Questions about which video card to purchase?

[Rattus]

I have two Astro City cabs running Groovymame PCs and my set ups and roms etc are now 8yrs old so I have decided to upgrade both hardware and software at the same time. Vertical cab first then Horizontal.

I did try out a Recalbox to see if I wanted to go that way but decided I prefer the configurability of Groovymame on a PC.

But what Recalbox did show me was the picture was slightly sharper and the colors more vibrant, not a huge difference, but worth pursuing.

So after much research I am now thinking that a contributing factor to that might be that my current video card has a HDMI to VGA adapter to display. Googling "hdmi to vga adapter mame low dotclock issues vibrant colors" the AI summary tells me that the adapter could be causing image issues.

I have read this guide https://www.buriedbits.org/building-a-groovymame-crt-emudriver-pc-in-2025 and come up with a powerful budget PC that I am running windows 10 on and I'm waiting for the video card I selected to arrive.

I bought a AMD Radeon R7 340, 2GB, GDDR3, HDMI, DVI, VGA because after searching eBay (Australia) it seemed to be the most current and powerful card I could find that was Supported by Groovymeme and has VGA output.

My question for the experts, especially those in Australia @buttersoft is I see most of the newer video cards in the Groovymame supported list do not have VGA, so how important is it?

I still need to buy another video card for my other setup, could people please advise what they think is the best video card I can easily purchase on eBay (Australia) for my new mame set ups.

Is a powerful video card even going to make much difference or is the CPU still more important for mame? I mostly play 80s 90s games, but I do want to try to play Cave Muchi Muchi Pork which my old system really struggles with.

[Endprodukt]

Your GPU will not help with your mame games. It still is relying on single core speed. The higher, the better. A fast GPU is going to help with other emulators if you care. Flycast for example.

You don't need a VGA output but you do need DVI-I for analog output.

If you want a CPU recommendation I was investing a lot of time and the for me the winner was the 13600k.