Fairfox: Despite playing all my games on it (both old
and new), my two-year-old PC is essentially made for an office, because:
1) I know nothing about building computers and simply
have to go for pre-built garbage.
2) It was cheaper than buying a dedicated gaming rig, and cheap is where I need to be (ooh eer).
3) It's still got an okay graphics card inside (think low(est?) level Nvidia). I guess they were catering for the secretly-playing-games office worker.
A high likelihood of integrated components, so you're looking at a fairly weak video card (
although a card strong enough to play Diablo 2 in direct draw is enough for me :P). I played Diablo 2 for 7 or so years with 8-bit palette and direct draw just fine. (
1.09d & zy-el i'd recommend). Actually some video cards are now integrated in the CPU chip.
As for the video card.. many computers include an express gpu slot you can put in a decent video card, which is going to be limited more by your power supply. So if you aren't sure what you have, a lower amp video card (
mobile or low power chip set) is better, while if you have 600+ Watt power supply you can get some of the higher end cards that just eat up a lot of power... and i'm not sure they are really worth it... So far built in decoding of mpeg4 has been more valuable to me than anything else on my card.
Then again the big pushers for hardware and 3D graphics is usually first person shooters & newer games, if you enjoy sprites, scrolling, emulating 16bit systems (
or PS1), schmups, or others, you probably don't need the newest cards. Even 3D based games like spellforce have fairly low polygons on almost all units (
since you're usually zoomed out) so it's not a huge speed penalty.