We learned during the unnecessary 2020 pandemic lockdowns that graphics cards are not entirely essential for gaming. It turns out that your regular processor is pretty okay for gaming and works pretty well as a stopgap when there is a lockdown-inspired microchip shortage. Yet, if you want to play games on their highest settings or if you want to run your creative software at its most convenient settings, then you need a pretty good graphics card. Here are a few things to consider if you are a gamer or creative.
Use a Rendering Farm
Let’s address the elephant in the room when it comes to creatives. Use your high-end computer to run your creative software but leave the rendering to a rendering farm. We live in an age where it is far more efficient, eco-friendly, cheaper and faster to use a rendering farm than it is to leave your computer ticking away as it tries to render modern 3D-modeled creations and products. Use the information in this article to buy yourself the best possible graphics card and hardware to ensure the design process goes as smoothly and efficiently as possible.
The Amount of RAM
Freezes and crashes can mostly be avoided if you have enough RAM. Keep this in mind when you are searching for a computer to play games. If you are a creative, then a healthy amount of RAM will help speed up the creation process. It may also stop those system stalls that occasionally delete your work from your last auto-save. Enough RAM gives your computer some space to breathe, and luckily, thanks to advances in storage technology, buying products with a higher RAM content isn’t as expensive as it used to be.
Try to Balance Price and Performance
Graphics cards seem to lose value very quickly over a few years. With that in mind, using last year’s graphics card isn’t always a bad thing. Try to opt for graphics cards that dance the fine line between affordable and efficient.
For example, the Nvidia Quadro RTX 4000 has 8GB GDDR6 memory, it has 416GB/s and memory bandwidth, 2,304 GPU cores and a base clock speed of 1,0005 MHz, with a boost clock speed of 1,545 MHz. It is reasonably priced but allows your systems to stretch their legs, allowing you to play games on medium-to-high settings.
What Type of Gamer Are You?
Gamers could write books on the correct setup for different gaming priorities. Added to this, the rules change each year as the graphics card manufacturers fight to become the best in one area or another. Nevertheless, here are the most common priorities.
SFF (Small Form Factor) gaming was what gaming consoles used to be before Sony and Microsoft released their massive gaming consoles. An SFF needs a powerful graphics card that is reasonably sized and that doesn’t need a hovercraft motor to cool it down.
High Refresh Rates are required for a variety of gamers, from e-sports and shooters to people who are creating top-quality content and need to see every frame as clearly as possible.
Gamers on a budget can work with larger machines and often can stretch their processing units by turning down the FPS (Frames Per Second) from 60 or by lowering the graphics settings. Oddly, gamers on a budget have the widest variety of options available to them.
VR processing is pretty straightforward, but your current graphics card is not future-proof. As VR progresses, computers are going to need more powerful graphics processors in order to keep up with the improvements in graphics that VR devices are likely to get.
Best-performance mid-range cards are for people who have some cash to splash but don’t “Need” every game to have super high frame rates. These are for people who want to play anything that other PC gamers and console gamers are playing. They want a robust experience and will usually enjoy the best graphics settings without any issues.
These days, good gaming doesn’t always require the best PC and graphics cards. In most cases, if a game performs poorly, it is because of the developers and not because of the gamer’s hardware.
