Quote:
Originally posted by n0b
To me, system requirements aren't too useful. To make a game look nice, you need way above the minimum requirements and even above their "recommended" requirements. Game companies don't really make games for the current hardware that's out, they make them for future technology to extend the game life. My advice would just be to buy the best system that you can afford.
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That's exactly right. Gaming companies release the minimum requirements...which are basically what the game will boot up on, not counting the fact that it's running at 5 FPS. Hell, even the recommended specs are incredibly undershot usually. Morrowind recommends a GeForce 2 with an 800 MHz processor. Umm, my 1.6 GHz Athlon XP and GeForce 4 TI4200 have trouble running it "well."
Simply enough, if you get an AMD Barton processor (preferably above 2 GHz) or an Intel Pentium 4 processor at 2.4 GHz or higher, that will cover the gaming market for a couple of years. The videocard is what ya need to be concerned with. If you spend $200 or above on a videocard right now, I'm sure it'll run the games fine as well. You can find GeForce FX 5900's for $200, and they beat out Radeon 9700 Pros on many tests. Cards of that caliber are gonna run the games fine.
You have to remember that Valve has released the video benchmark for HL2. It ran damn good on my computer, and it's nothing special anymore. Doom 3 runs alright on my PC until I...well, fire the gun, but that's only because the "demo" I played has no adjustable video settings. NVIDIA hasn't released optimized drivers for the game, either...it's sort of not out yet.
-Lasereth