Well, I'm not that much of a gamer. I'm a fan of the Quake series so
I bought Quake 4, and that's the only game I'm playing right now.
I'm not that excited with the performance of the game on my system.
800x600, 4x AA Low Quality. It has a smooth framerate most of the
time but on cases with plenty of enemies it slows down. That leads me
to believe that it's a memory/cpu problem. Note that the minimu
requirements on the box are Athlon XP 2000 and 512 MB RAM so this is
pretty much expected.
Oh man you can tell I posted that early in the morning dropped words
and using interesting instead interested.
Anyway --- Ive been posting about my second system Im using which
consists of a 3200 AMD 64 754 socket with 512 megs and an older 9600
Pro flashed to a XT level.
In this system which Im using right now the processor/system is more
modern and higher end though in modern terms its lower/mid but
relative to the card which is marginal and older its an interesting
combo.
Interesting cause main system was a 3000 AMD 64 939 paired with a
800XL ATI 256 megs which was fine for most games. My current main
system a dual core 3800 X2 with a 7800GT isnt a whole lot better
subjectively vs the 939/800XL.
The main problem is ALL of them can run at higher 1024x768 or so res
and Ive found at this res (higher than 800x600) the jaggies are
lessened to a huge degree. They are distracting at 800x600.
I also notice that using AA at all totally bogs the system down even
with my 3800/7800GT. I just dont use it.
My impression was that going to 1024x768 was best solution for getting
OK pic quality without bogging the system down too a crawl.
Even the 3200/9600XT system can in general handle that res but with
that setup it bogs down when the action as Ive posted before ----
starts getting heavy. You have more than simple effects/action going
on and it hangs for 10-20 seconds or even longer as its loading
datafrom the HD. I still havent tested 1 gig -- at the moment I have 2
512 meg sticks laying around since my main system is apart being RMAd
so I should do that test. Does 1 gig make the difference here?
My impression at the moment is if you have less than an AMD 64 I would
get a stronger card at least a 6600gt which is a decent not that
expensive card nowadays. Trying to pair a slower CPU with an older
weaker card -- 9250/9550 etc I think is just too wimpy. You want at
least 1024x768 even without AA so that you can run without incredibly
annoying lags freezes and no huge jaggies.
Even then this system is probably going to be marginal so that by next
Xmas youll have to upgrade again if new games with higher min
requirements come out.
The other way is to get at least a 3200 AMD 64 and you may use a
weaker card temporarily but I think the card plays the much larger
role. They both play a part obviously but the 3200 AMD 64 even with a
9600XT card is very marginal though might be OK if I can just get rid
of these annoying 10-20 second or longer freezes whenever action gets
heavy. If the 1 gig of ram doesnt help this or any other solution I
would have to say a 6600gt or better is the min recommended card if
you want to play modern games though people claim to play with
9250/X300s etc.
Now to figure out how to get a 6600gt for 30-50 bucks...........
Some have with dubious price matching but Id never go that route.
I was that close to upgrading again to a 7900GT.
