Hi,
I’m putting together a system to play Black Mesa and was wondering if anyone could recommend me a graphics card that they can play smoothly with on the highest settings?
The CPU/RAM will be:
Intel Core i7 3820 3.6GHz
16GB DDR3
You don’t really need the best and the latest to play Black Mesa. It hardly needs a super powerful computer. My Geforce 9800 is enough to play it all maxed out at 1080p and super-smooth framerate.
However, I’ll assume that you want to play other games too, specially heavy stuff like Battlefield or Crysis, so a videocard like the Geforce 560 or higher is what you’re looking for.
Going lower than that will be creating a bottleneck in your system anyway, specially with a CPU as fast as that.
I would suggest moving down to an i5 and using that extra money towards whatever you were willing to spend on a graphics card. Unless you model or edit videos the i7 is just a waste of money. And like Maxey said, BM (and Source in general) doesn’t require all that much power. Look at some of the other games you’ll be playing to see what kind of card you’d like I would say.