new videocard question

[sebvieira]

Hi,

I'm getting a new laptop from work, which got an nvidia nvs 4200m inside, a 2.5G i5 and 4G ram. Probably the most important piece is the videocard. My question is, is this enough to play Civ5 comfortably? Right now i have a intel core duo 2.4Ghz with 4G ram and an nvidia nvs 160m card, which performs quite horribly (i have to turn all options to 'low' or 'off', and even then i can't play more than a couple of turns before things start to slow down enormously.

Thanks for any response,

S

edit: this is the card: http://www.notebookcheck.net/NVIDIA-NVS-4200M.47343.0.html

 

[tokala]

It should be about an order of magnitude faster than the old one
But still nothing to write home about. Especially as it's not meant for gaming and the drivers might not be optimized for CiV.

Nevertheless you should be able to find a graphics setting where CiV runs reasonably fluid without looking too ugly

 

[sebvieira]

Hi, and thanks for your reply. I can also choose other models, one of them has a NVIDIA Quadro FX 880M card. Will this improve performance?

Sorry if i'm asking obvious questions. I just don't know much about video cards.

 

[tokala]

Those are not obvious questions, the naming scheme of the Quadro chips is utterly confusing
Without looking at the specs you can't even begin to guess how suitable those might be for playing CiV. Some rough overview, better ones on top of the list:

1. Quadro 2000M
2. Quadro 1000M
3. Quadro FX 1800M
4. Quadro FX 880M/Quadro NVS 5100M
5. Quadro NVS 4200M

From 2.-4. there should not be THAT much of a difference in performance, 5. might be severely handicapped by the 64 bit memory interface and 1. plays in a league of its own.

 

[timtofly]

That link you posted has a column of the video (choices) down the middle of the page. It mixes in both mobile and desktop cards, but you can see which class each one is in. I have a below specs HP laptop that is 6 years old and it has a class 3 Nvidia Go 7600. It handles the graphics just fine. The computer itself bogs down (no matter what the graphic settings are) after about half way through the game. Every time a city is added or units, the ability to cycle through turns is severly decreased. Anything in a laptop will be slower than its counterpart Desktop System.

After the 150th city, the choice of just adding what to build in the city que is extremely slow. It may take about 7 seconds just to register each choice. Having a great video card is important, but putting all the computer components together and having them work great with each other is important also.