Great choices abound, but is a new card the answer to sluggish video performance?

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In the last few years, video cards have seen tremendous gains in both performance and display quality. Video-card manufacturers are delivering their latest and fastest hardware to those folks willing to pay a premium. Read on to see if you really need that pricey new card. Then see how some of the new video screamers reacted to our tests.

Two acronyms you'll see in conjunction with video cards are PCI and AGP. These two acronyms describe the method by which a video card connects to a motherboard. If your motherboard is equipped with an AGP slot, then you should purchase an AGP-compatible video card. Before you buy anything, consult your PC's manual to see if it comes with an AGP slot. If it doesn't, you'll need to be on the lookout for a PCI-based video card. Unfortunately, PCI video cards are based on aging designs that will choke on the extreme eye candy of modern games.

Today's video cards depend on a variety of system resources, especially the CPU. In addition to feeding the video card with the information it needs to function smoothly, the CPU must also perform the bidding of any active resident programs. Those programs include what is usually the biggest resident of all: the operating system. Modern video cards can churn through more data than all but the fastest CPUs. Any load you can remove from the CPU will translate into increased video performance. But this trick will only get you so far.

Pairing a new video card with an aging CPU is a recipe for sluggishness. The cost of a top-of-the-line 3D video card is currently $300 to $400, depending on additional options. That is about as much as the fastest AMD or Intel CPUs.

So before you plunk down your hard-earned cash on a new video card consider upgrading your CPU. Last year, we upgraded a system from a 450-MHz processor to a relatively speedy 1400-MHz CPU (an inexpensive upgrade, if your current motherboard can support it) while continuing to use the same video hardware. Our gains in video performance with this single upgrade measured 50 percent to 100 percent, depending on the application. (The applications we used were none other than our favorite games.)

Remember to load up on memory. Having 512MB of system memory or more allows the latest games to reside completely in memory thus avoiding the performance-killing hard-drive swap.

Three-dimensional games are among the best real-world video-card benchmarks due to their intense CPU usage and the demands they place on the video system. If a slow CPU is already working overtime to perform the calculations required for a game, a high-end video card will spend more time sitting idle, waiting for new information. Therefore, if you don't run many programs (games) that require strong video hardware, consider saving that cash for future updates or a completely new system.


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