Fallout 3 mods on the Xbox

[Bofast]

It's two generations later. The 8800 in comparison with a 7950 is about twice as powerful, and I think the 9800 is basically a rebranded 8800, so you may have a point. But I think it plays it, at least.

It seems to play it, indeed. Not too shabby http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rRzGnNB10b0&feature=related

Yup. But bottlenecking because of a crappy VGA is way better than bottlenecking because of a crappy CPU or motherboard.

morb has it right...

its far more important to have a good CPU than a good GPU...

too good of a GPU and a low end CPU will mean you will severely under-drive that GPU making it perform very poorly.

too good of a CPU and a poor GPU will just mean that some games will not run due to no shaders, which only becomes important for brand spanking new cards...

I don't think I can agree with you on that. If you are bottlenecked by the CPU, meaning your GPU is faster than it needs to be to keep up, you can usually increase AA and AF and stuff to make the GPU work harder for an overall better picture/experience.

If you are bottlenecked by the GPU, you typically have to lower resolution, AA, AF and similar to improve performance, since you are often not able to do anything to make the game use more of the CPU. Oh, and it typically doesn't mean that some games just won't run, since pretty much every new game uses DX9, and pretty much every card sold since nVidias 6000-series and ATIs X800 series, or something like that, are compatible with DX9. It rather means that you might end up with anything from 1 to 20 FPS. My laptop, for example, has a ATI Mobility 3470 GPU which has all the features needed to run 3DMark06, but only enough power to give me 3-4 FPS on average.

Of course, if you do a lot of other things that are CPU-heavy, like video encoding or something, then having a powerful CPU can be very important anyway. Still, I think one should try to balance both CPU and GPU power to be somewhat evenly matched.

Oh, and since when are motherboards typically a noticable bottleneck?

plus upgrading a GPU is much easier than upgrading a CPU

That I can agree on, and so can AMD/ATI
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1DPQW0e9ufM

 

[Morbus]

I don't think I can agree with you on that.

And so don't all the geeks who think they know anything about computers all over the internet. No offense, you may well be right on your point, because I myself am not an expert, but the general consensus of the dudes who know nothing about it is that having the latest VGA with a pentium 4 is better than having a 6800 with the latest CPU...

And I will remind you all that the CPU is responsible for many operations concerning graphical quality too. Not to mention overall performance in assimilating all the information processed. Yeah, sometimes you're getting low framerates, not because your VGA isn't able to deliver, but because the rest of your computer is lagging. It's pretty simple to see too: with most games, your VGA is almost never at its top. That's why SOME games overheat it: the games that put it at its maximum...

Oh, and since when are motherboards typically a noticable bottleneck?

Since long ago. I saw in increase in TWICE the FPS on Crysis by a simple change of motherboard. Granted the dude only had 10 or so FPS with the old one, but still...

 

[TheWesDude]

everything gets pre-proccessed by the CPU in some form or another.

the engine runs on the CPUs, not the GPUs. the engine determines what gets loaded and run by the GPU. while PCI-E lowers that CPU overhead by a bit, it does not eliminate it.

if the CPU cannot drive the game engine at acceptable levels, how good your GPU is is quite irrelevant.

and changing the mobo helped the FPS either by a better mobo FSB, or by better PCI-E implementation/speed.

 

[frosty_theaussie]

This could hurt future dlc sales for Bethesda and their design philosophy, since now their main fanbase will have access to mods that show how easily it is to create additional deeper and free content and will ask that from Bethesda.

No it won't, it only works on the 360 and only on units that can perform the JTAG hack. The effort required to obtain such a unit and carry out the hack is very restrictive.