I have an Intel i7-4770 CPU (from 2013) and I don’t think I have ever been CPU-bound so I would rather not spend money on upgrading it. However, I want to upgrade my graphics card to a Radeon RX 7600. My motherboard supports PCIE 3.0 which the RX 7600 is fine with.
Is there anything I should look out for? I’m worried that I’m missing something that will prevent me from running a 2023 video card on hardware ten years older than that.
(In case anyone is curious, my current video card is a GeForce GTX 960. It has been good enough for Diablo 2 Resurrected but I don’t think it will be able to handle Baldur’s Gate 3.)
If I’m not going to be getting the full performance of that card, should I consider buying an older card instead, if the older card would be just as fast in practice?
(How can I know the effective performance of a video card on my system?)
I have a PC of theseus. My CPU and GPU get swapped out on alternating 3-5 year intervals. I buy the best GPU I can afford KNOWING that in a few years I’m going to be upgrading my CPU. My computer is an eternal bottleneck.
If you just plan on keeping everything as is for as long as possible then getting a less powerful GPU would hurt you at all. It would save you some cash.
No you really should get the best GPU you can afford. Yes you will be bottlenecked, but only on more recent games where game devs are really trying to squeeze what they can out of the latest Xbox and PS5.
CPU upgrades are relatively cheap compared to GPU upgrades as well.