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Vid Card - Would This Happen To Me?
decorumfriends
Posts: 2,811 Arc User
I'm running on an old computer and thinking about upgrading my vid card, but researching I ran into this in an old archived thread...
His description of what it looked like is how I see things now.
Now, my specs are better than his by a little, but would I fall into the same trap? Would buying a new vid card be a waste of money, making an ugly but playable situation worse?
Operating System
Windows XP Professional 32-bit SP3
CPU
Intel Core 2 Duo E4500 @ 2.20GHz 33 °C
Conroe 65nm Technology
RAM
4.00GB Dual-Channel DDR2 @ 332MHz (5-5-5-15)
Motherboard
Dell Inc. 0DN075 (Microprocessor)
Graphics
HP L1706 (1280x1024@60Hz)
128MB ATI RADEON X800 Series (ATI)
128MB ATI RADEON X800 Series -Secondary (ATI)
CrossFire Disabled
Power Supply
375 watts Power Factor Correcting (PFC) power supply
During Open Beta, I did not yet have the machine I'm currently enjoying. I had a Pentium 4 (2.8GHz) CPU, 2.5GB of RAM (2x1GB and 2x256MB, a very poorly-balanced setup) and a Radeon X600. CO ran, and I even got tolerably-playable framerates (in the neighborhood of 15 to 20 - not great, but, it worked ... mostly).
But it was FUGLY. Almost all of the detail was missing from the game - I had no reflectivity, so cloth/leather/metal didn't matter for my characters' costumes ... it all looked the same, on me and everyone else. Similarly, the "detail" level didn't show up. The same sort of things happened to the environment, in-game. And a developer told me in-game, directly and in as many words, that he was surprised that CO could run on that machine.
So while it might technically run ... don't count on it.
And that bit, leads nicely into ...
Before I (maybe) say anything about what Quaternion wrote, I want to relate the NEXT experience I had with CO, when I took the above P4 computer and put a much nicer video card into it ... this NVidia GeForce GTS 250, in fact.
And ran afoul of one of CO's little hidden "traps": a lot of the game is solidly processor-bound, and my P4 just couldn't handle it. Y'see, the peculiar mix of P4 and X600 had an unexpected advantage going for it: since my graphics card couldn't even TRY to do a lot of the shiny, special, extra-beautiful stuff?
It pretended that stuff wasn't even there, to begin with - and thus, didn't burden my CPU with any of it.
But once I put in a card that COULD attempt those things? A lot of extra work suddenly got dumped on my CPU. Work it couldn't do, not fast enough for the game to be playable. The money I spent on that GTS 250 was wasted, every dollar of it - and it was a $135 purchase, so that was no small sum!
His description of what it looked like is how I see things now.
Now, my specs are better than his by a little, but would I fall into the same trap? Would buying a new vid card be a waste of money, making an ugly but playable situation worse?
Operating System
Windows XP Professional 32-bit SP3
CPU
Intel Core 2 Duo E4500 @ 2.20GHz 33 °C
Conroe 65nm Technology
RAM
4.00GB Dual-Channel DDR2 @ 332MHz (5-5-5-15)
Motherboard
Dell Inc. 0DN075 (Microprocessor)
Graphics
HP L1706 (1280x1024@60Hz)
128MB ATI RADEON X800 Series (ATI)
128MB ATI RADEON X800 Series -Secondary (ATI)
CrossFire Disabled
Power Supply
375 watts Power Factor Correcting (PFC) power supply
'Dec out
Post edited by Unknown User on
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Comments
If the work is being offloaded to the CPU and ignoring the GPU then you likely need more RAM to get good results. I'm running with 8GB and 2.67ghz processor and its great for an original Xbox quality game. Average CPU use is 31%
I'd be more worried about picking up malware on that unpatchable XP machine than if it could run video games. There was a zero day exploit patched out of Windows 7 and up last week, you don't have that kind of protection. I picked up a virus either through a political website or Western Union last week to and my Norton history is full of warnings on Crypticerror.exe. Just an example how how unsafe you may be playing.
Black Friday approaches, maybe a whole new machine would put you on better footing.
Seconding both of these comments. The card in question is a PCI-E 2.0 x16 slot, which according to this sheet Your motherboard supports. (That's what I got when I searched for your motherboard's product number).
However, you cannot put more RAM into your computer. XP is maxed out at somewhere between 3 and 4 GB RAM. I think it's ... 3.73? I don't recall. XP is built on the x86 architecture, also known as 32-bit, and this memory limit goes across the board with any x86 build.
Your processor is a dual-core processor, and as such is a -lot- better at handling loads than the single-core P4 chips. I would not suspect you'd have the same issue as the archived post. But because you're playing on what is basically an ancient machine, it's all something of a crap-shoot. I'd say roll the dice, get the above card and try it out. It's 30 bucks either way. If it turns out to not work, I'd highly suggest getting a new computer when they're hella cheap come Black Friday.
XP is quickly bleeding out and while your hardware still may be ticking, the internet is quickly moving past XP. The latest version of Java no longer supports XP, neither does Firefox and IE8 (the last version of IE to work in XP) is starting to get phased out as well. Spybot and Malwarebytes are both reactive defenses rather than proactive. You have to get the bugs before you can do anything about them. Using old version of Java puts you at extremely high risk of contracting the FBI/Interpol/ICE virus, or even worse, the Cryptologger family of viruses. These viruses come in through infected ads on legitimate websites (meaning, you can get these viruses from everyday websites, not just weird German donkey sites) and sneak past your defenses via java script exploits. Once on, the FBI virus locks down your computer, forcing you to either wipe/reload or clean the computer with an offline virus removal tool (Going to safe mode only rarely works). The Cryptolocker virus encrypts all of your document files (.doc, .jpg, .mp3, etc) and demands a huge sum of money to unlock them, and paying doesn't always mean they'll unlock them either.
It's your choice, but if you continue to use XP I would highly suggest you back up important files and documents to an external drive and leave that drive disconnected from your computer. This is a good practice anyway. I'm also not saying that Vista/7/8/10 aren't exempt from these attacks either, but XP is just in a whole lot worse of a position to get them since you literally -can't- defend yourself from it.
Source: I'm a computer repair technician.
Is this thing on?
Sigh...I wouldn't be so reluctant to upgrade if Vista, 7 and 8 haven't been such bloated crap. I REALLY should learn Linux.
I play on 7 and it definitely isn't crap.
"Good can be found in heights, even in the deepest pits of evil" but "The valleys of evil always exist in the mountains of good."
~me
Linux introduces a new set of headaches, especially if you go for the more "fancy" distros. Ubuntu and its offshoots are serviceable, but getting Windows applications to run requires its own hurdles, and some things, such as Netflix, don't really work at all without a lot of effort on your part. I would not suggest Linux as a "daily driver" for anyone who is not extremely comfortable with command-line interfaces, searching the internet for forum posts, or a particularly impatient person. A lot of time will be spent fixing things that get broken during updates. Again, this is more true for the more exotic branches, but can be true for any of them.
The "bloat" for Windows NT 6 (Which is what Vista, 7, 8 and 10 run on) is hardly noticeable on modern machines, unless you mean added software. My Windows folder is 32 GB right now (I haven't cleaned out my Temp folders in a while...) which would be pretty much all of my HDD on my old Windows XP machine that I use as a typewriter, but since this computer has 3 TB of storage space, that's only 1% of my total. Also, since there is a much higher RAM ceiling with 64-bit systems you really don't feel a lot of those services running unless you're crippled with infections.
I got this machine for about 400 dollars on a Black Friday sale in 2011. 1.5 TB HDD, 10 GB RAM, i3 processor. I slapped another 100 dollars for a video card (which required an upgrade to the PS) and I have not had any problems running... anything. I play this game at max settings windowed with dual monitors and a full screen video playing on the second monitor (sup ADD generation). Three years later, this thing is still kickin'.
There's still plenty you can do with your old computer though. You can turn it into a file sharing server and turn your house into a multimedia smarthouse of the future, capable of streaming movies and music to your TV, computers or where ever. You should have room for two more HDDs on that board, or three if you unplug the DVD drive. You could also put Linux on it (or even try it out with a Live USB, I suggest using YUMI), or just use it as a heater during the winter. I always appreciate the ancient machines that come into our shop during the colder months for that very reason. (My boss is cheap and doesn't like running the heat very high...)
Is this thing on?
Oh, I'm aware. That's why I say I have to "learn" Linux rather than just "install" it.
I wasn't able to get that exact card (it kept telling me it couldn't verify my address), but I got something very similar elsewhere and it works great! It looks good even though I had to turn down a couple of things, they were things like bloom that I don't like anyway. Plays well with only a SLIGHT more "hitch" than before, but very workable. And I can now see all the things I couldn't before with so many choices grayed out. Clothing has wrinkles! Faces have options! Thanks again!
Windows 7 is the closest Windows has ever come the Mac OS: Pretty much a work of art.
Too bad the guy that was in charge of designing it left Microsoft as soon as he was done being forced to create the mess that is Windows 8. Maybe when Steve Ballmer leaves the company this year he'll come back.
* The downside of moving from triple-channel to dual-channel memory. I later picked up a 4th DIMM to get up to 16 GB, but with a 32-bit process and no swap pressure at 12 GB, it had no effect on framerate.
Ballmer's already gone. He's got his basketball team, and he can do Embarrassing Dad stuff on the jumbotron. He's happy.
I don't hear many calls to absolve Steven Sinofsky for Windows 8, though. For as much good as he did turning Vista around after that disaster of a launch and streamlining it into Windows 7, his implementation of Windows 8 was... Well, I'll put it nicely and say it was a gross miscalculation of the market. Windows 8 was the perfect touch-based operating system for some alternate universe where Surfaces sold like iPads, not the real world where tens of millions of Windows 7 users were upgrading the same keyboard and mouse/trackpad systems they had been using for years.
Windows 8.1 goes a decent way toward making Windows usable on a desktop or laptop again, but we'll have to wait until next year for Windows 10 to really straighten things out. I've been running the public preview build of Windows 10, and so far, it looks a lot like what your intuition would tell you Windows 8 should have looked like.
And I'll echo the calls to upgrade from XP. With no more support from Microsoft, it's too dangerous. The XP machines we keep around our office for maintenance support only have access to internal servers, not the internet. Even with anti-virus, even with a sometimes over-zealous firewall, XP machines on the internet are right out.
tl;dr: You can't give Cryptic Engine enough CPU, and get the hell away from Windows XP, NAO!
They're not there in the beginning, but when your story ends / Gonna last with you longer than your friends
I agree CO is heavy on the CPU, but that same goes for the GPU.
While keeping my (OC'd) Core i7-3930K, upgrading from a AMD 7970 to a nvidia GTX 980 improved fps in MC center from 35 to 57 (all settings maxed), and that 57 is probably hitting the 60 fps cap now and then.