Here's a great site showing benchmarks of different graphics cards while playing STO, this helped me decided what to get: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/...line,2553.html

That's two years old, so won't have all of the newer cards listed. That being said, STO doesn't need a top-o-the-line bleeding edge card to run.

http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/2...ance,2932.html

I'm normally an nVidia fanboi, but the reason I recommended the 6670 as a "budget gaming" card is that it gives you a bit more bang-for-the-buck compared to the nVidia 430-440.

Ok guys thanks for all the help. I've changed my mind about the Nividia GeForce 7800. Just one more question. I now plan on getting a brand new CyberpowerPC Gamer Ultra GUA880 Desktop. $519.99 and it has a Nividia 610 on it. I'm not sure about the complete specs of the GPU, but I have watched several YouTube videos where people play Battlefield 3 in High-Ultra settings with no lag. Do you guys think it could play STO in ultra settings? Would this be a reasonable upgrade?

While it's true that STO doesn't need a state of the art graphics card to run, I find it impossible to stay at 30FPS all the time at 1920x1080 with maxed details on a Radeon 6970. And that's with no antialiasing applied at all. Hitting 60FPS constantly is something I can only dream of.

I'm seriously thinking about waiting for when GPUs are twice as fast mine is currently and then getting two of these and run them in an SLI or Crossfire setup. Not just for STO.

It'll run STO, whether or not at full settings, I can only say "maybe, buit don't count on it". (610 is the bottom end of the 600 series). Keep in mind that the videos of "Battlefield 3 on a 610" are running at reduced resolutions and have tweaked things one way or the other.

Be very wary of the use of the word "gamer" or "gaming" in advertising, it gets abused a lot.

Wow, I'd have thought you could get better out of a 6970, it's a couple of steps up from what I have (GTX275). With my old GTX275, I average around 60fps with STO @ 1680x1050 (Lower resolution, but I'm also running two monitors.)

FPS are over 30 most of the time, often enough they even reach 60, it's just not as constant as I wish. That's kind of the problem with how benchmarking is done mostly. Reviewers look at max FPS and average FPS, but what it all comes down to is minimum FPS, because it's the minimum FPS that make a game appear choppy or not. So I rather run my GPU at 20% load most of the time knowing it's got enough reserves to deal with high poly / high effect counts scenarios. In STO and most other games, this means turning down detail settings.

Could the 610 play on minimal settings with a good FPS?

Let me just add some stuff to this.

1. 'New' computer? A 7800 is ancient by any standard, I wouldn't recommend it.
2. GT430? I had a GT440 just before I got my new 560Ti, only runs STO on medium with no shadows or ambient optical illusions.
3. GT610? Runs worse than a GT440. But still would be playable.
I would recommend at least a 550Ti+. They are pretty cheap these days.

older cards run dx9 better than many of the newer cards especially budget versions of the newer chips. gt 430 and i can run newer dx11 games full up, (deus ex:HR, crysis 2, etc) 1920x1080...start hitting mmo's with older engines based around dx9 and things slow down. older series gpus were designed around dx9/dx10. they rock. it's also why they can't just be upscaled or a driver fix to handle dx11, because they were designed around an older dx, shader, and ogl version(s).

now...if cryptic/pwe wanted to be reeeeally nice...the could create another client entirely dx11 and x64 that could be an optional d/l besides the main client. >.>

(like that will happen)

Uh why not, I am running it on a Nvidia Ion and my brother is using NO graphics card what-so-ever. He is using shared memory on an Intel chipset. Just remember 90% of most problems are drivers not properly installed or updated.