City of Heroes: Live Forum Archive

Computer upgrade in mind

Healix

By Healix,
Posted on: 2011-01-12 24:22 in ALL ACCESS Gameplay Technical Issues Bugs

 

Posted

I was wondering if any of you guys are playing with the latest and greatist hardware, playing in full teams without crashing and lag on full teams?

1.) I was wondering if I would noticed a difference switching from nividia gforce 8800
to an ati card. (never owned an ati card before)

Basically what hardware right now would it take to play this game at max with out crashing
and experience at full level?

 

Posted

Grats on your first post! Kinda an opened question, but with my I7 920 oc to 3.0, 9 gb ram, windows 7, 460 GTX Nvidia, 18 in. monitor, broadband connection, hardly ever get less than 30 FPS in any zone. Large raids can bring some lag due to network/server latency but no crashes here. BTW, runnin with occlusion settings at high performance, as it seems to affect FPS the most.

 

Posted

Quote:
Originally Posted by Spacetrucker View Post
I was wondering if any of you guys are playing with the latest and greatist hardware, playing in full teams without crashing and lag on full teams?

1.) I was wondering if I would noticed a difference switching from nividia gforce 8800
to an ati card. (never owned an ati card before)

Basically what hardware right now would it take to play this game at max with out crashing
and experience at full level?
At Max level?

I would say at a minimum:

AMD Phenom II 955 Quad Core or Intel equivilent (i5 or i7)
4 Gb DDR3 Ram
nVidia 460 GTX or Radeon 6850

That should play everything fine and bumping up any of these will help.

 

Posted

Quote:
Originally Posted by Spacetrucker View Post
I was wondering if any of you guys are playing with the latest and greatist hardware, playing in full teams without crashing and lag on full teams?

1.) I was wondering if I would noticed a difference switching from nividia gforce 8800
to an ati card. (never owned an ati card before)

Basically what hardware right now would it take to play this game at max with out crashing
and experience at full level?
You'd notice a significant difference in performance with the following cards currently available to purchase on the retail market:

RadeonHD 5770
RadeonHD 5850
RadeonHD 5870
RadeonHD 6850
RadeonHD 6870
RadeonHD 6950
RadeonHD 6970

Geforce GTX 460
Geforce GTX 470
Geforce GTX 480
Geforce GTX 580

All of these graphics cards should be capable of driving City of Heroes with maximum Shadows, Environmental Reflections, and Water Effects. Your frame-rate will vary on Ambient Occlusion.

You'll get more value on AMD cards right now. Case in point, the 6970 trades blows with the GTX 580. The 6970 has a street price around $375. The GTX 580 is on the other side of $500.

The Geforce GTX 460 can be a good buy, you just have to be careful on buying. The card originally launched with two variants, a 768mb model and a 1gb model. The 1gb model will run you around $185 with rebates. However, there is now a GTX 460 SE model that also has 1gb of memory and sells for around $140 with rebates. The GTX 460 1gb is a good competitor to the RadeonHD 5850 which will still top $200. However... it's not such a good competitor to the RadeonHD 6850... with a street price of around $185 with no rebates.

So, if you want to buy Nvidia, go ahead. That's your choice. Just be aware that Nvidia cards use more power generating less frame-per second performance while costing more money.

Something else to keep in mind is that Shadow calculation is processor intensive as well. You do need something with a bit of grunt in the processor department. The breakpoint for processing speed on Dual Core processors is somewhere around 2.4ghz~2.6ghz. Quad Core's tend to have a lower breakpoint, around 2.2ghz~2.4ghz.

 

Posted

Quote:
Originally Posted by Spacetrucker View Post
I was wondering if any of you guys are playing with the latest and greatist hardware, playing in full teams without crashing and lag on full teams?

1.) I was wondering if I would noticed a difference switching from nividia gforce 8800
to an ati card. (never owned an ati card before)

Basically what hardware right now would it take to play this game at max with out crashing and experience at full level?
Currently running:
  • Intel Core2 Quad 2.5Ghz
  • 8GB DDR2
  • nVidia GTX460
  • 240GB (2x120) SSD RAID array.
  • Windows 7 Ultimate Edition

My system rating comes in at 7.2 (meaning all components rate 7.2 or higher on a scale that caps at 7.9) and my disk throughput is ridiculous.

I still get lag in high lag situations (Lag hill, ship raids, invasions...)
I still get lag, occasionally, on teams.
I still get slow-loading zones.
I still crash out fairly frequently (at least once a week).

Simply throwing hardware will not make these problems go away. They MAY help to MINIMIZE them, but the hardware itself isn't the sole contributor to these issues.


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