Is a good gaming PC good for other things too?

[Red Stranger]

Hi, if I get a good gaming PC, does that mean my computer will do well with other programs that require good/fast graphics too?

 

[Dida]

Good gaming PC usually means good graphics, so yes.

 

[Genocidicbunny]

I have to say this.....no duh. Computers come in 3 categories (im generalising). Work, Multimedia and Gaming. Work computers are the slowest of the bunch since they are mostly used for internet surfing and other low intencity tasks. Multimedia computers are good for viewing movies and stuff like that and they can play most games from 2004-2005. Gaming computers are designed to be the best of the bunch. They are the computers that are designed to be fast and very versatile. So they are good for everything. So to answer your question again-yes, if you get a gaming computer it will most likely be good at multimedia and general work. Unless you6 get some really specialized comp. But that doesnt happen often.

 

[Speedo]

By definition a "good gaming PC" is going to be one of the most powerful home PCs available, so yes.l

 

[Maniacal]

Nah, they are all wrong, it'll be COMPLETELY useless for anything else. I wish I had a good gaming compter.

 

[Dr. Yoshi]

For almost anything the average consumer would want to do, a gaming PC is the best of the best. However, if you are going to be working with CGI and video compositing, then it would be better to have a OpenGL-accelerated graphics card rather than the DirectX-accelerated graphics card used in gaming. Of course, because all modern PC games use the DirectX API, this means that a system with an OpenGL card would be crap for gaming. That isn't to say that a DirectX card wouldn't work with compositing and CGI applications, the previews will just be slower and with some compositing packages the rendering times will be as well. Image software such as Photoshop, on the other hand, relies almost exclusively on the CPU so it wouldn't matter which type of graphics card you went with.

 

[Speedo]

For almost anything the average consumer would want to do, a gaming PC is the best of the best. However, if you are going to be working with CGI and video compositing, then it would be better to have a OpenGL-accelerated graphics card rather than the DirectX-accelerated graphics card used in gaming. Of course, because all modern PC games use the DirectX API, this means that a system with an OpenGL card would be crap for gaming. That isn't to say that a DirectX card wouldn't work with compositing and CGI applications, the previews will just be slower and with some compositing packages the rendering times will be as well. Image software such as Photoshop, on the other hand, relies almost exclusively on the CPU so it wouldn't matter which type of graphics card you went with.

All good graphics cards support OpenGL in addition to DX. nVidia has always had excellent OpenGL support, and ATI has greatly improved theirs in the last few drivers revisions. Certainly not performance on the level of a workstation card (but you're paying a fraction of the price, what do you expect?), but more than than most people will ever use.

In fact, for nVidia at least, the high end Geforce and Quadro cards have cores that are essentially identical.

 

[dragokatzov]

depends....

generally speaking yes, a good gaming computer will make everything run fast, but there are exceptions

for example, graphic rendering...
Geforce and Radeon GPU's suck at this. You need cards like the Quadro or the FireGL for these applications....

 

[FriendlyFire]

depends....

generally speaking yes, a good gaming computer will make everything run fast, but there are exceptions

for example, graphic rendering...
Geforce and Radeon GPU's suck at this. You need cards like the Quadro or the FireGL for these applications....

Thats causes games uses low poloygon counts + high textures and bump mapping. While grpahics rendering uses massive pologyon counts