Graphics card

I once played Sins on a computer that had an 8400. It worked okay (at least medium), but I eventually had serious stability issues with it. I think it was the Vista operating system that was to blame, not the card, but I could be wrong.

You can probably play it at the lowest settings and enjoy it just fine.  Since it's a strategy game you'll spend most of your time zoomed out managing ships and fleets and not zoomed in staring at eye candy.  I play it at the lowest settings even though I have an 8800 GT to reduce the load on my CPU and RAM and it doesn't bother me at all.

I don't think graphics cards make a bit of difference with Sins. CPU restrictions are going to get you long before the graphics card does.

indeed.  i run fine on a 7300gs.

sins IS cpu/RAM bound, not video card.

if you want the best sins performance get the fastest ram you can and overcloack the FSB on the cpu, just make sure you have a very good cpu heatsink and lots of air moving through the case.

harpo

im playing it on an ati radeon 3100 and a 2 ghz processor and it works fine even with an improved graphics mod, but will this lead to serious stability issues later on

Your processor is most certainly going to be the limiting factor, not graphics...I have a 512 ATI (which is likely not as good as anything geforce) and graphic settings are completely unrelated to performance...as more objects (basically, ships and SC) enter the game, things can get slower regardless of my settings...

If you were to improve your computer for the sole sake of making it better for sins play (a noble, worthy cause indeed ), I'd go for improving the processor...just remember, this game is not multi-threaded, so the individual bus speed and processing speed of each processor is what is most important....a 1.8 quad-core is not as good as a 2.0 dual-core when it comes to playing sins....

If you are having performance problems and don't want to upgrade your hardware, there are mods out there that improve game performance by reducing the size of files needed and preventing weapon effects lasting forever and random quirks like that...I have a friend that uses a quad-core (does sound and video stuff) which isn't great on the individual processor level....he says that the mod he uses improved the performance by a fair amount....

These mods don't change the game mechanics in any way...they simply improve the efficiency of the game and have very little affect on the graphics quality...

I don't know if it's the CPU or the RAM that ends up lagging my games later on, but it's definitely not the video card.  The fact that Sins is pretty much single-threaded and RAM intensive doesn't help, especially on an older dual core rig that only has 2 GB of RAM.

Sins is 32 bit and there is a hard coded limit on how much RAM it can use anyway...at a certain point, the amount of RAM you have won't matter, though I suppose how fast your computer can access RAM would make a difference...most new computers now are going to be limited by CPU, not RAM or graphics, especially if you are using a laptop...I feel like the bottom of my laptop is going to melt through my desk one of these days, the thing gets so hot...

by 512 ati, do you mean that it has 512 mb dedicated memory? because mine has 256 mb, which is probably...bad

aaa11, as I replied earlier sins is CPU & ram SPEED bound, the higher MHZ cpu & ram the better & higher settings you can get away with before the dreaded

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harpo

yeah, i have a 2ghz dual core cpu, i can't upgrade since it's a laptop. i lag pretty bad in mid sized battles and large maps, oh well.