Game performance problem
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Anyone else think the last few years of 3D video cards have been a bit confusing? I honestly have no clue any longer what video card is good and which one is needed for game X, Y or Z. Back in Star Control days all you worried about was your CPU and your RAM. A better 2D video card did help but if you didn't have a great one the game still worked fine. Now though if you don't have a specific video card you might not be able to play the game no matter how good your CPU is or how much RAM you have. In other cases half of the visual delight that made you buy the game is disabled because you don't have a video card that isn't actually released yet. Even though the rest of your machine is a quad P4 4Ghz with 32Gb of RAM. Even the amount of RAM on a 3d card is not an indicator of how good it is or what games will work with it. All the confusing chipsets with their different capabilities and features. Frankly I have stopped buying games because I can never be sure it will work on my laptop (a P4 3.2Ghz 1Gb RAM but with a weak video card). I just want a nice, clear way of knowing if a game will work well or not. Minimum requirements don't help as a: they are a minimum and mean that the game will play but at 2FPS with all features turned off and b: the video chipset mentioned I have never even heard of never mind understood. A model 3 shader card? WTF? We need to go back to good old voxels. They were the solution to everything ;) regards, Paul Watson Ireland Feed Henry! K(arl) wrote: oh, and BTW, CHRISTIAN ISN'T A PARADOX, HE IS A TASMANIAN!
adapted from toxcct:
while (!enough)
sprintf 0 || 1
doPaul Watson wrote:
We need to go back to good old voxels.
Voxels?! Luxury! Back in the day 320 x 240 was the way to go. In fact, CGA was perfect for games. Who needs more than 4 colours? Who needs graphics anyway? All you need is a prompt where you can type things like "Look" and "North" Jokes aside I agree with you. Maybe I'm just getting old and too lazy to keep up with technology. I stopped caring when I last bought a Nvidia 5900 graphics card or something like that. I can't even remember anymore. I was looking at upgrading lately and I see there's things like PCI express and SLI's and whatnot. That means, new motherboard, new CPU, new graphics card(s), new morgage on the house (well if I had a house that is)... I just cant be bothered. I got a ps2 and a TV instead. At least if I ever get a PS3 I (hopefully) wont have to upgrade the TV. :sigh:
"Love is a snowmobile racing across the tundra and then suddenly it flips over, pinning you underneath. At night, the ice weasels come." I refuse to spend my life worrying about what I eat. There is no pleasure worth foregoing just for an extra three years in a geriatric ward.
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I just bought and installed Oblivion from Bethesda softwoks, and that's too damn slow... even with minimum resolution I can't play.... On the other hand this year I want to avoid expense as much as I could... I would need an hint on what I should improve in my computer to get decent performance. I have: AMD Sempron 2800+ 1Gb RAM 1.61GHz GeForce FX5200 with 128MB Now I am thinking if I upgrade just my video card, should that bring considerable change?
Well your first problem is your machine is under the recommend specs for the game. You two main issues with this game and your machine is your Sempron, and the video card. (and the 128 on the video card isn't helping) Though I have an AMD Athlon 2.0g, 1 gig of Ram, and a Ge-force 5700.. so you're not THAT much under. However, you are still under and Oblivion takes A LOT of graphics horse power. $200 at Fry's will net you a Ge-force 6800 (with 256 ram) that will do wonders for all your games. I just upgraded mine last week, and the difference is unbelievable. Anyway, your best bet is this: A) make sure you have plenty of HD space free for swap B) Turn off EVERYTHING (and I mean EVERYTHING) before running the game. You might want to use something like 'Smart Close' (http://www.bm-productions.tk/ (FREE)[^] in order to shut everything down automatically. C) be sure your drive is defragged. D) there's also some tweaks that you can do in the Oblivion INI file look here for that information: Oblivion Settings Guide[^] E) You will need to run the game in the lowest settings.. However, I've noticed that the game doesn't always KEEP those settings. So be sure to check them (both in the main launch menu, and in the load game menu) before play. F) make sure your texture settings are set to the lowest possible. Hope this and the Guide can help! -== The PogoWolf ==- Like a funkey muckin' a bootfall. http://www.pogowolf.com GamersVue: ttp://GamersVue.blogger.com
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I just bought and installed Oblivion from Bethesda softwoks, and that's too damn slow... even with minimum resolution I can't play.... On the other hand this year I want to avoid expense as much as I could... I would need an hint on what I should improve in my computer to get decent performance. I have: AMD Sempron 2800+ 1Gb RAM 1.61GHz GeForce FX5200 with 128MB Now I am thinking if I upgrade just my video card, should that bring considerable change?
You can check your hardware setup against a number of different games at http://www.srtest.com/referrer/srtest[^]
Maximilien Lincourt Your Head A Splode - Strong Bad
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I just bought and installed Oblivion from Bethesda softwoks, and that's too damn slow... even with minimum resolution I can't play.... On the other hand this year I want to avoid expense as much as I could... I would need an hint on what I should improve in my computer to get decent performance. I have: AMD Sempron 2800+ 1Gb RAM 1.61GHz GeForce FX5200 with 128MB Now I am thinking if I upgrade just my video card, should that bring considerable change?
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Anyone else think the last few years of 3D video cards have been a bit confusing? I honestly have no clue any longer what video card is good and which one is needed for game X, Y or Z. Back in Star Control days all you worried about was your CPU and your RAM. A better 2D video card did help but if you didn't have a great one the game still worked fine. Now though if you don't have a specific video card you might not be able to play the game no matter how good your CPU is or how much RAM you have. In other cases half of the visual delight that made you buy the game is disabled because you don't have a video card that isn't actually released yet. Even though the rest of your machine is a quad P4 4Ghz with 32Gb of RAM. Even the amount of RAM on a 3d card is not an indicator of how good it is or what games will work with it. All the confusing chipsets with their different capabilities and features. Frankly I have stopped buying games because I can never be sure it will work on my laptop (a P4 3.2Ghz 1Gb RAM but with a weak video card). I just want a nice, clear way of knowing if a game will work well or not. Minimum requirements don't help as a: they are a minimum and mean that the game will play but at 2FPS with all features turned off and b: the video chipset mentioned I have never even heard of never mind understood. A model 3 shader card? WTF? We need to go back to good old voxels. They were the solution to everything ;) regards, Paul Watson Ireland Feed Henry! K(arl) wrote: oh, and BTW, CHRISTIAN ISN'T A PARADOX, HE IS A TASMANIAN!
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doI know how you feel, when I first started into the pc gaming a year ago one card seemed the same as the others (suppose this is the nice thing about consoles) but after a while you start to pick up on a few things. Also it comes down to the games, some are better supported on ATI, other NVidia e.g shader 3 is not on ATI cards but is on nvidia (or is it the other way round :~ ) but ATI are better at opengl at the minute..... A medium range card is ok, its only when your big into a specific game that you try to match the card to it (which is stupid) that and the willy shaking contests. I seen something recently were ati/nvidia were going to put a gig of ram on the gc:wtf:. Imp. 'Out of Office Auto Reply' The email server is unable to verify your server connection and is unable to deliver this mesage. Please restart your computer and try sending again. '(The beauty of this is that when you return, you can see how many in-du-viduals did this over and over).
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Anyone else think the last few years of 3D video cards have been a bit confusing? I honestly have no clue any longer what video card is good and which one is needed for game X, Y or Z. Back in Star Control days all you worried about was your CPU and your RAM. A better 2D video card did help but if you didn't have a great one the game still worked fine. Now though if you don't have a specific video card you might not be able to play the game no matter how good your CPU is or how much RAM you have. In other cases half of the visual delight that made you buy the game is disabled because you don't have a video card that isn't actually released yet. Even though the rest of your machine is a quad P4 4Ghz with 32Gb of RAM. Even the amount of RAM on a 3d card is not an indicator of how good it is or what games will work with it. All the confusing chipsets with their different capabilities and features. Frankly I have stopped buying games because I can never be sure it will work on my laptop (a P4 3.2Ghz 1Gb RAM but with a weak video card). I just want a nice, clear way of knowing if a game will work well or not. Minimum requirements don't help as a: they are a minimum and mean that the game will play but at 2FPS with all features turned off and b: the video chipset mentioned I have never even heard of never mind understood. A model 3 shader card? WTF? We need to go back to good old voxels. They were the solution to everything ;) regards, Paul Watson Ireland Feed Henry! K(arl) wrote: oh, and BTW, CHRISTIAN ISN'T A PARADOX, HE IS A TASMANIAN!
adapted from toxcct:
while (!enough)
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doPaul Watson wrote:
Back in Star Control days
Holy cow! I can't believe I missed that line. Star Control 2 was the best game EVER! I still have it on 5 1/4 inch floppies (real floppies, not these newfangled 3 1/2 inch "stiffies") somewhere. p.s. I haven't forgotten about sending you the South Africa vs. Australia cricket match! I've just been so busy I haven't been able to get them from my friend. I think we only have the SA innings though..
"Love is a snowmobile racing across the tundra and then suddenly it flips over, pinning you underneath. At night, the ice weasels come." I refuse to spend my life worrying about what I eat. There is no pleasure worth foregoing just for an extra three years in a geriatric ward.
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Anyone else think the last few years of 3D video cards have been a bit confusing? I honestly have no clue any longer what video card is good and which one is needed for game X, Y or Z. Back in Star Control days all you worried about was your CPU and your RAM. A better 2D video card did help but if you didn't have a great one the game still worked fine. Now though if you don't have a specific video card you might not be able to play the game no matter how good your CPU is or how much RAM you have. In other cases half of the visual delight that made you buy the game is disabled because you don't have a video card that isn't actually released yet. Even though the rest of your machine is a quad P4 4Ghz with 32Gb of RAM. Even the amount of RAM on a 3d card is not an indicator of how good it is or what games will work with it. All the confusing chipsets with their different capabilities and features. Frankly I have stopped buying games because I can never be sure it will work on my laptop (a P4 3.2Ghz 1Gb RAM but with a weak video card). I just want a nice, clear way of knowing if a game will work well or not. Minimum requirements don't help as a: they are a minimum and mean that the game will play but at 2FPS with all features turned off and b: the video chipset mentioned I have never even heard of never mind understood. A model 3 shader card? WTF? We need to go back to good old voxels. They were the solution to everything ;) regards, Paul Watson Ireland Feed Henry! K(arl) wrote: oh, and BTW, CHRISTIAN ISN'T A PARADOX, HE IS A TASMANIAN!
adapted from toxcct:
while (!enough)
sprintf 0 || 1
doPaul Watson wrote:
We need to go back to good old voxels.
They never went away. :) They just became "more interesting". If I render a 3D texture into a volume, the net result is voxels, I can control the transparency of every texture pixel in the 3D volume and do volumetric rendered pixel(voxels). Mostly used for medical imaging now, but I use it for a few things....
Paul Watson wrote:
A model 3 shader card? WTF?
Think Visual C++ 7.0 compiler.... Model 2 is 5.0 compiler... Model 1 is VC 1.0. :) Model 3 shader simply means that the programmer can use "branching" (if statements) in the rendering cycle on the graphics processing unit. Shading languages are usually "just in time compiled" and the code runs in parallel on the graphics card itself. Everytime you hear someone say the card has "24 pipelines" vs. "6 pipelines" it is number of parallel processing "nodes" on the graphics card. Thus a 24 pipeline graphics card that is shader model 3 capable is capable of most operations of a CPU but runs 24 parallel operations making it a miniature supercomputer. ;P Never get me started talking about work.... :rolleyes: _________________________ Asu no koto o ieba, tenjo de nezumi ga warau. Talk about things of tomorrow and the mice in the ceiling laugh. (Japanese Proverb)
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Paul Watson wrote:
We need to go back to good old voxels.
Voxels?! Luxury! Back in the day 320 x 240 was the way to go. In fact, CGA was perfect for games. Who needs more than 4 colours? Who needs graphics anyway? All you need is a prompt where you can type things like "Look" and "North" Jokes aside I agree with you. Maybe I'm just getting old and too lazy to keep up with technology. I stopped caring when I last bought a Nvidia 5900 graphics card or something like that. I can't even remember anymore. I was looking at upgrading lately and I see there's things like PCI express and SLI's and whatnot. That means, new motherboard, new CPU, new graphics card(s), new morgage on the house (well if I had a house that is)... I just cant be bothered. I got a ps2 and a TV instead. At least if I ever get a PS3 I (hopefully) wont have to upgrade the TV. :sigh:
"Love is a snowmobile racing across the tundra and then suddenly it flips over, pinning you underneath. At night, the ice weasels come." I refuse to spend my life worrying about what I eat. There is no pleasure worth foregoing just for an extra three years in a geriatric ward.
You'll need to get a HD tv then (this will be my excuse anyway ;P) 'Out of Office Auto Reply' The email server is unable to verify your server connection and is unable to deliver this mesage. Please restart your computer and try sending again. '(The beauty of this is that when you return, you can see how many in-du-viduals did this over and over).
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If you use your pc mainly for games, and your on a tight budget, i'd suggest less RAM, larger Display Card. That's if you can swop them out. What games are you trying to play?
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Well your first problem is your machine is under the recommend specs for the game. You two main issues with this game and your machine is your Sempron, and the video card. (and the 128 on the video card isn't helping) Though I have an AMD Athlon 2.0g, 1 gig of Ram, and a Ge-force 5700.. so you're not THAT much under. However, you are still under and Oblivion takes A LOT of graphics horse power. $200 at Fry's will net you a Ge-force 6800 (with 256 ram) that will do wonders for all your games. I just upgraded mine last week, and the difference is unbelievable. Anyway, your best bet is this: A) make sure you have plenty of HD space free for swap B) Turn off EVERYTHING (and I mean EVERYTHING) before running the game. You might want to use something like 'Smart Close' (http://www.bm-productions.tk/ (FREE)[^] in order to shut everything down automatically. C) be sure your drive is defragged. D) there's also some tweaks that you can do in the Oblivion INI file look here for that information: Oblivion Settings Guide[^] E) You will need to run the game in the lowest settings.. However, I've noticed that the game doesn't always KEEP those settings. So be sure to check them (both in the main launch menu, and in the load game menu) before play. F) make sure your texture settings are set to the lowest possible. Hope this and the Guide can help! -== The PogoWolf ==- Like a funkey muckin' a bootfall. http://www.pogowolf.com GamersVue: ttp://GamersVue.blogger.com
Yeah, what I was wondering is if I could avoid upgrading my processor as well.... But if just upgrading the video card could do wonder, that's good :D
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Interestingly, I have an Athlon 2600+, 768Mb RAM, and a 128Mb FX5200 and the game plays OK on low settings. Gets a bit jerky in fights, but otherwise OK.
That's weird... :wtf:
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Paul Watson wrote:
We need to go back to good old voxels.
Voxels?! Luxury! Back in the day 320 x 240 was the way to go. In fact, CGA was perfect for games. Who needs more than 4 colours? Who needs graphics anyway? All you need is a prompt where you can type things like "Look" and "North" Jokes aside I agree with you. Maybe I'm just getting old and too lazy to keep up with technology. I stopped caring when I last bought a Nvidia 5900 graphics card or something like that. I can't even remember anymore. I was looking at upgrading lately and I see there's things like PCI express and SLI's and whatnot. That means, new motherboard, new CPU, new graphics card(s), new morgage on the house (well if I had a house that is)... I just cant be bothered. I got a ps2 and a TV instead. At least if I ever get a PS3 I (hopefully) wont have to upgrade the TV. :sigh:
"Love is a snowmobile racing across the tundra and then suddenly it flips over, pinning you underneath. At night, the ice weasels come." I refuse to spend my life worrying about what I eat. There is no pleasure worth foregoing just for an extra three years in a geriatric ward.
Nic Rowan wrote:
I just cant be bothered. I got a ps2 and a TV instead.
Only in the past several months have I really appreciated the consoles. You just buy a box and it works (though good old Microsoft muddied things a bit with the different Xbox 360 versions. What is with Microsoft and different versions lately?) Still, I'd want a console with a mouse and a keyboard for the kind of games I like to play. regards, Paul Watson Ireland Feed Henry! K(arl) wrote: oh, and BTW, CHRISTIAN ISN'T A PARADOX, HE IS A TASMANIAN!
adapted from toxcct:
while (!enough)
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do -
Yeah, what I was wondering is if I could avoid upgrading my processor as well.... But if just upgrading the video card could do wonder, that's good :D
Well upgradeing the Video can't hurt.. LOL -== The PogoWolf ==- Like a funkey muckin' a bootfall. http://www.pogowolf.com GamersVue: ttp://GamersVue.blogger.com
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Yeah, what I was wondering is if I could avoid upgrading my processor as well.... But if just upgrading the video card could do wonder, that's good :D
Super Lloyd wrote:
Yeah, what I was wondering is if I could avoid upgrading my processor as well.... But if just upgrading the video card could do wonder, that's good
Take a look at this performance chart on a recent review of a 7300: http://www.pcstats.com/articleview.cfm?articleid=1934&page=4[^] The 5200 is 30% slower than the 6200. _________________________ Asu no koto o ieba, tenjo de nezumi ga warau. Talk about things of tomorrow and the mice in the ceiling laugh. (Japanese Proverb)
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thanks for the tip!
Super Lloyd wrote:
thanks for the tip!
Before you buy... watch the reviews and compare your choice in real-world test comparisons over at http://www.nvnews.net/[^] That way you know what you are getting before you get it, so you know what is expected/unexpected problems with the card. _________________________ Asu no koto o ieba, tenjo de nezumi ga warau. Talk about things of tomorrow and the mice in the ceiling laugh. (Japanese Proverb)
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Anyone else think the last few years of 3D video cards have been a bit confusing? I honestly have no clue any longer what video card is good and which one is needed for game X, Y or Z. Back in Star Control days all you worried about was your CPU and your RAM. A better 2D video card did help but if you didn't have a great one the game still worked fine. Now though if you don't have a specific video card you might not be able to play the game no matter how good your CPU is or how much RAM you have. In other cases half of the visual delight that made you buy the game is disabled because you don't have a video card that isn't actually released yet. Even though the rest of your machine is a quad P4 4Ghz with 32Gb of RAM. Even the amount of RAM on a 3d card is not an indicator of how good it is or what games will work with it. All the confusing chipsets with their different capabilities and features. Frankly I have stopped buying games because I can never be sure it will work on my laptop (a P4 3.2Ghz 1Gb RAM but with a weak video card). I just want a nice, clear way of knowing if a game will work well or not. Minimum requirements don't help as a: they are a minimum and mean that the game will play but at 2FPS with all features turned off and b: the video chipset mentioned I have never even heard of never mind understood. A model 3 shader card? WTF? We need to go back to good old voxels. They were the solution to everything ;) regards, Paul Watson Ireland Feed Henry! K(arl) wrote: oh, and BTW, CHRISTIAN ISN'T A PARADOX, HE IS A TASMANIAN!
adapted from toxcct:
while (!enough)
sprintf 0 || 1
doPaul Watson wrote:
Anyone else think the last few years of 3D video cards have been a bit confusing?
I absolutely agree 100%. I got my first 3D card back in January of '97 [edit: not '07 :doh:]... the legendary 3DFX Voodoo for my top of the line 200MHz Pentium Pro. I then started buying the newest cards when they came out... the Voodoo 2, followed shortly by a second Voodoo 2 for SLI action--that was about $450 for my video card setup alone. I then bought the Voodoo 3 when it came out (that was a mistake), shortly followed by my conversion to nVidia when I got the GeForce 2 GTS. After that I got married (and I played only Everquest for years, which tempered my "need" a bit), but eventually I got a GeForce 4 Ti4200 with 128MB RAM, my first upgrade that wasn't ridiculously expensive. That's still the card I use. My wife got me an Xbox after that, and I haven't worried about PC gaming since. It's easier on the wallet (especially if you buy used games almost exclusively)... I can't believe I'm a console gamer now after years of PC snobbery. But it's so nice to buy a game and not worry if my setup is beefy enough to handle it, or to have a new game work but make me wonder how it would perform if I upgraded my video card. Xbox Live made the switch possible. Still, I've found myself browsing the PC game racks a little more longingly at Best Buy lately... sigh. Must... not... give in... -- modified at 8:20 Thursday 30th March, 2006
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Super Lloyd wrote:
Yeah, what I was wondering is if I could avoid upgrading my processor as well.... But if just upgrading the video card could do wonder, that's good
Take a look at this performance chart on a recent review of a 7300: http://www.pcstats.com/articleview.cfm?articleid=1934&page=4[^] The 5200 is 30% slower than the 6200. _________________________ Asu no koto o ieba, tenjo de nezumi ga warau. Talk about things of tomorrow and the mice in the ceiling laugh. (Japanese Proverb)
Nice article!
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Nic Rowan wrote:
I just cant be bothered. I got a ps2 and a TV instead.
Only in the past several months have I really appreciated the consoles. You just buy a box and it works (though good old Microsoft muddied things a bit with the different Xbox 360 versions. What is with Microsoft and different versions lately?) Still, I'd want a console with a mouse and a keyboard for the kind of games I like to play. regards, Paul Watson Ireland Feed Henry! K(arl) wrote: oh, and BTW, CHRISTIAN ISN'T A PARADOX, HE IS A TASMANIAN!
adapted from toxcct:
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doI think you can use usb mouse/keayboard on the ps2.....might try it tonight again. 'Out of Office Auto Reply' The email server is unable to verify your server connection and is unable to deliver this mesage. Please restart your computer and try sending again. '(The beauty of this is that when you return, you can see how many in-du-viduals did this over and over).
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That's weird... :wtf:
Ask [Sandra^] might show up something. 'Out of Office Auto Reply' The email server is unable to verify your server connection and is unable to deliver this mesage. Please restart your computer and try sending again. '(The beauty of this is that when you return, you can see how many in-du-viduals did this over and over).
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Paul Watson wrote:
Anyone else think the last few years of 3D video cards have been a bit confusing?
I absolutely agree 100%. I got my first 3D card back in January of '97 [edit: not '07 :doh:]... the legendary 3DFX Voodoo for my top of the line 200MHz Pentium Pro. I then started buying the newest cards when they came out... the Voodoo 2, followed shortly by a second Voodoo 2 for SLI action--that was about $450 for my video card setup alone. I then bought the Voodoo 3 when it came out (that was a mistake), shortly followed by my conversion to nVidia when I got the GeForce 2 GTS. After that I got married (and I played only Everquest for years, which tempered my "need" a bit), but eventually I got a GeForce 4 Ti4200 with 128MB RAM, my first upgrade that wasn't ridiculously expensive. That's still the card I use. My wife got me an Xbox after that, and I haven't worried about PC gaming since. It's easier on the wallet (especially if you buy used games almost exclusively)... I can't believe I'm a console gamer now after years of PC snobbery. But it's so nice to buy a game and not worry if my setup is beefy enough to handle it, or to have a new game work but make me wonder how it would perform if I upgraded my video card. Xbox Live made the switch possible. Still, I've found myself browsing the PC game racks a little more longingly at Best Buy lately... sigh. Must... not... give in... -- modified at 8:20 Thursday 30th March, 2006
David Kentley wrote:
Must... not... give in...
:wtf::omg: You will put me out of a job!!! :wtf::omg: upgrade your 3D every generation, you'll keep me gainfully employed in the 3D market. :rolleyes: _________________________ Asu no koto o ieba, tenjo de nezumi ga warau. Talk about things of tomorrow and the mice in the ceiling laugh. (Japanese Proverb)