> Why does the game have to require such a fast processor? It pains me
> that I will have to upgrade my machine in order to do some demon
> beating.
I'm not really sure. One of my friends plays D3 pretty respectably on
his
FX5600, and if I recall, he has an AthlonXP 1600+ - a chip which was
pretty
cheap some time ago, and now sell for something like $25 on ebay.
I spent $400 on a GeForce 6800GT, and $90 on a CPU (Athlon XP-M). The
mobile AthlonXP is clocked well above "3200+" levels. I believe that the
overall D3 experience on this setup is at least 99.5% as good as you could
get for an extra $600 right now. The game plays silky-freaking-smooth
with
AA/AF turned on, 5.1-audio from the NForce SoundStorm, and everything
looks
about as good as you're going to get - but even with a somewhat slower
chip,
I could still get a perfectly fine D3 experience.
A faster processer or moving to a 6800 Ultra would buy me a marginal
increase in FPS - which realistically would go unnoticed. When video
cards
with 512 megs come out, those will be able to give a slight increase in
quality, but in reality, I believe that it'll only be noticeable when
you're
doing a side-by-side comparison on screenshots, not while you're actually
trying to save your butt from getting blown apart!
Now, back in the day of playing Quake3 online in a railgun match on a
TNT2, tweaks that would get me an extra 5 FPS were a big deal. But I
haven't even bothered benchmarking D3 with this setup, it's sufficiently
smooth that an extra 5 or 10 FPS wouldn't really do very much for me.
steve
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