catback

I have to agree. I know kevin knows his stuff and I know my stuff. I'm not sure what CS people you know Lasareth but CS people learn all things computers. Sure they don't exactly have doom 3 performance building class but the classes they do have they can apply what they learned and what they know to things like doom 3 and other gaming situations. I'm still not sure why you think they put 1.5 ghz min requirement if the game isn't cpu intense. Surely if the video card does most of the work a pentium 3 500Mhz should work great as long as the video card is up to the task. Sadly this isn't true and we can't keep our old 500's as cutting edge gaming systems. I'm just gonna say this about ram, processor, and video card. Games are run from ram if you don't have enough the computer will need to load more data to and from the hard drive at a more constant pace. The processor computes all the mathematics of the games things like ammo amount/usage, movement, map changes, virtually every thing that happens in the game that doesn't concern how pretty it looks on screen (and that is alot of stuff). The video card takes care of the pretty, it takes info from the processor on what to display and turns it into cool looking visuals like smoke from the gun, lighting, shadows, basically everything you see.

You can buy that expensive video card to enhance the pretty but it's still going to be slowed down by the processor (a Radeon 9800 Pro or better will perform like shit when it's paired with a 400Mhz or slower processor). All that said if you have a system that plays doom 3 but is near the minimum requirements it's better to upgrade the processor for about a $100 and max out the video cards ability then to upgrade the video card for $200 or more and have it slowed down by the already maxed out processor. I'm not saying that you wouldn't upgrade the video card but it's not cost efficient to upgrade the video card first if you already playing doom 3 on a min requirement or slightly better machine.