I hardly do any gaming on the PC outside of Frets on Fire.  Recently, a buddy of mine gave me a video card so I could try some games.  It's a little old, but he said it should run a decent array of games.  He just wasn't sure about the more recent titles from the last year or 2.  The card is a ATI Radeon HD 3450.  I don't care if I can't run the game with all the bells an whistles.  I just wanna play it.  Can anyone tell me if this card can handle it as long as the rest of my system is up to snuff?  I really don't understand where my card rates in the hierarchy and if it's better or worse than the ones listed for minimum.  Here's a link to the Gears minimum system requirements.  Thanks.

http://blogulate.com/content/gears-of-war-minimum-system-requirements/

My 7800gt ran it decently on medium settings.

That can play gears of wars (low-med)

Are we talking something like 800X600?  I guess I probably need to turn down/off some of the special lighting or shadow effects or anti-aliasing right?

you can run it at decent settings with that card, i have 7600 GT and i can run gears of war at around 1024x768 or even bit higher, and your card is more powerful than my card i think, so you should have no problems running gears of war at low to medium settings.

^ No, the 3450 is a lot worse than a 7600GT.

Normally like half the speed, but luckily Gears of War is an Unreal 3-engine game which favors ATI cards. But still the 3450 will be clearly slower in Gears too.

So dougsdad0629, prepare for low settings, 0xAA and 800x600 (in ~25FPS).

damn, i guess i didnt know 3450 was such a weak of a card, i have not been paying attention to graphics card powers for 2 years so i am little behind on this a little.

minimum RAM says 1 gig. will my 1.5 gigs I have improve my performance at all?