Display setting?

Okay, I ended up getting the ATI Radeon HD 4200 rig. My wife got the deciding vote. The brightside is the thing was reasonably priced and came with a 23" monitor, although widescreen. Its an HP rig, and i am already planning the upgrades. The two upgrades I plan are RAM (has 8) and a new graphics card.

But for a month or two (at least, holidays sigh) I will be running as it sits. It is a major upgrade from my six year old midgrade Dell, which barely ran the game. Still, I am having some dificulties with it.

First, I set it to the resolution the monitor said performed optimally. Oops, could barely walk. dialed that back, But I think I am still on the wrong setting.

I do not have Ultra on, unsure what any of my settings should be. Honestly, compared to what I was on, the game feels Ultra to me right now anyways.

For this monitor and graphics card, if I am reading the below correctly I should be at 1k x 768? (Is that right for a 23" widescreen?) What are setting should I roll with. The more precise an answer the better, I barely speak tech. Thanks.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Father Xmas If you are talking about the integrated graphics on the AMD 785G desktop chipset, found in some store bought PCs like HP, it's surprisingly okay as long as you don't over do it graphic settings wise. My folks have one in their HP quad core and it can run the game (no ultra mode, shadows as blobs) at 1k x 768 in a window with 0xAA, 4xAF at around 25fps blueside, faster inside indoor missions. That's with the graphics settings slider in the middle with DoF and bloom turned off and textures settings at max. You can get UM reflections to work with a minor hit in frame rate but hard shadows, AO shadows or AA will kill performance totally. I assume the laptop version is similar.

You are planning to up it to 8GB or it already has 8GB and you are planning to add more? Why would anyone need more than 8GB for a home PC?

Model number? Where did you buy it? Just trying to get an idea of what you got for as a PC and a monitor.

Now I haven't bothered to upgrade the graphics drivers in my folks computer because they seem to work OK. ATI driver upgrading was still a a craps shoot when they got it so since it seems to work okay, I wasn't going to risk it. Bad enough that I'm the family Nerd Herder, I don't need to add to my workload if the driver upgrade goes wonky.

Now they have a very old 15" Dell monitor hooked up to it that can do 1152x864 at 70 or 72Hz which is one reason playing in a window (avoids any problems swapping tasks if I can simply click on the actual desktop) at 1024x768 isn't that much of a sacrifice from a screen real estate point of view. Of course if your monitor has a high native resolution, a 1024x768 window could be very small.

------------------------

For graphics settings in the game I first turned off advance settings, which gives me the graphics settings slider. I set it at the middle setting which I believe is one tick below minimum Ultra Mode. I then turn advance settings back on so I can turn off Depth of Field which I personally hate. The upside is it does improve performance a bit. I make sure that the texture settings are on max and that I have texture filtering set to 4x Anisotropic. I found that any Anti-aliasing (AA in my previous post) simply destroys frame rate.

In old Paragon I saw frame rates in the high 20s outside, thirties inside indoor missions. Areas like Praetoria, new Atlas, Faultline, Rogue Isles are a little to a lot lower outside in the zone. I haven't looked at tweaking the settings any further in those areas but in the past I know dropping the world detail some can help.

If you didn't see my posts in your other threads, AO stands for Ambient Occlusion which is a fancy way to say soft shadowing. The three features they added with Ultra Mode are reflection (primarily off of water but also on some costume parts and windows), hard shadows cast by the sun on everything and Ambient Occlusion for soft shadows. Of course with the Halloween event up and running, shadows aren't something you need to worry about.

------------------------

The graphics upgrade path I had planned for my parents, which is unlikely since it took three months of pestering for them just to replace their 12 year old Dell Pentium II 450MHz running Windows 98se so the HD 4200 itself is a significant upgrade, is to replace the power supply with something like the Antec Earthwatts EA-430, 430 watt and add in a video card like the HD 6770 or a GTX 550Ti.

It has 8 for ram. Your technospeak leave poor Blue confused lol. I understand you, but the details are fuzzy. So, if I pop it one over the middle, Ultra goes back on? But at middle on the slider Ultra is off, but then I cn partially turn it on using the other switch?

I will be getting a graphics card upgrade, since I want this machine to run this game at a pretty high setting with no problems.

It is a HP Pavilion AMD Athlon 11 650 quad 8GB DDR3 w/ ATI Radeon 4200

monitor is HP 2311x