Operating System: Windows® 98/Me/2000/XP. SuSE Linux, which you released a demo for (which I’m playing now), and also support out of the box.
Processor: Pentium® III or AMD Athlon 1.0 GHz processor or faster (1.5 GHz or faster processor recommended). So I’ve got a 1.5 GHz Athlon…
Memory: 128 MB RAM minimum (256 MB recommended). I’ve got 384 MB. (actually 512 on the board, but more on that later)
Video: Any Windows-compatible video card(NVIDIA GeForce 2 or ATI Radeon with at least 64 megs of video memory recommended). I’ve got a GeForce 4 MX on-board video card that I’ve dedicated 128 MB of RAM to.
Sound: Windows®-compatible sound card. NVIDIA® nForce™ or other motherboards/soundcards containing the Dolby® Digital Interactive Content Encoder required for Dolby Digital audio. Got the onboard nForce sound.
So why can’t I get more than 20 frames per second with everything on “high” detail? I’ve gone so far as to turn all the details, even the sound, down to low quality. Even then I’m getting a playable, but still annoying 30-odd frames per second. I’ve met or bested all of the “Recommended” requirements, I should expect 50-60 FPS with everything on high quality.
I suppose they consider 20fps to be ‘playable’ and therefore set their ‘reccomended’ specs at those you mention.
Actually sod that. I agree. They lie. I’ve noticed with all games that when you exceed the ‘reccomended’ specs the game still struggles.
This seems to me like a very good place to start piling up blame consider that the standalone version of this card comes in cornflakes packets as gimmicks nowadays. I replaced mine a month ago with a nice Geforce FX 5700 card and behold the computer (comparable to your specs) now runs circles around the old performance.
System requirements have always been bull. You need to meet or best the recommended requirements to have a playable experience without all the detail turned off and the resolution at minimum. For example, I recently played Splinter Cell on my computer that beats all the recommended reqs by miles and it still chugs in high detailed areas.
Er, the Ti 4600 is a MUCH better card than anything that ends in MX. The Nvidia MX series are shite. My Ti 4200 is still hanging in there though, until the ATI’s come down in price.
I know I seem to have contradicted myself above. I haven’t. I said High end gf5s are ridiculously expensive. Here the next card up from the one I can buy in Game (£99) is about £350, a huge increase in price.
Lobsang as pointed out there are vast differences in performance between the Ti4600 and the MX series, as I said above I had a geforce4 MX and the card and it performed worse then my old geforce2 gtx card which unfortunately died with the old PC. For price comparison I paid less then 50€ for the MX card 18 months ago.
Tentacle Monster 150 $ sounds about right for a good middle class card that runs games smoothly but you mentioned it was an onboard card so you might run into troubles upgrading, just a thought.
Odd… I’ve yet to encounter a game that didn’t run smoothly and playably (albeit with low quality) at two thirds of the “minimum” requirements, in every category. Well, except for hard drive space, of course… No getting around that one.
BubbaRay: I could either disable the on-board card in BIOS, or simply have it check the slots before going to on-board.
Chronos: :dubious: What are you running, and can you mention specific games? I haven’t seen a game that’ll run decently on minimum requirements since the days of the original DOOM. And even that was pushing it.
its a bad time to buy a video card, as ATI and Nvidia are about to release their next-gen cards… but ATI definately has the edge performance wise over Nvidia at the moment. If I was buying (and nobody has said that they were), I’d go for a Radeon 9600 pro. Its the best bang for the buck right now… or wait a few months and pay the same for a 9800
no currency conversion was used in making this post…
why in heaven’s name would you expect it to work on high detail!?
if the requirements are the minimum required… and the minimum worked on high detail, why would you even HAVE lower detail levels?if it would run on lesser computers then they would be the minimum requirement.
Yeah, I was going to say, “recommended” is not the same as “ideal.” “Recommended” means, the “game will be playable and won’t look like it was designed for the Atari 2600.” If you want to play a brand new video game with all the video sliders maxed out, you’re going to need a brand new computer with top-of-the-line components. All the Unreal games have been about absolutely bleeding edge graphics. You want to run it on high, you’ll probably need something in the neighborhood of three or more gigs of processing power, and a video card that’s so advanced that parts of it don’t technically exsist in this time-space continuum.
Which is why I’m not even buying Unreal 2004 until I get a new computer in about two months.
