Graphics Cards

[Aratron]

no, your memory (ram) is used to store data you're currently using, so when you're playing games, data gets loaded into your memory for temporary use, thats why when you're walking on something, and you don't save it to your hard drive, you lose it when you shut the porgram or pc down.

an easy way to explain it is your hard drive is a filing cabinet, used to store all your programs and data, your memory is your desk, so when you're walking on it, you fetch it from your filing cabinet, and work on it all on your desk, when you're done, you take it back to the filing cabinet and file it away, otherwise the office cleaner comes and throws it away thinking its rubbish

i have say asked the pc how much ram is available , it will say 212mb out of 252mb. if a game needs 252 to run, i the same still gonna be able to run?

[dan the acid man]

look at the minimum specs for the game you're playing, if it says 512Mb or less you will be fine, im sure the game you're on about only requires 256Mb, so 512Mb will be ok.

although having said that, minimum specs on games is exactly that, the minimum your pc needs for it to run, i'd always want a little more of everything they ask.

but 512Mb for this game will be enough

[Aratron]

have you ever played star trek - birth of the federation?
my fav game period

[dan the acid man]

no, im not a trek fan

[danielmarshall]

The GeForce 7800GS is available for AGP now and it's a great card. If you're wise though you'll spend about half that and get 75% of the performance on a GeForce 6800GS. That works out to $AU380 in Australia. Not sure how much that is in pommy speak. It has all the nice pretty DirectX 9 shader feeatures technology too and should be good enough to run just about anything for a while.