For the past year or so, many of the games I have been playing on my PC have been set to the minimum settings and the lowest resolutions just to make sure they run fine.

Battlefield 2, in particular, I’ve been playing for eight or nine months, and it’s been on the minimum settings from the outset, though it runs at a playable frame rate (probably about 20-25). The game is one of the prettiest games recently, but on my computer you’d never know it — it looks like a game from three or four years ago.

With a few new games coming out this year that I want to play — such as Neverwinter Nights 2 — I knew I’d have to perform some sort of upgrade to my computer this year.

Well, the last straw was when I fired up The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. I’d expected I’d need the settings to be on minimum — after all, it’s a pretty hefty game — but even at those settings it ran pathetically slow; after a little bit of browsing the game’s forums I found that my GeForce FX5600 which is listed on the “minimum requirements” webpage is not actually supported as part of the minimum requirements. What gives? I managed to get the game running under the minimum settings but even then it chugged a bit.

I’d been hoping to wait another eight months before upgrading my computer since I wanted to get a lot of new bits, but my plans have since changed and I decided to buy an interim upgrade, which will hopefully last twelve to eighteen months (though I don’t expect it will make eighteen).

I bought an XFX GeForce 6800GS which is about the best card available for ye olde AGP systems nowadays — it’s all PCIe (or PCX, depending on how you want to write it; to me that’s a graphics format, though). And after a lot of trouble getting it running, it runs mostly smoothly; most importantly, I am able to run games at medium (even high, in a few cases!) so things actually look pretty again.

I would have preferred not to spend the money, but being a PC gamer can be a very expensive hobby.