OT: Worst PC Decision

[Fyron]

What Roanon said.

[ May 18, 2004, 23:39: Message edited by: Imperator Fyron ]

[Atrocities]

Hey look I agree about the cost thing 100%, but I am telling you that card manufactures are including needed and now supported features on the lower cost cards. Take for example Far Cry, by all rights my GeForce FX 57 Ultra should run this game on hits higest settings with no problem, but the best I can do is Medium. Remember this card is less than six months old and I had to buy it to run the then State of the Art Deus Ex II. Bit shading, bump shading, something dot resolution at FPS, god only knows what the hell the differance is now, but the point is if I had opted for the Radeon 9800 or the better GeForce FX card I would be playing Far Cry on its highest settings.

Really all I am saying is that more and more games are using the features you find on the high cost high end cards that don't exsist on the less expensive Versions.

If all you want to do is play NOTOR, a borning game of epic proportions, then by all means just buy the X-Box or whatever card the game requires.

And for the record, NoToR is one uber magnum boring game on a galatic grand scale.

[Fyron]

Yes, but you can still play Far Cry just fine, right? So that just goes to prove the point... you do not need the bells and whistles provided by the cards that cost 2x to 3x as much money...

[Roanon]

Of course, if you think you have to play every new game on highest settings (even if that rarely makes much difference) you NEED the most expensive card. These customers are what the manufacturers like most, and they know they can rely on them paying ANY price - because they just MUST have all the latest gimmicks, like superultraspeed with separate shadow textures for invisible pixels moving behind objects covering them, and so on.

But your average highest-tech card won't Last much longer than half a year - if you keep that standards. Nothing to say against of course, if you have enough money - its your money . Ok, you can always resell our old card on ebay when upgrading - but, while the average middlehigh card will drop from around 200$ to around 150$, half a year old high tech cards usually plummet from 500$ to 200$...

[Wardad]

[Atrocities]

Originally posted by Imperator Fyron:
Yes, but you can still play Far Cry just fine, right? So that just goes to prove the point... you do not need the bells and whistles provided by the cards that cost 2x to 3x as much money...

Yes I can play Far Cry ok, but still I would love to take advantage of all the extra features.

[dogscoff]

So this guy will have spent double the amount that a top of the range card will have cost him beacuse you'll have bought basicly 3 GFX cards compared to 1 for the same amount of time.

Well no. The point he made is that even though he bought 2 or 3 GFX cards instead of one, it still cost him less because one top of the range card costs more than 3 older ones, because that's just the way graphics cards are priced these days.
As a bonus he gets to sell on/ re-home the old ones as he upgrades...

[David E. Gervais]

Wierd, I have a simple gForce2 MX and it runs Farcry fine with high details. My CPU is an AMD Athlon XP 1700+ 1.46 ghz. Memory is 512meg DDR2400 (where farcry gives me problems is I occasionally loose the sound. In spite of upgrading to a SB Audigy Gamer from my old SBLive Value.)

One thing that will make most any game lag is if you let windows manage your virtual memory. It is perpetually changing the size of the HD Cache (min of 0mb and max as needed.) Set your Virtual memory to double your actual RAM. And be sure to set the min and max to the same value. It will create one big swap file. Also, it helps enormously if you defrag before setting the virtual memory. (remember to turn off VM before defragging) The final result of this will make your system seem like it is a good 50-70% faster.

That's it for my tip of the day.

Cheers!

P.S. About Graphics cards,.. depending on your motherboard getting top of the line might not show any improvement at all. If you have a max 2-4x AGP then the new cards won't work, and it will cost you a MB upgrade to use it. It's just common sense. My next Upgrade will be a gForce 4 Ti or gForce FX. (depending on what I can get for approx 150$cdn. Last time I looked the FX was creeping into this price range.) Since my MB has a max of 4x AGP, I'll buy a card that will run at this speed. So even if I get the FX at 4-8x AGP I'll be running at less than peak performance, but that's ok, it means less heat issues.

My upgrade after that will be to change my CPU to a AMD Athlon XP 2600+ (since that is tha max my MB will allow.)

Nuf said, Cheers!

[ June 01, 2004, 15:29: Message edited by: David E. Gervais ]

[Renegade 13]

Where should I go to manually set the amount of virtual memory??

[Zagan]

Just read over this.

You really should buy the highest GFX card for the money you can get.

To buy something less is really wasting your money and is totally pointless.

A guy here is saying buy a mid range card sure that'll Last a year and half but if you buy a top of the range card it'll Last for 3 or more years before you really have to upgrade.

So this guy will have spent double the amount that a top of the range card will have cost him beacuse you'll have bought basicly 3 GFX cards compared to 1 for the same amount of time.

The reasons why to buy a top of the range card:
Able to handle DX9 in hardware.
ABle to do ALL the new lighting shading and anti-aliasing etc.
the fastest ram you can get.
The highest Resolutions you can get at the different Mhz for any monitor you may have.
The highest amounts of ram.
More features in the OS and on the card, such as TV in/out features you wouldn't ever get on a mid range card.
The fastest and most amounts of bandwidth for ram and for the different rendering pipes.

To play Far Cry properly and any of the newest games coming out now, That's Half-life 2, Stalker, UT2004/UT2005, and others.

You will need to have a DX9 or DX10 capable GFX card, anything less and you are basicly wasting your time even buying and installing the card these days.

Lower cards, will have lower resolutions and Mhz ranges.
Les ram, slower ram, less ram bandwidth and rendering pipes.
Few Features if any at all.
A top of the line mid-range card feature would be TV out and maybe dual head for having 2 monitors going at the same time.

Mid range cards are also spped limited and rendering features locked, so you could buy a mid range card that can't render light maps.

The low end GeForce 3 GFX cards were locked in this way execpt the GeForce 3 top end cards, even the GeForce 4 cards are in the same boat.