Compare Video Cards

  • Thread starter Thread starter John
  • Start date Start date
Intel makes no add-on video cards,thier only video lies on thier chips fixed
to the board.The 7500 series was'nt ati better cards,if AGP is what youre
after,try the 9800 PRO.
 
I recently purchased the Harry Potter Order of the Phoenix and minimum
requirements for a video card were ATI Radeon 7500 or NVIDIA GeForce2 GTS.
What would you recommend as an equivalent to one of those?
 
Does that mean you have onboard video that is not good enough to run the
app?
What video slots do you have?
This PC isnt a Laptop is it?
 
Correct
I'm not sure, but HP said my computer can use the video cards I listed.
It's a desktop
 
There are at least three different types of video card slot, you need to
provide the exact model of your PC, or look in the manual.
 
John said:
Correct
I'm not sure, but HP said my computer can use the video cards I listed.
It's a desktop
Click to expand...


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Potter_and_the_Order_of_the_Phoenix_(video_game)

"The PC version game has shipped with a number of issues which have to this date
not been addressed with a patch from Electronic Arts."

Rating: "5.0 mediocre"
http://www.gamespot.com/pc/adventure/harrypotterphoenix/index.html?tag=result;title;1

Game trailer - apparent release June2007 ? The referenced video cards are oldies.
http://www.gamespot.com/pages/gamespace/download_alt.php?pid=936995&sid=6169717&id=6169717

Even has 410MB demo version of game. HPOOTP_PC_DEMO.exe
Read the user comments about the demo. (Some download sites want you
to be a member to download. I did a search, and there are other sources.)
http://www.gamespot.com/pc/adventure/harrypotterphoenix/download_6173066.html

Demo can be downloaded here.
http://www.ausgamers.com/files/details/html/29183

Maybe after you've tried the demo, you won't need to buy it :-)
The demo should give you some idea exactly how powerful the computer
really has to be. If the computer only has graphics provided by
the motherboard, and not a separate video card, that would be a
bit iffy. If there is any kind of separate video card (PCI Express,
AGP, or even an older PCI card), it might be worth a shot.

Paul
 
I was able to download the demo, but when I tried to open the game to play
nothing happened. Am I missing doing something to open the game? My HP
computer
xp Home Edition meets and exceeds all the minimum requirements shown in the
read me file.
 
John said:
I was able to download the demo, but when I tried to open the game to play
nothing happened. Am I missing doing something to open the game? My HP
computer
xp Home Edition meets and exceeds all the minimum requirements shown in the
read me file.
Click to expand...

I got it to run on my Win2K machine. The Win2K OS has more issues than
any version of WinXP, and I did find a trick to get it working. I have a
pile of demos downloaded here, that I never got to use, because of Win2K.

The first problem for me, with the game, was starting my monitor running
at an extremely low resolution (512 x 384 or somewhere thereabouts - I
didn't take notes at the time). My LCD monitor OSD popped up and said
"out of range", but the image still rendered on the screen (a miracle).
I immediately went into the program options, and bumped it up to 640x480.
Perhaps some registry editor work can fix that.

Second thing to do, is enable "subtitles". I found the sound volume level
of the characters tended to vary a bit, and I needed the subtitles to make
up for inaudible speech.

Moving the character around the playing field, uses "WASD" or cursor characters.
I found some inconsistency in the controls, for example, sometimes in corners
I found myself spinning in circles (in real life, I do that a lot anyway :-) )

The game demo is time limited, and in the ten minutes alloted, I never managed
to get off the courtyard.

I tried to play "marbles", but the one shot I managed was so weak, as to be
ineffective.

I'm sure the kids will love it :-) Making a puzzle from the controls,
is more fun than the puzzles in the game.

In terms of video performance, the video animation that plays at the
beginning, wasn't entirely smooth. I have a 3GHz P4 and a 9800Pro
video card, and that is a bit better than a motherboard with integrated
video. The actual gameplay didn't seem to be too taxing.

For safety, I actually put this game on a cloned copy of my system disk.
Just in case the demo was going to install a lot of cruft. The DX9 folder
seemed to contain a lot of stuff, and at least one of the cab files
came in handy. By extracting XINPUT1_3.dll from one of the .cab files,
placing that in the game folder, that solved the first dependency for
Win2K. The second issue with the XINPUT1_3 file, was solved with advice
from here. After that, the game would start for me (albeit in too-low
resolution). I expect a forum somewhere, has advice if the game demo simply
won't start for you. Check some of the user comments in the forum links
I put in the previous post. Someone is bound to spill the beans as to
what'll make it work.

Win2K - cab extraction, xinput1_3.dll , TraceMessage , GetUserNameA
http://www.techspot.com/blog/87/fix-for-running-bioshock-in-windows-2000/

Paul
 
Does Intel have a video card equivalent to ATI Radeon 7500 or NVIDIA GeForce
GTS?
Click to expand...

Why ask here? This has nothing to do with the OS. Do your own
research elsewhere.
 
Thank you for your help. I don't have the expertise to do the suggestions
you made to try and make Harry Potter work. I'm either going to buy a video
card, or wait until I need to replace this computer. I looked at the Best
Buy ad in Sunday's paper and it seems like most of the new computers have
video cards which have more capabilities than my computer has.
 
John said:
Thank you for your help. I don't have the expertise to do the suggestions
you made to try and make Harry Potter work. I'm either going to buy a video
card, or wait until I need to replace this computer. I looked at the Best
Buy ad in Sunday's paper and it seems like most of the new computers have
video cards which have more capabilities than my computer has.
Click to expand...

I read some more reviews, and one reviewer noted that cutscenes were a
little bit choppy for unknown reasons. But gameplay was not that demanding.
So it could be that the cutscenes will be choppy, even when better hardware
is used.

In reading the reviews, another thing came up. When I mentioned I was
"spinning in circles" when using the controls in the game - apparently
the controls (letters WASD) control with respect to the camera view, and
not the character orientation. So when you see a character pointed in
a particular direction, the direction keys don't work with respect to the
player character, but to the camera viewing the character. Even armed with
that knowledge, I still didn't get very far. I gave up, because the controls
were so poor, I couldn't achieve the basics of gameplay.

If your theory is, that the problem is hardware related, what you can
try, is go to Start:Run and enter "dxdiag" and run the diagnostic from
DirectX. Under the "Display" tab, there is a "Test Direct3D" button.
Clicking that should cause the screen to flash, and a spinning 3 dimensional
cube should appear on the screen. That would prove that you have basic
3D capability working OK. (Don't click the three buttons labeled "Disable"
next to it. The status is the text to the left, and the user interface
is confusing, so don't get fooled into clicking on them for nothing.)

To get working 3D, you need:

1) Chipset drivers (on my machine, they help the system recognize there
is an AGP slot). That may not be quite as important on a PCI Express
machine. On my AGP machine, the chipset drivers set up an AGP bridge
driver AGP440.sys. On PCI Express, a default PCI to PCI bridge may be
all that is needed.
2) Video card driver for 3D. Knowing the manufacturer of the video device,
you can download a driver. (Whether it is built-in graphics from Intel,
or a card from ATI or Nvidia etc.)
3) Most games will try to install the latest DirectX for you. Even the
Harry Potter game tried to do that. So it is hard to imagine you
have anything less than DirectX 9c at the moment.

If you want a test for your existing video, you can try this one. It is
a 40MB download. If I use the benchmark on my system, I get around 15000
right now, with a 9800Pro video card. Really modern hardware is
easily able to achieve benchmarks more than 5x higher than mine.

http://www.majorgeeks.com/3Dmark_d99.html

Paul
 
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