Questions About Running PBA on PC at 1920x1080

[Wish It Was 1984]

My current arcade PC is fine for MAME but it runs Pinball Arcade like a slideshow. So I want to upgrade the guts of it but I had some questions for anyone running PBA at 1920x1080 resolution:

-CPU -> LGA 1155. What's the lowest I could go? Pentium G620? Is an i3 minimum?

-Video Card -> Thinking of just getting a GeForce GT 610 w/ 1GB.

Other than that I'm just going to drop a 4GB Corsair DDR3 1600 stick in it and my current 300W PSU should be enough (based on Newegg calculator). I'm just hung up on the CPU/GPU situation. Don't want to spend more than I need.

 

[Retron]

My current arcade PC is fine for MAME but it runs Pinball Arcade like a slideshow. So I want to upgrade the guts of it but I had some questions for anyone running PBA at 1920x1080 resolution:

-CPU -> LGA 1155. What's the lowest I could go? Pentium G620? Is an i3 minimum?

-Video Card -> Thinking of just getting a GeForce GT 610 w/ 1GB.

Other than that I'm just going to drop a 4GB Corsair DDR3 1600 stick in it and my current 300W PSU should be enough (based on Newegg calculator). I'm just hung up on the CPU/GPU situation. Don't want to spend more than I need.

The main PC used for pinball in our household is a Pentium G860 (at 3 GHz). I can't imagine that a G620 would make too much difference.

The graphics card in that PC is a Geforce GTX 460, which is roughly equivalent to a GTX 650 in modern terms. I've played a bit on my laptop, with a GTX 560M - roughly equivalent to a GTX 640 with GDDR5 (the DDR3 ones are really slow in comparison).

A 610 would be awful - don't even think about it! They can barely run Aero, let alone games. (The boss bought one at work, but it turns out the integrated HD 4000 graphics does a better job in his case!)

The minimum I would suggest would be a 640 with GDDR5. A 650 would be better.

 

[MWink]

I'm not sure if this will help you at all but TPA runs just fine on my machine which is a bit old. It's a 3GHz Core 2 Duo, with a Radeon 4870 (old but high end). As for the components you asked about, I doubt a Core I3 is necessary but I don't know anything about that video card.

 

[Wish It Was 1984]

The minimum I would suggest would be a 640 with GDDR5. A 650 would be better.

Thanks for the advice. The G860 gives .4 GHz more and it's only $10 more so I think I will add that to my parts wishlist.

As for video, I checked Average G3D Mark for the GT 610. Ugh. I see why you said to not even consider it. I guess I was being hopefully because the LGA 1155 mobo on NewEgg I was looking at was bundling one for free. You get what you pay for.

So I thought the Radeon HD 7770 with a score of 2157. It's only $110. But for just $20 more I can get the GeForce GTX 650 Ti which has a score of 2700.

So right now to gut my current arcade PC I'm looking at this for a parts list in order to run pinball at 1920x1080 perfectly:

Intel G860 3.0GHz CPU
Cheapest ATX mobo I can get (currently ECS X77H2-A3 v1.2)
Gigabyte GeForce GTX 650 Ti
Corsair 4GB DDR3 1600 Chip
Antec Basiq 500W (this setup is a bit too much for my 300W PSU)

Altogether today, $375. Now to justify the cost for pinball.

 

[Alex Atkin UK]

For the record, its been mentioned that Pinball Arcade is developed on a GTX 660. So if you can stretch I think that is the card to go for guaranteed performance especially as you can sometimes find it as cheap as a 650 Ti.

That said, I can get it to run fine at 768p without post processing or reflections on an Atom Z3740 with Intel HD Graphics. So unless the post processing and reflections are heavily CPU bound I don't think you will have a problem with pretty much any low-end Intel CPU.

Also on my desktop PC which HAS a GTX 660 I seem to recall it not using much of the GPU at all, although we do have to consider how much the DX11 upgrade may increase the usage.