Hey everyone, just thought I'd share my thoughts on the Nvidia Geforce 8400GS, which I see many people put down.
First of all, the 8400GS is a low end card, but that doesn't mean it's not a gaming card. The one I have is a Foxconn one thats clocked at 459/918/400 with 256mb dedicated ram
Also, my system suck. I have a amd sempron 3400+ with only 256kb l2 cache and only 768MB ram, so I wasn't expecting great performances.
I've played a few modern games, including bioshock, HL2 ep 2, supreme commander, and Gears of War (omg GoW with a 8400!)
For bioshock, it ran suprisingly well, and I'm getting around 40+ fps with all settings high but at 640x480 resolution. However, that is after I overclock the card to 640/1380/428 lol. Without overclocking it runs around 25-30fps. However, I'm sure that if I met the minimum requirements for bioshock, which needs 1GB ram, and if i had a better processor, I would be able to run it at a higher resolution. btw, bioshock with all settings high at 640x480 doesn't look very bad. The occasional stuttering was due to the low ram I have.
Half life 2 episode 2 ran at 40+ fps with settings med-high and 720x540. However, I didn't overclock my card. I know that overclocking when I play source gives me like a 10+ fps boost though.
Supreme commander actually ran Ok. Fidelity was at medium and everything else was at low except textures. it ran at 25fps in the beginning of the game and around 15 i think when i had 500 units. When I overclocked it, I was able to play with 2xAA and low shadows on. However, I'm sure the poor performance I got with supreme commander isn't all due to my video card. If i had a better processor, my fps would definitely have been higher. A sempron, even when it first came out, was not a processor for gaming. Also, you CAN run supreme commander at resolutions lower than 1024x768. I'll post a tut on how to do it later.
Gears of War ran pretty well. I ran it at 800x600 with everything at medium except shadows and decal and I'm getting 45+fps. There is a little stuttering, but that's because the game wasn't ported over well. Lots of people have had trouble with Gears of war on PC.
If I had a core 2 duo and a 8600gt and 1gb ram, my results would be so much better.
so there's my two cents on the 8400gs. Now that you've seen how well I run modern games on a crappy PC, I hope people will see that even low end PCs can run games without too much restrictions. hope it helps
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