Will my computer be able to play most high-end games? Splinter Cell, Unreal 2, etc... (1 Viewer)

[ChuckM]

Processor:AMD XP 1700
Video Card:Sapphire Radeon 9500 non-pro RED
Motherboard:Abit KD7 DDR 400 AGP 8x
Ram: 256 or PC2700
Hard Drive:maxtor 20gb ATA100

 

[Tekara]

yup, I do believe it will even if you don't overclock. . . the only problems that you will encounter is that you might not be able to play with all the settings maxed out. . . though that tends not to bother many

anywhichway. . . that looks like a great system, especially if you start looking into overclocking.

 

[MikeAlletto]

i'm playing splinter cell and unreal 2 with a 800Mhz P3 with a geforce 2 and it plays good enough...have to play at 800x600 but its pretty good.

 

[Andre F]

I think you'll be fine...don't get caught in upgrade mode. I just did and it's been VERY expensive!

 

[NickSo]

I have an XP1700+ with a GF2GTS-32MB(DDR) and it runs splinter cell fine. I run it at 640x480 with settings on low, it runs almost 60FPS. i've tried running at 800x600 wihtout problems as well.

 

[ChuckM]

Thanks for the input guys

 

[Javier_Huerta]

On a side note, at the office I have a Pentium 4 running at 2 Ghz,with 512 MB RAM, and it *crawls* when trying to play UT 2003.

Then again, I own a PC at my home where I can play UT at max detail levels. And it's a PII at 450 MHz.

I think the video card makes *all* the difference int he world. At my office, I have a Riva TNT2. At home, I had a pair of Voodoo2s in SLI.

 

[Brian Ruth]

Chuck:

I'd say everything on your system is fine except the hard drive. 20GB isn't enough anymore, especially with 3 Gig installs. I'd suggest upgrading to a larger hard drive before loading all those games onto your system.

 

[Shane Martin]

Personally I would go further with the system upgrade to the following:

Processor: fine
Video Card: I would upgrade. ATI's always require special patches and they seem to never get everything right. Nvidia's never require this.
Ram: Upgrade to 768. 256 just doesnt' cut the mustard anymore.

If a video card upgrade isn't in the cards, buy some ram, It's cheap and 512 more will make a huge difference.

 

[Javier_Huerta]

I have used 4 ATI cards (ATI RAGE LT pro, Ati Radeon 7500 All-In-Wonder, Ati Radeon Mobility 7500, Ati Rage 128), and I have never had any problems with them. As a matter of fact, I love the 7500's video quality - DVD's have never looked better on a DLP projection system.

Many people talk about problems with ATI drivers. Either I'm one of the lucky ones, or ATI has had its share of undeserved bad reputation.

 

[John_Berger]

Chuck, you'll be fine. A lot of games are now putting more power into the video card than on the processor to the point that the video card is becoming the main bottleneck. I play Unreal 2, Unreal Tournament 2003, and Splinter Cell with my Athlon 1.4GHz without too much of a problem, although scenes with a lot of textures slow down in Splinter Cell. I have my excuse to upgrade to a new video card.

Ram: Upgrade to 768. 256 just doesn't' cut the mustard anymore.

The low cost of memory not withstanding, that's massive overkill. Unless you're doing something like 3D CAD or finite element analysis or you're going to use a respectably sized RAM disk, anything more than 512 MB is wasted. Even my video editor and conversion system doesn't crack 340MB of used memory when pounding away making DVD-ready MPEG-2 files.

 

[Shane Martin]

Many people talk about problems with ATI drivers. Either I'm one of the lucky ones, or ATI has had its share of undeserved bad reputation.

It's mainly the games that is the issue. The ATI drivers for Video or dvd playback are fine. In relation to games, they are horrid in my experience. I play alot of games with alot of people. ATI cards are improving however.

 

[Tekara]

since ATI is now the king of video cards, they have been pushing their drivers more. in perspective they've released the cat 3's in november and have currently revised it once with another revision due in the next week or two, so they've picked up the ball lately, which is good.

depending on the game you play the amount of ram needed in your system can vary. 512 is my minimum, 1gig is my current "nice place to be" 1 gig may sound like a lot, but it all comes into use eventually if not today then in the future. Especially for the price ram can be had for nowadays to, it's not to hard getting your hands on a full gig of memory.

 

[John_Berger]

Alot of the games I play anymore look better and run better with 768 over 512 ram.

Unless your video card can tap into the system's memory, I find that to be very difficult to believe. Load and reload speeds, yes, that's believable since there is more room to cache the files; however, improvements to the actual animation rate I find very difficult to believe unless the game is so bloated and has so much memory leakage that you need the extra memory to compensate.

But if you can convince me, I'll be glad to go out and replace one of my 256 MB sticks with 512 MB.

 

[Shane Martin]

John,
Everquest's minimum requirements now include 512 ram with more recommended. I've used less and the more the merrier with EQ. The performance of the game changes completely. It has over a few hundred thousand people a night playing it so don't tell me its not poorly designed because if it was, people wouldn't play it. People do and its the most popular MMORPG ever. There is a drastic improvement with more ram. The game is also very video card dependent as well.

 

[Joe Hsu]

hehe, if you're that concerned (which you shouldn't be, your system is fine), you could look into "hacking" your video card, since it looks to be compatible with the R9700 software hack, giving you 9700 numbers.

Just do a search on it, it's not hard to find some info on it.

 

[John_Berger]

Everquest's minimum requirements now include 512 ram with more recommended.

WHAT??? Where the hell did Everquest's programmers graduate from? The Microsoft Institute for Bloatware Coding??

 

[Javier_Huerta]

Considering BEA Weblogic Server has a minimum requirement of 256 MB, with 512 MB recommended, I'm really surprised a game must require 512 MB.

I mean... BEA is the stuff enterprises rely upon for their e-commerce and database integration requirements. What does Everquest do?!?