Dear Travis 'Bailo' Bickel:

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I got the nVidia FX5200 with 128MB (WInFast A340T, GeForce). Anything
higher is better. The 5200 is the first nVidia with "pixel shading". 5600
and 5800 are better still (increased number of pipelines, if I recall the
jargon correctly). ATI also has product offerings.

Be sure that you look at the requirements for Deus Ex Invisible War, and
meet (or exceed) *that*. That should keep you video card
compatible/superior for the next year or two.

Halo was developed originally for Xbox, so it does have some healthy
requirements for video, although it "ran" on an nVidia MX400 with 32meg...

Halflife 2 should be out pretty soon...

David A. Smith

Ok, so I'm a reasonable person...sometimes /too/ reasonable.

I like to give credit where credit is due. Maybe, I think, Linvocates
are too zealous. But then, there it is, the crappiness of Micropox
software, always there to remind me how great Linux is...

Take gaming and video, one of the /supposed/ strong points of Windos/CSS
now. Or is it? I bought two games to test out my new Athlon 2400, with
32M onboard Savage Pro video. It's dual boot Suse/W2k but of course
I'm using the w2k for these games.

I tried to pick best of class, so I got Grand Theft Auto Vice City and
Halo. Both recommended, both award winners. Both with specifications
that were well under the qualities of my machine....or so I thought.

Grand Theft Auto: Crappy DOS looking graphics. Sluggish speed.
Unresponsible controls. After playing for an hour, I hit the Q button
to get some hint information and map info. The screen started
refreshing on top of itself. After hitting escape a hundred times, and
then flipping into WIndos and then back, it came back. Then it did it
again.


Halo: My mouth was watering for this one. I go through the install,
then, as soon as I hit Start --- a little alert popsup and says:
warning, the windows driver associated with my card may cause problems
with Halo. Hey, fools -- it's a WINDOWS driver and Halo is a MICROSOFT
PRESS GAME !!! So then, I press, ok, I will play at my own risk. Then
it throws up the same message and says, that hey, I just can't play this
game...

So, alright. I am willing to buy a new graphics card and all. But the
thing is: here every single argument about Microcrap goes out the
window. They clearly don't have standards. There's no integration.
And when something doesn't work as it should, they blame other people.
If they aren't centralizing and testing and validating, then what are
they for ??? The OSS community is proving that it can do that job with
greater rapidity and quality than CSS...and CSS quality is obviously
dropping like a brick.

Well...gotta do some more work so I can buy that G-force...

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My condolences.

On Sun, 29 Feb 2004 04:41:43 GMT, Travis 'Bailo' Bickel
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Well, so you finally figured out that any motherboard with onboard
video and sound is a piece of crap. You got what you paid for, ie:
low price, low performance. When you installed Halo it came up
with a dialogue box that reported that your video chipset was a
piece of crap and to expect low performance. Not to even
mention your stolen copy of Windows 2000 that was never even
designed to run games much less hardware intensive game like
Halo. Its not a Windows video or sound driver and Microsoft has
no reason to write drives for substandard hardware. Did you even
bother to get the updates for both games? Contact the folks at
Rockstar Games about their crappy graphics. What has caused
you believe that Microsoft set standards for the gaming industry?
You got a low end motherboard for a low end price, live with it and
take some Midol. Another ope source loser. Just shutup and sit
on your ass and wait for decent open souce gaming software.
Many others have been waiting for over 10 years Oh yeah but

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ok your first mistake was using a picashitelchepogarbage video card - ffs
128mb on a video card is STANDARD these days.

your second mistake was using Windows 2000 - personally i find Windows XP a
hellovalot faster - espically with games.

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ok your third mistake - who in hell believes the "minimum system
requirements" for videogames - these specifications are written by
ADVERTISERS who want one thing - money.

yes the game will "work" on said specifications @ 5 frames per second and
with windows paging every 10 seconds swapping memory in and out of your
128mb of system memory.

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hell - on thoes specifications i wouldnt even try it.

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buggy as hell games - ffs i HATE it when i want to switch to a diffrent
program but the friggen game is wanting to be "on top". if i got 512mb of
ram (1gb in my next box) i sure as hell want to be able to switch to
outlook while i have a game paused in the background.

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then update your videocard drivers!

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then update your videocard drivers - you seriously arnt one of these people
that expect that the cd that comes with their kit has the latest drivers on
it are you?

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that would be a wise investment.

But the
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ok so how do we get form your own incompitance to blaming microsoft?

you purchased a garbage system - (32mb videocard - most likely shared
memory, who in hell uses savage anymore - exactly how much memory does your
system have????) - and now your complaining that top of the line games wont
run on your hardware - who wold have guessed.

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lol - and the similaraty here is ........ ;)

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do you have a clue how much testing goes into MS products, with all the
variants in hardware out there iam surprised microsoft does as well as they
do.

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ok i will wait with baited breath for the OSS community to produce a game
the standard of Halo -

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seriously look at replacing that rig you got, if you want to be playing
games for the next 4 years and have a budget here are some specifications
to look at.

GForce baised Motherboard, NVida baised videocard (they play well
together), atm AMD Barton 2500+ raited cpu's will clock to 3200+, somewhat
decent videocard 5600 would be better but a 5200 would do for a year or so,
512 mb of system memory "will do" but 1gb costs bugger all - you can even
squeeze an extra 5% (real not synthetic benchmarks) of power out of your
box by using dual channel memory in the configeration your mb specifies.

all this for less than NZ$1,600

as others have said, get what you pay for.



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Steven H - B.I.T. Otago Polytechnic, Dunedin, New Zealand