14 réponses à ce sujet

[Mountain Man]

My system specs (don't laugh):

Ahtlon XP 2600+
nVidia 7800GS 256MB
1.5 GB RAM

I know it's old, but I've been able to play games like Fallout 3 and Borderlands on medium-ish settings and with (what I consider) good performance (average 25 frames per second).  I'm perfectly fine with cranking the visual settings down to their bare minimum if it means the difference between a playable game and a slideshow.

So, Dragon Age, should I even try?

[Gorath Alpha]

When the game first came out, a few people with much newer video cards (and similar old AMD CPUs) said they were doing pretty well, but your video card is comparatively weak compared to those I saw mentioned, such as HD 3850s and HD 2900 XTs.

Modifié par Gorath Alpha, 21 janvier 2010 - 07:41 .

[Mountain Man]

I wish there was a demo or something I could try out.

[Mountain Man]

So a follow-up question:

I notice that according to the system requirements, my video card falls right between the minimum (6600GT) and the recommended (8800GTS). That leaves my CPU as the weakest link, so the question is, how important is the CPU to Dragon Age? Would an older, single-core CPU cripple the game? According to this guy, he's had success running the game on high with a P4 3GHz, but his video card is better than mine.

Thoughts?

Modifié par Mountain Man, 24 janvier 2010 - 03:44 .

[Gorath Alpha]

The 6800 is the minimum, yes, and all that goes with minimum, but the 7800 GS was not seriously more potent than the 6800, all things considered (in other words, Radeons blew both of them into the weeds if a lot of shader code was involved).  Let's look at your card, compared to the recommended 8800 GTS.

www.gpureview.com/show_cards.php 

There are three performance criteria that the 7800 GS shares with the 8800 GTS (which blew the Radeons away when it was new).  The 7800 GS can only get 60% of the memory bandwidth, and 30%, 50% numbers on the other pair. 

I have a PC that I use regulalrly that is almost as retarded as yours, with a Barton XP 3000 CPU, 2 GBs of PC 3200, and (presently) a Radeon X850 XTP video card, soon to be replaced by an X1950 Pro, from a newer PC getting a still newer video upgrade.  I meant to test DA: O on that machine, and then had a serious interruption in service from a partitioning error when I wanted to shift some free space around.  So, I never got around to that test.  

Personally, I would say that unless you have an XP-M (mobile) 2600, with an unlocked multiplier, you need more than a 7800 GS to have acceptable performance with it.  If it is unlockable, and you do have a BIOS that allows you to overclock, the Bartons were almost all capable of running at the XP 3200 model's default core speed, if not at its default FSB speed (400 MHz). 

Gorath
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Modifié par Gorath Alpha, 24 janvier 2010 - 04:56 .

[abadomen]

I was able to get the game running pretty well on a Pentium 4 3.0GHZ....I had a 9800GT though....

[Mountain Man]

Best thing I can recommend it to simply ugrade...

Don't you think I would if I could afford it?

Upgrading isn't going to be an option for me for a while, so I'm stretching my current system as far as it can go, and honestly, it has stayed a viable gaming rig for far longer than I ever thought it would.  I expect in the next year or so I won't be able to play any of the latest AAA games on it, but then, I was saying that two-years ago, so who knows.

My main concern right now is whether or not I can actually play Dragon Age on my current machine or if buying it would just be a waste of money.  Note that I'm looking for playable and not ideal performance.  My idea of playable is stable framerates above 20FPS, though I could probably get by with lower in Dragon Age since it's not an action game.  My only concern would be lag during battles where commands don't register.

[Mountain Man]

The 6800 is the minimum, yes, and all that goes with minimum, but the 7800 GS was not seriously more potent than the 6800...

According to the official system specs the minimum is actually a 6600GT, not 6800, so the 7800GS is actually better than the minimum.

Personally, I would say that unless you have an XP-M (mobile) 2600, with an unlocked multiplier, you need more than a 7800 GS to have acceptable performance with it.  If it is unlockable, and you do have a BIOS that allows you to overclock, the Bartons were almost all capable of running at the XP 3200 model's default core speed, if not at its default FSB speed (400 MHz).

I've tried overclocking this machine (and it's definitely a Barton) but I was never able to get it 100% stable above its rated clock speed, and this is with a large, high quality heatsink and fan.  It was mostly stable up to a 3000 XP level, but it crashed just enough to be annoying.

[luciensan]

You could rent it for one day, to see if it runs.

[Mountain Man]

Unfortunately, you can't rent PC games.

[Gorath Alpha]

It's been a lot of years since I had several XP-equipped PCs on hand and was running a couple of them overclocked, but I think I recall a need to boost the voltage to the CPU, and to stick to the highest quality RAM. The old machines were so much more picky about brands of RAM they worked with. However, that was also true of the P-IIs and P-IIIs.

[Mountain Man]

Well, thanks for everybody's comments and help. I'm still not sure whether I'm going to buy it or not since it's a bit of a gamble (too bad Steam doesn't have a "try before you buy" feature) but if I do, I'll definitely report my experience.

[Magnus of the Moon]

I would wait, if I were you. Don't waste the money on a game you can't play. My machine meets all of the minimum specs and so did my graphics card. But, sadly, my little card was not up to the task and burned up. So, now I can't play anything.



Besides, if you wait until you can upgrade your card then they might have fixed all of the other problems this game has.

[Teldira2]

nvm

Modifié par Teldira2, 24 janvier 2010 - 07:10 .