I just bought the Athlon64 3200+ with 1GB of Mushkin Blue memory on a
Foxconn 755/760 board. Using my old components, hard drive, CDRW, sound,
etc., and a 2 year old Geforce4 Ti 4400 - I am running the game with almost
all settings on high @ 1024x768x32 and it is amazing - this is also with
Antialiasing at 2x and AF @ 2x - and it is very playable - not laggy at all.
Everything that I read about the game before I bought it said that everyone
would have to wait for the Geforce 6800 to play it with all settings maxed,
and at least have a high-end P4 or likewise AMD coupled with a high-end ATI
or Geforce FX card. All benchmarks I saw with older vid cards such as mine
were with all graphic settings on low - especially textures and the infamous
water quality setting (said to really bog down machines). I am running both
the texture quality and water quality at high with no slowdown.
What amazes me is exactly what everyone has been saying about the 64bit AMD
chip - that is, that it's good for gaming. Now, I'm not running the game in
a real high res, but, this is farcry - I mean at 1024 and in 32 bit it still
looks incredible. Comparitively, I am running the new Splinter Cell game @
1280x1024x32 with all settings maxed and 4x AA flawlessly. So I am down a
notch or two in the resolution department, but it is stunning nonetheless.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that if you do have the 64bit Athlon, I
wouldn't be discouraged from going out and buying Farcry even if your video
card is a couple years old...the water, foilage, physics engine, just
everything about the game is incredible - graphically I have never seen
better - it is well worth 40 bucks.
The only thing about the link you posted (re: 64bit Farcry version) is that
I think this will require a 64bit operating system, such as Windows 64. I'm
not a programmer, however I'm not sure how they will run 64bit dll's on
32bit OS's - so it's not like you can just buy the game, then download some
patch that will greatly take advantage of your 64bit processor - at least I
don't think so - as it is now, it seems as though the AMD64 already does
wonders for the game. Better to invest $500 in a Gefore 6800 when they are
available because I'm sure Windows 64 and 64 bit drivers for ALL your
hardware is still a long, bug-laden way off.
