[Injustice]

Why in the world would you run a seperate sound card off of an A8R32 motherboard? Do you do voice/audio synthesizing on your computer or just enjoy the overkill?

[TheRag]

Originally Posted by Injustice

Why in the world would you run a seperate sound card off of an A8R32 motherboard? Do you do voice/audio synthesizing on your computer or just enjoy the overkill?

I never use onboard audio. It's always a little better with a sound card. Also, this card really does sound great. Oh, and try to play SupCom with 4 players when you are the server, you have NO extra CPU cycles left for anything else. That game can choke a Cray.

[Injustice]

Strictly speaking, it's not your CPU that's getting choked. With any processor running at or above 2GHz the biggest traffic jam when it comes to system processing is going to be your front side bus speed.

[Wild_Bill]

The_Rag, no offense taken. I know my system is crap, but as long as I can play Jumpgate and check my e-mail, it's okay. I bought it to replace my Pentium 133 running Win95 so I could play JumpGate. If/When my current system will no longer play Jumpgate, I'll upgrade again. Playing Jumpgate and surfing is about all I actually DO with this computer or any other for that matter so I have no great need for better/faster.

We had a discussion on-line the other night about who had what old hardware laying around. The only one's I've owned and dont' still have are a couple of Commodor 64 and 128's, plus my original IBM machine (8088 I think). I've still got my Trash80 and my Pent133 is still operational as well, if mostly unused and not on-line.

I'm not in a financial position to upgrade or buy whatever's newest and greatest and that's fine by me. When it gets to the point I can't play Jumpgate on this machine, I'll find some way to acquire a machine that WILL keep playing Jumpgate.

[Jump]

Frankly, 256 MB is the minimum standard for games now. My 5 year old card even has that much.

[Powo]

I ran an internet research on how many MB for a graphic card is required and it looks a-lot like 128MB(Especially for Supreme Commander and STALKER, oh and I forgot Dark Star One) followed by 64MB(Look at X3 Reunion, I mean far better graphics than Jumpgate and it doesn't require too much memory for a GFX card)... Well maybe except for Quake 4.

As for 256MB being the minimum standard, I would say yes if the developers are aiming towards making the graphics next generation and state of the art.

But most of the released games for the PC I took a look at may require no more than 128MB..

[Jump]

I sure hope the new Jumpgate doesn't look like some of those cheesy video games you mention there.

[Milkman]

Haha... i would think you could set the texture quality in game which should allow a variation in video card ram.

As for the cheezy comments on some well reviewed and popular games... back off i own those!

[Scorch]

We have a p800 with 384 MB RAM, and a 64MB no shader video card we are working with as a min-spec benchmark. The tough things are fitting into video memory with lots of polys with more data in a vertex than there used to be (textures can simply be reduced in size for this card), fill rate (so 800x600 may have to be there still), fitting into physical memory as Jumpgate now loads everything into RAM all the time (something we are of course changing but being an action game we can't have load screens when you jump for example) and processing LOTS of particles is tough on the slower CPUs. The game runs on that machine, but not fast enough yet.

[Chemdog]

So why don't you guys pull a microsoft and release 5 versions for different pc capabilites. Or have multiple releases like for pc/mac - release a high end version now, and work the low end version while us folks with hard hitting pcs get to enjoy.

[TheRag]

Originally Posted by Powo

I mean far better graphics than Jumpgate

Try using a little better hardware. With 4xAA and 16xAF Jumpgate doesn't look that bad. In fact, space looks pretty good.

[WileE]

Powo, you cannot go by the mimimum requirements. Most of the time, those are set that if you have the minimums, you will get the game to load and run. It makes no mention of quality. You generally have to look at the suggested loadout for a baseline of functionality.

Scorch, from a personal perspective, I don't think your baseline video card is enough. I have a Radeon 9600 (128MB SM 2.0 (I believe)), and it will run almost anything. The card itself is almost 6 years old, and more than represents what I think can be considered a minimum.

My biggest concern would be that you are putting in alot of time, money, and effort on updating Jumpgate, but the bar is set low enough that not only will it not compete with most of the games on the market, but that there will not be enough improvement for even the vets to come back other than to check it out. I don't think that Jumpgate will even be able to match something like Eve, due to the required overhaul that would take (I could be wrong). But in order for Jumpgate to take some major steps forward, I would think you are working on a DX9 engine. Given that, to run a card with no shader and only 64MB video memory is not going to perform at all.