Your card from experience as a gamer and building computers will almost always be the problem. One problem when trying to get an answer to sluggish game play is that we need to know the game , because there are certain games that can very well be WAY above what your card can handle. Also just like COMPUTERULER mentioned above a fragmented hard drive can REALLY screw you even with a powerful enough card. Hard drives speeds can effect you , definately not as common as the others. Also is your problem a consistant slow running game or does it come in CHOPS like feels like glitches. If it is without glitches but seems slow this is likely do to an option in your video card called vsync, when this option is on your video card will only run a game at the speed of your monitors refresh rate settings. So lets say that your monitor refresh rate setting is set to 60 , well your only going to get a max fps or frames per second of 60 because with vertical sync option on for your video card it locks you to the rate per second to whatever your refresh rate setting is on your monitor. To fix this disable the vsync option IN THE GAME your playing if its a first person shooter especially as well as in the VIDEO CARD'S OPTIONS. Set the monitor to the highest refresh rate for that resolution that it can go. If its an old small monitor and your refresh rate wont go above 60 hz or so yer pretty much screwed of fixing that problem other than replacing your monitor to a larger one with better refresh rates.Also you can have a fast proccessor , fast video card, all the right settings, and monitor and have hardly any ram/memory and have major problems do to lack of memory. A lot of people dont understand how important ram/memory is to running a computer well. Its like those little computer companies who will sell you a computer to do just the basic and will put a ton of programs on the computer, good processor and mother board but just enough ram to get the computer to boot. Fresh off an install the computer will run halfway ok, but in 3 months of installing more programs and a little defragmentation the computer will do nothing but lock up and take up to sometimes 10 mins to load MY Computer. These small businesses install your operating system and give you no operating system cd of course , because they know in 3 months you'll be bringing your computer back to them for them to charge you for their dishonesty and your lack of knowledge of how computers truly work.
