🚀 go-pugleaf

Tanzen <waldby...@yahoo.com> looked up from reading the entrails of
the porn spammer to utter  "The Augury is good, the signs say:

>Whoever said that is extremely prone to exaggeration.

I said it, quoting hardware reviews I read online.

It's 2.5 months away from being 3 years old (introduced Sept 13, 2010)
and it was aimed at the midrange market.

See for instance
http://www.neoseeker.com/Articles/Hardware/Reviews/NVIDIA_GTS_450/

You don't get high performance cards for less than $200, that's the
midrange/budget area.  High end is going to run probably $400 and up
(can get a GTX 670 locally around $400 up to the GTX Titan at $1079.)

You can get a lot of performance out of a modern midrange card, but
you'll never be able to max out all the graphic settings in a new game
(unless that game has graphics that aren't modern.)

My current card is a generation newer than yours (GTX 550 Ti,)
outperforms your card in every way, and was a midrange card when I
bought it a couple years back.   It was designed as a midrange card,
just as yours was.

Mine is still enough for me in most games simply because I don't use
FSAA and AF and if need be I can turn down/off shadows and not really
miss them, and I don't need more than 30FPS ever, giving me enough
performance for my needs.  In games that let you do it, reducing
particle count for physics stuff can also give a relatively huge
performance boost without changing the visuals much.)

You might find this chart handy for comparisons when your shopping for
your next card.   (Not a substitute for reading reviews about the
specific card(s) you're considering, but will give you a broad overview
of relative power.)

Xocyll