jamyskis: OK. here's the deal. I've been contemplating upgrading my PC for a while now and decided against it when I realised that the future of triple-A PC gaming wasn't certain, my PC was more than suitable for the best indie games out there and most current AAA titles do play quite well on the PC.

There are, however, two games that I have modded up to the gills and would benefit from an upgrade - GTA 4 and Minecraft. GTA 4 would benefit from a faster video card, that much is obvious, but given that Minecraft runs off Java, I'm wondering if a memory upgrade would make more sense, or whether my CPU or hard disk is putting the brakes on the whole affair.

I have:

A quad-core Phenom X4 920 with each core clocked at 2.8 GHz (it's a few years old now).
4GB RAM
An ATI HD4890 graphics card

I'm already using 64-bit Java and allocating 2GB to it, and I notice that Minecraft is rather slow to load chunks at the best of times, but once they're loaded, performance is generally not too bad. OptiFine enhancements shaders tend to slow the game down massively.

I'm mainly interested in having an extreme view distance than visual bells and whistles like motion blur and shadows, but I really don't know if I'm being slowed by my card, CPU. memory or hard disk. I really couldn't imagine that Minecraft would be slowed by the HD4890, even with high view distances.