Clubbing demons left and right, , "Steve Wolfe" <unt@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
>> 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
>
It's not the FPS as much as the load times that are improved by the very
fast versus the fastest CPUs. The FPS is a function of the speed of the
graphics processor, mostly, and that's greatly improved by a lot of
on-card
memory.
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