Wanting help regarding video cards (Ultra Mode question)

Hello all.

I'm asking this a little in advance as from what I've read over in Developers' Corner, the final numbers and specifications of what Ultra Mode is going to run and be handled by don't seem entirely in yet. We have the guidelines handed out by Posi, and that's reasonable enough.

My situation is as follows: I have a very strong PC at the moment, running a i5-750 chip with 2gig of DDR3 RAM (I'll be going up to 4 soon) and a Thermaltake 650W power supply on a GA-P55-UDR3 Gigabyte motherboard. The video card however is a (by modern standards) a slightly lowly Nvidia 9600GT 1GB.

Now, I have no problem running most games; I play LotRo on Very High settings, Champions on Very High settings, and the PC shrugs and goes 'so what?' when it comes to playing. I have very few problems at all.

Now I see the guide to Ultra Mode and wonder where I sit in that spectrum. Posi notes your processor might affect where you sit in terms of performance, and I'm a good generation or two above the recommended specs for running CoH. That being said, I've been looking over prices for video cards out here and it seems Raedon is becoming the more readily available of the cards out there. I know nothing about Raedon cards and how that's going to affect my overall play. I've always bought Nvidia.

I think I also wouldn't mind knowing just what the range of settings in Ultra Mode are going to look like. Like most people, I've only seen the HeroCon videos and screenshots, but I don't have a frame of reference for where that falls.

However, I did recently try a game that I saw at a convention, Planet Calypso. Now the requirements on that game were massive; my rig as it stood put it into the Medium High range of system and video requirements. As it used the Crysis game engine (or so I understood at reading), it seemed comparable to the situation we'll be getting here. Would I be wrong in that?

I'd like to hear from experienced hands where I might sit and also ask for some guidance about Raedon; I'll be pouring through the Ultra Mode thread to understand more, but I thought here would be a good place to start.


S.

An MMO that's using the CryEngine 2, ouch.

Hopefully our Ultra Mode is nothing like the CryEngine 2 in terms of performance. At enthusiast settings (knobs turned to 11) I don't think I've seen any single GPU setup that could run Crysis at above 30FPS and at a reasonably high resolution at the same time. That could just be a problem with Crysis and not the engine in general but looking at Calypso's recommended requirements that may also not be the case.

Just as a quick note to demonstrate what I was talking about with Planet Calypso:

https://account.entropiauniverse.com...-requirements/

I've never seen an MMO with such high requirements.


S.

CoH isn't like most games that you listed. CoH uses OpenGL and those other games are DirectX games. Apples and Oranges.

CoH also will stress a system like no other game I've run. I use how the computer handles CoH as a guide to how good of a system it is.

There is always a game every few years that brings the current generation elite gameing system to it's knees. Before Crysis was Oblivion. Before Oblivion was FEAR with soft shadows on. Before FEAR was Farcry and the circle is now complete. Of course this was back in the day before LCD panels were locked at 60Hz.

In other news, nVidia says not to expect a new mainstream GPUs based on the GF100 technology (Fermi) any time soon because their current crop of mainstream GPUs are "fabulous".

If it wasn't for their success with their Tegra system on a chip that's in the latest rev of the Zune, that news would make me want to sell nVidia stock, if I had any, which I don't, just to be clear Mr. SEC.

The G210, GT220 and GT240 are Dx10.1 but the GT240 tops out at $120 (with 1GB of GDDR5 memory) but it's performance is less than the 9600GT. So between that and the Fermi all nVidia has left are the G9x based Dx10 video cards, assuming the GT200 based ones are truly being phased out. I have no idea what nVidia is thinking.

Well....it's not, really. Aside from making their own real-world banking system and the whole point of the game (from what I've read) is to run around and get more real-world money from doing stuff and investing your own money into the game.....

Freaks me out as a concept.

S.