Which graphics card is better?

[Raijin17]

I have two computers and want to play World of Warcraft on one of them. It takes forever to install and update so to avoid installing on both machines to see which it plays better on I thought id just ask here.
One machine (a notebook) has the NVIDIA GeForce g0 6150 graphics card and the other machine (A desktop) has the ATI Radeon XPRESS 200 series.
I would just like to know which one would get a better framerate with the game. Thanks!

 

[hunter315]

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/best-graphics-card,2404-7.html

They are both 4 tiers up from the bottom which is really bad, for the desktop get a cheap 4650, it will perform worlds better than the Xpress 200, wont cost too much, and wont draw much power.

 

[Raijin17]

Ok so as it stands right now though they both would perform basically the same?

 

[MrCommunistGen]

Neither will be very fast and I don't even know if either will be enough (I don't play WoW). Generally I'd say that the 6150 is faster than XPress 200, except that the 6150 in this case is on a mobile platform and may have lower clock speeds. The graphics hierarchy chart shows both GPUs to be at the same level Link Also note that one card is AMD/ATI and the other is Nvidia so it will depend which WoW generally "prefers." What are the other specs for the system? CPU/RAM are also important.

You should probably install on both to see which is better... You might try installing and updating the game on one machine and then just copying over the game folder to the other machine instead of reinstalling it.

-mcg

 

[Raijin17]

Thanks for the info.. I used to have it installe don the notebook so I know that it runs on there.. albeit not very fast though (10 to 20 fps with windows 7, sigh) Was basically jsut wondering if the desktop as it is now would be any better off before i re-install the game.. Sounds like I could expect it to perform essentially the same though. Thanks guys.

 

[Gulli]

Get the 4650 as suggested (this would of course go into the desktop.)

 

[photonboy]

But..

You have not said what the rest of your hardware is. In particular, the CPU will limit how much of your graphics card can be used.

For example:
The AMD X2-4800+ will be the bottleneck in about 5% of the games when paired with an HD3870. In most games the CPU runs at closer to 80%. The best balance would be an X2-4800+ and an HD4770.

You can look your CPU up on this chart:
http://www.cpubenchmark.net/index.php

The HD4650 512MB is a good choice for lower-end CPU's that are still powerful enough to use it. Don't get the 1GB version, it's marketing hype as a GPU at this level can't utilize 1GB for a single game on the market. You also should have at least 2GB of RAM if possible. 4GB is optimal and more than that is a waste unless you have a specific application need which is rare.

Here's an example of a lower end system that should play nice with WOW. I've looked at the chart for reference:

X2 3800+
HD4650 512MB
2GB DDR

This won't run a lot of the latest high-end games but WOW is one of the best optimized games around. The graphics also look best on a good CRT compared to any LCD monitor. You'd have to pry my 19" Viewsonic from my cold, dead hands. The viewing angle, contrast and color is still untouched by any LCD. I also watch movies on it which an LCD monitor can't compare with. Eventually I'll go OLED. If you can find a good used 19" CRT (hard to do) get one. You have to see it though.

About scaling:
Most people don't scale properly so they usually operate at a lower resolution so the text is large enough. There is no perfect solution but this is the best one. Do this for a 4:3 of 1600x1200 native res or widescreen of 1920x1200 (or 1920x1080).

1. Set to its highest resolution
2. Change DPI scaling to 150%
3. Disable DPI for programs that have issues with it (right-click the main EXE and click "Properties")

*DPI scaling should ONLY be used when your monitor is at its highest resolution. If you set a monitor to a lower resolution it DOES use all the pixels but it simply calculates the screen based on the lower resolution then scales it to fit the screen which doesn't produce pixels which are as sharp.

**Firefox presently does not work well with high DPI scaling (but Internet Explorer 8 works awesomely.)