Try running Battlefield Vietnam - the MINIMUM requirements are a Radeon 8500 or Geforce3 class card. The Radeon 9200 is actually about the same speed as the 8500 model. Still, you can play almost any game fairly well with a 9200, you just won’t be able to turn all the eye-candy, or use Anti-aliasing or Anistrophic filtering with newer games. For future games - Half-Life2 or Doom3, getting a Radeon 9600XT or better is a good idea.
And just for kicks, my system specs:
AthlonXP 2000
1 Gig RAM
Geforce4 Ti4600
180Gig total Harddrive space.
If you’re planning to play Half-Life 2 and/or Doom 3 when they come out, don’t be surprised if you need close to the top end video card at the time of their release. I’ve been holding off on upgrading my video card and RAM until then, but I fully expect to have to do so.
Why, yes, I do upgrade my computer around specific games.
Games these days are becoming increasingly unpredictiable in terms of system requirements. Things like amount of RAM, graphics card RAM and processor speed aren’t really very useful anymore. For instance…
I have a top of the line gaming system. XP 3000+, Radeon 9800 pro, etc. I can play some absolutely stunning games with hardly any loss of FPS at all. UT 2004 for example can run perfectly at the highest of settings. But strangely enough, some much worse looking games can hardly play at all. GTA 3, looks much worse and runs really choppy. Having fairly high demands to performance, I would call GTA 3 unplayable. GTA 3: Vice City runs slightly BETTER, despite improved graphics and a more detailed city. The even stranger thing here is that, while I know lots of other people who have similar problems, I also know of at least as many people who report playing the same game at high settings with good performance, on rigs as low as 1.8 Ghz and GF4200. Conversely, I know plenty of people with even better rigs than me who simply can’t play UT2004 due to performance issues. It’s a strange thing. Games these days are very quirky, and being able to play them is often more a matter of luck than anything else.
Also is the issue of shoddy programming. If you buy Battlefield - Vietnam, and wonder why the performance is so crappy, it probably isn’t because your computer is too weak. It’s just a poorly coded game. In other words, don’t be tricked into thinking the game is so insanely complex that your computer simply can’t keep up.
Definitely cough up the cash for a decent vid card. You won’t need more than your 480 RAM for gaming. A faster processor is one of the things you can pretty much bank on. Any game will see improved performance from a better processor, so if you can afford it, you should buy that as well. But don’t shell out for top of the line stuff. Buy something moderately priced. Chances are, if you can’t play it on a moderate rig, you probably can’t play it on a high-end rig either.
I bought my 9200 just so I could see the menus in Need for Speed: Underground.