Quote:
Originally posted by Syneval;167574
I bought the following system a few days ago, and no I didn't upgrade just to play Vanguard : )

Core2duo 2.4ghz, 2gb twinmoss 667 ram, asus p5b deluxe mobo with integrated soundmax audio card, geforce 8800gts 320mb, sata2 320gb 16mb cache hd, antec sonata2 with 450w psu. You can check the prices of these components online, and you'll agree this is a pretty cheap system.

I did a format, installed windows xp professional, and the latest drivers. I also applied M$'s v4 dualcore fix, activated it in the registry, forced windows to use the pmtimer in boot.ini, and lastly activated ahcpi (sp?) v2.0 in my mobo bios. I then set all possible quality settings to maximum in the Nvidia cp.

Vanguard was installed and updated, I set 'highest quality' in the gfx options, and then proceeded to turn all remaining sliders and options to maximum as well, except hardware occlusion which seems a bit buggy. In other words, I have set everything, everywhere to maximum, with a res of 1280x1024. I then added the precache line in vgclient.ini and gave it 128 as value.

Now, I have to admit I didn't expect the game to run very well. On my previous system it was a bit of a dog, and looked and ran a LOT worse than any other game I had installed. Vanguard looked unimpressive, was plagued by constant load times, the textures looked like uninspired crap and so on ...

On my new kit however, holy crap ! Not only does the game run at a near constant 40-75+fps in the wilds, even in busy towns with many players loading hitches are kept to a minimum and fps never drops below 25. And it looks absolutely breathtakingly gorgeous. Just think about the best screenshots you saw of the game, and that's exactly how Vanguard shows up on the monitor here. Having taken the time to tweak my driver color settings, the world looks incredibly vibrant, with none of that washed-out look that plagues some people. I'm a bit of a graphics whore, and I'll freely admit there is not a single comparable game that can hold a candle to Vanguard's full gfx option looks.

I tried to play EQ2 after it but was instantly and inexplicably repelled by how ... fake ? that gameworld looks now. Not to mention the sub-par combat etc.

I have seen the same thing with many other games : Oblivion, NWN2, Supreme Commander ; a very huge jump in performance, far beyond what should mathematically happen if I compare with my previous system. The culprit ? The GeForce 8800GTS 320mb ! Even at less than 300 euro's, this card truly achieves the next level : its 96 streaming processors and unified shader architecture basically mean that any shader-heavy game will run ridiculously better on this card.

I'll admit nothing is perfect tho. Two things annoy me : the fact that there are sometimes small gfx bugs like a bush flickering in and out of existence. And most irritating, sometimes the game will bog down to 8-9fps after a few hours of play. If I log out/in and stare at the exact scene again it's up to the usual smoothness tho.



Gratz on your machine. The 8800 screams, you've got a good amount of RAM, and Vanguard loves the core duos. The game constantly moves data from the cpu to main memory to the video card and back and forth. We've never been as much CPU bound, so the core duos lower clock rate doesn't matter much, but it's ability to handle memory, its caches, etc. help a LOT.

Heh, want to make it even go faster? Put 4 gigs in there, use XP 64, and get an Xfi card. I see about 5fps from the xfi and another 5 from runing xp 64 even though Vanguard is still a 32 bit app.

I run a system that was uber bucks about 8 months ago and is still pretty high end. The only thing I've upgraded since I bought it was the video card.

It has 2 3.8 ghz Xeons (I didn't go dual core), 8 gigs of ddr2-400 (that was the fastest I could get with this motherboard, and I wanted that ram), xp 64, raptor drives, an xfi card, and an ati x1950 with 512megs of RAM. I regret now getting 8 gigs of ram and should have got 4 gigs of faster ram, because there are so few apps that are 64 bit. I was hoping to do some video editing and use the ram but to my knowledge there is no 64bit Adobe Primiere -- I mean, what app would be suited for 64bit? Especially now with HD camcorders... but I digress.

Like I said, the only thing I've upgraded was the x1950 -- when I bought it the fastest ATI was an x1800 I think.

Anyway, I get on average 30-40fps outdoors, and 15-20fps in cities with people running around and such. The xfi offloads audo processing to it's cpu and also sounds great. The OS is solid as I don't have many cards/devices and the drivers seem solid. I know some people stay away from XP 64 because they can't get it stable, but if you build a machine to play games I think it's worth it. The x1950 screams and I think was #1 until the 8800. I'm unsure whether to get an 8800 or wait for the ATI dx10 card. And I run at 1920x1200 usually on balanced. I also get only the slightest pause when chunking into the vast majority of chunks (chunks like New Targenor with all of it's assets is a bit slower). But then if I chunk back and forth to the same chunk, a lot of it gets cached and then even the slight pause goes away. I CTD maybe once every couple of weeks, but then as another person posted, it may be where I'm playing (the poster said that areas like Darguns Tomb are worse, for example).

All that said, I'd love to get the core duo EE quad core, fill it up with really fast memory, and see what kind of performance I can get.

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