought I'd get some advice from everyone, particularly with the Graphics Card, since I'm kind of out-in-the-wilderness with what my options are for that.

According to the Driver-Scan on their website, I'm currently using a NVIDIA GeForce GT 320, and I'm currently running Windows 7 64-Bit, with 8gb RAM. Hopefully that's of use in advising me-- I'm wondering what sort of things I should be looking for in an upgrade, and if there's any suggestions?

I'm in the UK, and my budget is about ￡150 /$US250 (which, at least from what I've seen so far, seems to be about mid-range on pricing? I've seen some for ￡40, and a few for ￡200, so...)

Any suggestions/input would be great

My own graphics card is a little old now (was pretty much top of the line at the time, but now a couple of years old), so I'm not up to date on the newest cards - but there are a few things you could consider:

Are you planning on running lots of graphics mods at high quality? HD textures, ENBs, supersample aliasing etc. will push even a top of the range graphics card to its limits. It may be better to spend a little more on a better card - more vRAM is always better.

Also, do you want it just for Skyrim or for other games as well? AMD is now the sole provider of GPUs for the new generation of consoles, so new games are likely to be better optimized for Radeon. Skyrim is possibly better optimized for nVidia.

That's not true at all. It comes down to the GPU. The better the GPU is, the less VRAM needed to perform similar tasks. Also, the GPU may not even be able to use the memory.

SKyrim itself isn't GPU heavy. In fact even weaker one can run Skyrim at max. VRAM is important as the game eats lots of it, especially with high res textures.

Using ENB however makes GPU far more important.

Hmm...maybe this is the case for low end and mid-range cards? Whenever I've done research on top-end cards in the past, having more vram always came out as just about edging out clock speed.

Yep - even without ENB (although with plenty of texture mods), my 2gb vram was pretty much swallowed up straight away. I had to lower AA settings to get reasonable performance.

It's hard to compare between cards. Really the only way to test it is using one card and testing different versions of that card where the only thing that is not constant is the VRAM amount. Generally speaking, it's usually better to go with a better GPU than it is to go with a lesser GPU and more VRAM.

Thanks for the replies, everyone

Ideally, yeah, I want to be able to play the latest games, and not just Skyrim-- right now, my main game IS Skyrim and a few older-ish ones, so getting those looking amazing, esp. with a few graphic Mods would be great; so I'll definitely look into increasing my budget, then

Is there anything special I'd need to check if I wanted to swap to an AMD? I.e., it's not like a different connection, or needs a special slot, or anything?

I would agree with jackstarr, and recommend for Skyrim a GeForce (nVidia) GPU with as much VRAM as you can reasonably get.

- nVidia GPU's generally seem to better suited for Skyrim, if that is your primary interest.

- The more VRAM you have, the more and larger textures can be stored in it, so there may be less of a need to continuously reload textures into the GPU during game play. I am no expert, but my understanding is, that having to continuously feed the GPU with textures can be a strain not only on the GPU, but on overall system resources (RAM, CPU) as well. This could be relevant, because Skyrim itself can demand much from those general system resources.

Edit:
Well, if Skyrim is not your primary interest, then I believe deaths_soul's points are very relevant. My understanding is, that not many other games would benefit from VRAM as much as Skyrim does, especially when modded. To make an optimal decision, you may really have to prioritize your goals.

Edit2:
Nothing of that nature, at least for a single-GPU system. I am not familiar with current dual-GPU compatibility requirements, if any, but I guess those would not be of interest to you either.

So you have 250$ to spend for GPU, if I understood well !!!!!

Your GT320 will not handle skyrim well.

btw. what's your CPU ????