I'm not much of a gamer, except that I love Madden football games on PC. Right now I'm stuck with the stock integrated video circuit on my motherboard that I bought about 6 months ago. It's a Gigabyte GA-M61 SME-S2, which are already obsolete at MicroCenter, where I bought it.

 

Needless to say, the video performance ain't that great. I've managed to tweak enough settings to get it managable to enjoy my game. But geez, it's far from the smooth, quality video I see on my kid's Xbox.

 

So, I'm ready to upgrade to a PCIe now. My question is, what kind of PCIe video card specs should I be looking at to attain a smooth video performance on Madden? (in case anyone has any experience with that particular game)

 

Personally, I thought this would be about right:

http://www.microcenter.com/single_product_results.phtml?product_id=0291635

 

Do I have to blow big bucks, are will a practical 50 dollar augment do the trick?

that one should be fine. dedicated videocards will outstrip any integrated graphics solution by an order of magnitude or two.

Thanks IA, that's the one I bought and you're absolutely right, it's much smoother.

yep, although, given time, integrated graphics chips will be able to outstrip it, for instance, the intel X3100 integrated chip in my laptop, in some circumstances, beats the pants off my Geforce FX5200 thats in my desktop. the part where the dedicated card wins is in sustained performance but thats it.