New vid card - wanna show it off

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Jedi2016

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So I finally upgraded my computer a bit. My "new" card is actually not new, but it's a damn sight better than the 32MB card I had last week.

Here are my current specs:

AMD AthlonXP 2600+
2GB RAM
ATI Radeon 9600Pro 256MB vid card

And more storage space than God. Well, not really, but I'm over half a terabyte of total storage space, which is nice. What can I do to show off the new card? I downloaded a couple of ATI tech demos that are cool (that my old card would have killed itself on), but I'm wondering what sort of demos are out there that'll wow me. I was never much of a PC gamer, so I don't really know what's out there. One of the guys at work recommended Doom 3. I've already got Oblivion on PS3. What other high-end-graphics games are out there? Or any other cool tech demos and stuff?

And while we're on the subject, why is it that developers never actually release these tech demos of theirs? I think it'd be cool to play around with CRYEngine2 or UE3, even outside of a full game, like in all those videos they release.
 
Not sure how much you know about that card/your computer. The card is a drastic improvement over your old card, but even with it your computer isn't good enough to play recent games at high res - Doom 3 for instance will not run very well, at least not pretty.

I had a very similarly specced computer about 3/4 years ago and that ran some games at an ok res. Try these, but don't get your hopes up:

- FarCry
- Halflife 2
- Battlefield 2
- Doom 3 (buy it if you want, i didn't think it was a very good game and it is very very demanding on the system)

They're all first person shooters like Doom 3 and a bit like Oblivion (from the viewpoint). Make sure you get all the games from a store that lets you return them if you can't run them. Some stores near where i live do not.

Really though i'd say don't spend a lot of money on games for your PC when you've got a PS3 at hand, the PS3 is hugely better at gaming.
 
donbenni
Really though i'd say don't spend a lot of money on games for your PC when you've got a PS3 at hand, the PS3 is hugely better at gaming.
Click to expand...

As I said, I'm not a big PC gamer, so that's not really a concern. I was mainly after the increased video memory, for my 3D work. I just want to put the card through it's paces. :)
 
Having a 9600 Pro myself (the Mobile one), for what you want it for, outside of games, the card is perfect.

When it comes to games though, it'll run new ones like a pig. Even games a few years old, like Half Life 2, etc, only run well on very low resolutions.

Doom 3 is actually surprisingly stable, if you like your graphics to be set a little lower, and no shadows. Shadows seem to be the killer of performance for this card - I usually turn it off in games and it's fine.

However, a games a few years older, like Quake 3 Arena, and Unreal Tournament 2004, run very well, and are very fun. 👍
 
nice specs 👍 - wish i had specs like that - although i am updating mine but not that good getting the cheaper stuff so i can play mmo's but not spend a bomb lol

got a 128mb graphics card

I'll build my super computer 1 day when i have a job :lol:

Anyway i think the best game for pcs are online games - mmos - wow is a good 1 but u have to pay which sucks so i play ........

Guildwars - the new one is comming out in septemeber gonna be Immense! - but only add on -

Guild wars is like oblivion but a million times better because its with millions of other people - some ppl prefer oblivion or never winter nights etc but i prefer being with millions of other gamers, having fun and owning them - more competitive :p
 
Either you're all crazy, or I'm just lucky. Both FarCry and Doom3 run pretty well.

I tried FarCry first (demo), and it auto-selected Medium settings for everything. I changed it all to Very High, and noticed no difference in performance between that and Medium. The only setting that wouldn't change was Texture Filtering, that stayed locked on Medium. The game played fine.. no Vsync breakup, no real framerate drops to speak of.

Then I tried the Doom3 demo, and it auto-selected 640x480 at Medium quality, with all options on except for VSync (maybe my card doesn't do Vsync? Neither game auto-selected it). Anyway, I jacked everything up to maximum, and the game even gave me a warning about how maximum settings use 500MB of texture memory and isn't recommended. Hey, I've got 2GB of RAM, might as well use it, jackass.. hehe. So I set everything to Maximum and off I went. I noticed more slowdown in this one than in FarCry, but it was never unplayable (think of it like a bad port of a console game, where people complain about "framerate all over the place", but it's still playable). I could probably just bump overall texture detail back down to Medium and it would probably play fine with minimal change in visual quality. Aside from that, the only thing I didn't like was that the game was too damn dark. Methinks Id went a little overboard on that one.. even in the "brightly lit" areas of the game, I was wanting to use the flashlight.

I've always been kind of lucky with games, though.. Or maybe I'm just jaded by console gaming, where 30fps is good enough. I dunno. I've often been able to play games fine, even when I barely met the minimum reqs.

The only other downside is that I suck at shooters.. hehe. Maybe I'll go find me a nice racing game or something.

Do I dare to try Crysis? ;)
 
I have only 512mb of ram, otherwise i could play Doom 3 on ultra setting with no vsync and 4x anti-aliassing on 1280*1024
But the framerate drops to 1 everytime i open a door and the game has to load new textures and stuff.
Same goes for other games, my limited ram capacity limits the quality and in a racegame the amount of AI vehicles.

Btw, i have a MSI NX7800-TD256 AGP. That means 256MB of DDR3 ram on my graphics card :)
It's one of the fastest video cards available for AGP.
 
I think when it says you need 512mbs of texture memory it means the memory you need on the card - not the RAM. That's another reason why would be getting the freezing. I get the same on anything above the 128mb this card I can handle.

If I remember correctly playing months ago on here, it froze a little on High with recommended 256mb, and froze constantly when moving to another room in Ultra, 512mb, which kinda proves my point...
 
No, not really. It doesn't proof that they mean the graphics card's ram.
You forget the time needed for the textures and stuff to be loaded into the memory. Doesn't matter if it's your graphics card or your normal ram, it takes more time to load 512mb than to load 256. If you get what i'm pointing at.
I searched on google and found this page:
http://forums.idlethumbs.net/archive/index.php/t-875.html
It tells you how to enable image caching for the game. They say it helps improve the FPS, so maybe it's worth to give it a try.
 
Mine never "froze", even on max settings, the framerate would simply stutter now and again, no worse than you see on a lot of badly-ported console games.
 

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