Can I Speed up gameplay without upgrading graphics card?

[Rubberbandman]

I've got 512Mb Ram, 2.8Ghz Celeron D processor & Radeon 9200 graphics card. I know that if set my games to the lower detail levels they will play fine, but would it help if i bought another ram module or is a new graphics card the only option.

 

[N3051M]

The graphics card is fine, although some of us would think that its not as powerfull as ones you get today... but all in all, the extra ram to bump it 1GB would help, but your main bottleneck is your Celeron processor, as they aren't realy designed for numbercrunching...

 

[Tedster]

A celeron is a low end CPU and not designed for gaming. 512mb should be sufficient for most games. 1gb might improve things a tad.

 

[kitty500cat]

So if I have the processor, graphics, and RAM that are listed in my signature, upgrading to a gig of RAM won't help that much?

 

[sllewe]

So if I have the processor, graphics, and RAM that are listed in my signature, upgrading to a gig of RAM won't help that much?

It really depends on what game you are playing.

 

[Rubberbandman]

It really depends on what game you are playing.

Personally I'm playing NFS Most Wanted

 

[kitty500cat]

It really depends on what game you are playing.

I play SimCity 4 and also NFS Underground, although the latter I haven't played in a while.

 

[notcorn]

I play SimCity 4 and also NFS Underground, although the latter I haven't played in a while.

This is your motherboard isn't it ?
http://www.dealtime.com/xPF-Asustek_MATX_MBD_KM400_FSB333_AUDIO_LAN_MATX_MBD_KM400_FSB333_AUDIO_LAN
In my opinion a new graphics card would yield the most performance increase. Even a reasonably cheap AGP8X card would perform far better than your integrated graphics and would free an extra 64mb RAM which your onboard graphics currently uses. The card you should get depends on how much you are willing to spend.

 

[Tedster]

So if I have the processor, graphics, and RAM that are listed in my signature, upgrading to a gig of RAM won't help that much?

your biggest bottleneck is intergrated graphics. That's fine for officework, but games require a card.