New Graphics Card!

[lobotomy42]

My PC is finally working again, and newegg *finally* sent me a replacement for my previous broken graphics card and...

W00t! Things look good again! Wow, the Prey Demo is really fun! And, hey, the Doom 3 Engine actually looks really really good when it's not running at 5 fps.

Wowsers!

[Thrik]

Clearly time to get yourself some of this and then come stalk me up. ;

[miffy495]

Holy shit! My complete not-caring about the Battlefield series meant that I barely noticed when 2142 released. That vid looks fantastic! Why didn't anyone tell me it was actually fun?

[Thrik]

Hee. :~

2142 really is fantastic. I played the older ones quite exhaustively, but they don't compare on any level to how enjoyable the gameplay in 2142 is. Everything has been improved and made more accessible and fun -- well worth getting, and there're no end of servers/players all day and night.

My favourite part is that you can unlock lots about 45 things over time, ten for each class. One of the first in my case being stealth camo which is literally that from Metal Gear Solid but with a 20-second timer. You can practically be Solid Snake out there with your knife and pistol! Surprisingly it all remains balanced and fair, despite this.

But then the point is you can totally specialise and have great fun doing whatever you like the most, which is what 2142 got right so much better than the other Battlefields.

[Wrestlevania]

BF2142 ran like absolute shit on my machine. I don't care how old my computer is; that software is fundamentally badly designed. So make sure you've got a beast of a computer before you even think of buying--it's incredibly intensive.

I'm just in the process of mailing it to a friend so he can play instead actually.

[Thrik]

It's not that bad. My old machine which was an Athlon XP 2800 with 1GB of RAM and a GeForce 6600GT ran it and Battlefield 2 pretty decently with the settings turned down, which is to be expected considering it's a 2004 machine. I'd be a very big stretch to call that a beast by anyone's standards.

On my current machine I easily push 90+ FPS with all the settings turned onto maximum and anti-aliasing with all its gamma correction, transparency anti-aliasing, etc. Although my machine is what you would consider a beast these days, it's not difficult to see that you could tone down the hardware considerably and still push 30+ FPS on maximum settings.

Considering what Battlefield is, it's to be expected that the requirements might not be the same as your Half-Life 2s and whatnot. I mean, just look at it. The sheer scale of the gameplay and the amount of action that can occur on the screen at once is beyond what you get in most action-packed single-player games, nevermind multiplayer games.

The only thing I can see really making Battlefield difficult to run is not having the vital 1GB of RAM. Considering 2GB is pretty much standard fare for making games run at their best these days and Vista itself really wants 1GB, having under 1GB and expecting to run modern games in pretty much madness. Way back in 2005 is when people started saying "You really need 1GB nowadays".

Anyway, if you get it my name is RyanJW. Feel free to buddy and stalk me as I play a lot.

[Wrestlevania]

Considering what Battlefield is, it's to be expected that the requirements might not be the same as your Half-Life 2s and whatnot. I mean, just look at it. The sheer scale of the gameplay and the amount of action that can occur on the screen at once is beyond what you get in most action-packed single-player games, nevermind multiplayer games.

Not really disproving my argument here...

Don't get me wrong, I really wanted to enjoy this game. But the hardware requirements were too inhibitive to actually make it enjoyable for me. I'm certainly envious of others who're having a great time in the game though.

[Thrik]

I dunno, Half-Life 2 is a 2004 game. To expect a game that came out two years later and looks a lot better to run equally well would be slightly unreasonable. I found myself in the position of being able to play very few 2005+ games particularly smoothly with the older hardware I mentioned above, so it's not like Battlefield sticks out amongst its peers.

I guess I just found your comment about the engine quite surprising since for what it actually does it's an extremely slick machine that handles dozens of players really well. You'd be very hard pressed to find a finer example of such a scale being handled so well.

Anyway, we're probably getting a bit sidetracked here. I really should be working right now.

[lobotomy42]

Well, I have an Athlon XP 2400+ (as high as my poor old motherboard can go), 1.5 GB of RAM, and a GeForce 7600 GS. Am I game or no?

[DanJW]

On a different tangent to the last; I've lost track entirely of how powerful AMD chips and GeForce graphics cards are. Which retard decided to name them using a bunch of apparently random numbers? It makes it very hard for me to compare power with Intel Processors and ATI cards respectively - I wouldn't be surprised if they have lost sales becuase of it. Does anyone know of a simple conversion chart or jargon translator?

I need gigahertz dammit!

[Thrik]

The numbers have become fairly useless these days as you've no hope in hell of understanding the various specifications a graphics card has (go check them out to see what I mean).

The best and really only approach is to look at performance comparisons on sites like Tom's Hardware and Hard OCP after getting a general idea (ideally from someone else) of what's hot.

At the moment the GeForce 8*** series is what you want, with the 8600 being considered the mid-range performer, the 8800 GTS being the high-end performer, and the 8800 GTX being the ultra-end performer (very expensive, ridiculously powerful). A lot of people are opting for the 8800 GTS as it has supreme performance but is a lot more affordable than the GTX.

One spec you can watch out for is the graphic card's memory. Generally, the more memory you have the more room you have for pumping up anti-aliasing, displaying high-resolution textures which eat up the memory, and generally keeping things running smoothly. The 8800 GTS comes with 640mb of memory and the GTX has 780mb. I'd consider 512mb a minimum these days.

As for AMD, go with Intel. The days of AMD being the de facto standard for gaming processors are over at the moment, with Intel's Core 2 Duo having absolutely beaten them into the ground with both performance and price. The E6600 Core 2 Duo is probably the epitome of price/performance balance at the moment, with each of its 2.4GHz cores being enough to power a game like Battlefield 2142 or Command & Conquer 3 smoothly by itself. Get a game which uses both cores (finally starting to come out more frequently) and you'll have blistering performance.

That said, there're other variations of the E6*** range that also perform admirably. The E6600 is particularly renowned though as it can be easily overclocked to around 3.0GHz with just air cooling in most cases.

Take the above info and use it to find performance benchmarks via Google and you should find sites comparing them to similar ATI/AMD equipment (graphs for the win).

[Thrik]

Oh and yes lobotomy42, you should be alright with that. With some tweaking of settings you should get a smooth game, although I'm not sure how the processor will fare and that's probably going to bottleneck your entire system until it's replaced.

[lobotomy42]

Oh and yes lobotomy42, you should be alright with that. With some tweaking of settings you should get a smooth game, although I'm not sure how the processor will fare and that's probably going to bottleneck your entire system until it's replaced.

Well, replacing the processor means basically a new computer, so, um, no. Maybe in 2-3 more years.

[miffy495]

Athlon 4400+ processor, GeForce 7800GTX, 4 Gigs RAM. I've never had any problem cranking Doom 3 or Source engine games to their max. FEAR chugged a bit though. What's the word? Am I good to run?

[Thrik]

Tee, yes. I'm surprised FEAR didn't run well to be honest; it could be that you had the soft shadows option enabled, which is for some reason a known FPS rapist. Even I got it to run decently on the older hardware I mentioned earlier.

I'm not sure why you feel the need to wait a few years though, lobotomy. Considering your graphics card is almost certainly being bottlenecked by that processor, it seems like it'd be worth the £40 or whatever for an old motherboard that can handle a beefier processor. Then again, I'm not very conservative when it comes to splashing out on stuff like this.

Really, Battlefield is a very scalable game and I'm not too sure what Wrestlevania meant. The only thing that's really going to slow you down is not having 1GB of RAM, largely due to the amount of stuff you've got going on at once (kind of like how RTS games often perform badly for people due to RAM bottlenecks, despite good components otherwise).

Just look at the box's requirements and then pretend it says 1GB of RAM and you can't really go too wrong.

[brkl]

Yes, for fuck's sake.

[DanJW]

Cheers for that rundown on GFX cards Thrik, most useful. I'm glad the spec numbers really are unhelpful and I wasn't just being thick

[Wrestlevania]

Really, Battlefield is a very scalable game and I'm not too sure what Wrestlevania meant. The only thing that's really going to slow you down is not having 1GB of RAM, largely due to the amount of stuff you've got going on at once (kind of like how RTS games often perform badly for people due to RAM bottlenecks, despite good components otherwise).

I sense a cunning ploy to have me embarass myself, by releaving just how shit my computer really is.

[Thrik]

[lobotomy42]

I'm not sure why you feel the need to wait a few years though, lobotomy. Considering your graphics card is almost certainly being bottlenecked by that processor, it seems like it'd be worth the £40 or whatever for an old motherboard that can handle a beefier processor. Then again, I'm not very conservative when it comes to splashing out on stuff like this.

The graphics card is AGP, that's all I can use in this motherboard. And a new motherboard means a new processor, and probably new RAM, and heck, my CD/DVD drive is pretty close to busted, so I might as well get a serial ATA one, and both hard drives are full, so I should get a bigger one, and I just know this power supply isn't going to last much longer, so that should be replaced and this case is freaking FUGLY, and what's even left? Oh yeah, the monitor and speakers. Well, my speakers are fine. The monitor is fine, except it's a CRT. But ideally, I'd like to just get an HDTV and hook my PC into that, since I only use it for games. And my keyboard is have broken.

So, far, in my new computer, I could keep:

- Speakers

- Mouse

- Wireless card

Yeah, once we get to the point where the motherboard goes, the whole thing goes. So I'll just wait.

Moral of the story: Hardware is an inelegancy. Software is where it is AT.

[LOPcagney]

I dunno, Half-Life 2 is a 2004 game.

And yet it still manages to look a whole lot prettier than BF 2142.

Ahhh, you can't beat good old-fashioned artistic direction.

[Thrik]

It's certainly a more inspired visual style, but it does look kind of ass nowadays -- especially on my 24-inch screen which does a glorious job of highlighting any blurry textures or low-poly models. I think so, anyway.

The Episode(s) have aged a bit better, but classic HL2 is kind of ";(". Not that I couldn't still thoroughly enjoy the atmosphere and whatnot.

If I were to choose one as of now that is more visually stimulating to play, BF2142 would win hands down. It really is a very rich and beautiful game when things get going, and if it were adapted into a single-player game with more tightly restricted "on rails" play like Half-life 2 it could probably look fairly amazing.

[Wrestlevania]

Moral of the story: Hardware is an inelegancy. Software is where it is AT.

Correction: 'closed' hardware is where it's at.

As much as I love PC gaming, I bought a console because I'm sick of the hardware rat race. There's nothing innovative about bullying people to buy more-powerful hardware every 6 months - write better code!

[DanJW]

What are the current estimates of rate of computing power increase? It was meant to slow down over the next few years, but clearly isn't.

When, basically, is the singularity?

Or has that concept no longer in fashion?

[Wrestlevania]

Or has that concept no longer in fashion?

LOLcat much?