Worthwhile to upgrade?

[Smellincoffee]

It's been a long time since I was current with gaming trends and hardware. Back when I was subscribing to (and understanding) PC magazines, 512 mbs of ram was normal, and the only people with a gig of it were the ones with $4000 Alienware computers. I'd like to play games like Mafia 2, or Civilization 5, but when I install them they're unplayable. "Can my computer run...." websites generally flag my graphics card as inferior. These are my specs:

Card: GeForce 6150SE nForce 430. According to the control panel, its total memory is 1920 mbs.

Processor: AMD 9150, 1.8 GHZ
RAM: 7 GB
Hard drive: 583 GB


Based on this, is my big weakness just the graphics card? Also, how would I find out how much additional RAM my machine can accept?

 

[Zelig]

That computer's old, I wouldn't really bother upgrading any of it.

Good amount of RAM, but even the processor is somewhere between an iPhone 5S or an iPhone 6S in performance depending on how multithreaded the workload is.

On the plus side, civ5 is awful, so you're not missing anything on that front.

 

[Smellincoffee]

Thanks for the response. I purchased the PC in fall 2009, so I figured it would be dated. My biggest weakness in comparison shopping is that I know virtually nothing about graphics cards. I know if I buy a machine from a store it will probably come with a low-end card to cut costs, but what might I look for in the mid range? I'm more concerned with smoothness of play than jaw-dropping graphics.

 

[Zelig]

Depends what you're defining as "midrange". $1k gets you the Skull Canyon NUC. Best integrated graphics you can get, so not as good as high-end discrete cards but should be fine for Mafia 2 or Civ5. (Integrated graphics are greatly improved lately - that one I linked is about 10x faster what was available five years ago.)