Hmm... my Geforce2 Ti can play FarCry at 1024x768 with 0 lag, WTF??? So does that mean it's pointless to buy new video

[Matt2]

Originally posted by: SupremeServer

Originally posted by: Matt2
Yeah really. You can't expect software companies to hold back Visual quality and performance of their brand new games to support hardware that is 5 years old.

I didn't expect, most of them ARE backwards compatible! I can name a few on top of my head, War of Warcraft, Ragnarok Online, FARCRY (OMFG, PLAYABLE ON GF2 TI, DAMN!!)

I agree most games are, but not all of them, and the GeForce2 is slowly fading away.

How come you're not ranting and raving about BF2?? BF2 requires a GeForce FX 5700.

Gamers have begged soiftware companies to take a advantage of new video card features that we pay $500 for and they finally are. So as gamers, we can't complain about new games designed to run around current technologies not running on 5 year old hardware.

 

[mwmorph]

Originally posted by: SupremeServer

Originally posted by: Matt2
Yeah really. You can't expect software companies to hold back Visual quality and performance of their brand new games to support hardware that is 5 years old.

I didn't expect, most of them ARE backwards compatible! I can name a few on top of my head, War of Warcraft, Ragnarok Online, FARCRY (OMFG, PLAYABLE ON GF2 TI, DAMN!!)

there wil be that game that comes superbly coded like HL2/farcry but for every supebly coded game, there will be many hackjobs released by EA or some publisher that cares about quantity than quality. It's just how it is. To amke a game engine that runs well on a vareity of hardware is neraly impossible unless it is a middleware or a blockbuster game. Takes too much time and effort.

 

[0roo0roo]

companies develop for systems they think the customers will reasonably have, esp since their customers are ones that have atleast enough money to pay for a subscription based game. such as if you meet their minimum cpu/ram requirements they probably doubt you have a geforce 2 its like assuming a ferrari has a civic engine, its a tad absurd. sure some will go the extra mile..like hl2 and farcry because they are building and selling their game engine anyways. but its not to be expected. the last time this happened when gamesstoppped supporting cards without t&l.. some companies did it earlier then others. b*tch all you want...theres no conspiracy. and even before that there was the support for software rendering vs hardware rendering. last game to have it pretty much was unreal. then you were out of luck. and even before that there were some games where you could make the window smaller and smaller down to 320x240 and shrink the viewing area until your sh*t system could handle it. that kind of support fell away too. if they thought it was worth it, they'd support it to gain the extra customers. and apparenlty they don't.

 

[mwmorph]

dont be so down on SOE anyway. EQ2 isnt even all that good with all the other choices now.

 

[ArneBjarne]

Originally posted by: SupremeServer

Originally posted by: ArneBjarne
GF2 doesn't have hardware pixel and vertex shaders so it doesn't meet the minimum requirements to run EQ2 end of story. You can stop your little conspiracy theory right here.

You know it's true, the new stuff are there to make people upgrade their video card, FarCry ran nicely without it so why can't EQ2? FarCry beat the crap outta EQ2 in terms of graphics even without pixel shader, so what's the point this pixel shader crap for the people who just wanna play the game and don't care about highest quality? Are you an employee of SONY or Nvidia? When a game company design their game to make it not backwards compatible, it's a sign of brain wash.

Update:
According to nvidia's website
http://www.nvidia.com/page/geforce2pro.html
My video card does support pixel shading.

If you want to play and don't care if it is a slideshow and/or looks like crap then buy a Radeon 9000, an FX 5200 or something similar. If you don't want to spend those $29 and haven't allready got something equal to or better than a GF3 then I can't really take your idea of wanting to play the newest games seriously.

In any event stop crying about how they should spend time on rewriting their engine to be able to run on cards that will not be useful to any significant amount of people anyway. If they did people would be in here screaming about how unrealistically low their minimum requirements were and wanting their money back from the box sale.

As for FarCry without shaders looking better than EQ2 on high settings. :laugh: You honestly think that eg. the water in FarCry without shader effects looks better than it does in EQ2 or FarCry with shaders?

 

[Overkiller]

The difference between Direct X 9 and Direct X 7 is quite massive. I know pcgamer, and probably maxpc, had side by side comparisions of the Half life 2 engine running Dx7,8,and 9. it's not " just a little bit " different.

but i digress. you are wasting a great system, especially if your a gamer.

 

[Ranulf]

Originally posted by: ArchAngel777

Check out the requirement for War of Warcraft:
Windows® System 98/ME/2000/XP OS:

800 MHz or higher CPU
256 MB or more of RAM
32 MB 3D graphics card with hardware transform and lighting, such as GeForce 2 or better
4 GB or more of available hard drive space
DirectX® 9.0c or above
A 56k or higher modem with an Internet connection

See what I mean? Even blizzard support my card, I think SOE just wanna force players to upgrade.

Hmmm, I played WoW on my old Athlon XP 2800+ with ATI Radeon 9600 Pro (Which is about 6-8 times faster than your card) and WoW was decently smooth, but it was still severely choppy in several areas. There is no way Blizzard's system requirements are even close. I would be very angry if I have a P3 1Ghz and a Geforce2 and bought the game... Very angry. It would run very horrible with those requirements.

Eh, it would be playable depending on ram sizes and hd speeds. Certainly not to the max and probably best at 640 resolution (and then I wouldn't dare go to ironforge or run instances). Playability across a wide spectrum is blizzards MO. They tend to sacrifice uber graphics code to get more people into the game. Most sane people would upgrade anyway to enjoy the game more. Hell, mt ti4800 128mb card can play it fine with 1gb system ram. Choppy in spots but very playable on the whole (still going to upgrade to a 6600 though to get better framerates). My dell 700m laptop can run WoW on its intel extreme2 shared memory graphics chipset, course it runs at 15 fps tops.

 

[imported_michealo]

time for the tin foil hat
SOE is out to get you

 

[Valkerie]

Originally posted by: Matt2

My Geforce2 Ti can't play Everquest 2 cuz it gave error msg saying "require video card with at least 4 texture units", fine... I went and bought a BFG Geforce 6800 OC and comes with FarCry full version which is nice.

For the last time, Nvidia did not bribe anybody, black list any video cards or anything, lol.

It's simple, the game is calling for hardware that does not exist on the GeForce2. In your case, the game is calling for the use of 4 texture units and your card doesn't have that many. It's as simple as that.

Like someone mentioned earlier, the worlds in an MMORPG are massive, regardless of how smooth the graphics are, the programming requires intense drawing with hardware support. As the graphics for EQ2 may not look as fancy as FC, just realize how much grahpics power alone is needed to draw generic landscapes 100 times the size of FC.

 

[ArchAngel777]

Like someone mentioned earlier, the worlds in an MMORPG are massive, regardless of how smooth the graphics are, the programming requires intense drawing with hardware support. As the graphics for EQ2 may not look as fancy as FC, just realize how much grahpics power alone is needed to draw generic landscapes 100 times the size of FC.

Actually, that was one of the things people were raving about Far Cry, for its completely gigantic detailed maps without having to have a "Loading" Screen. I have not played EQ2 but I am pretty certain it is not 100X the size of a Far Cry map, being that a Far Cry map is about 4K in size... However, even if the map sizes are 100X larger, that still would not affect graphics performance. Especially since it is loaded in the ram. You have to rememer things like LOD and Draw Distance allow games to have gigantic maps without a performance hit. Except for RAM.... LOD and Draw Distance are wonderful

 

[SupremeServer]

Like I said before, I'm not a heavy gamer, I don't play enough games to take advantage of a NEW highend video card, I just don't feel like put my good old Gf2 Ti to waste. Back then, it was the highend model when I bought it, it still plays alot of games with no lag ^_^;

My pc is usually for workstation stuff, web development/programming, running webserver and game server, I don't really use it to play much games, that's why I sold my Geforce 6800 cuz I felt there's no need for it, it's really not that hard to make a game backwards compatible with older video card cuz there are logical operators (if... else) in any game programming languages.

 

[ArneBjarne]

Originally posted by: SupremeServer
it's really not that hard to make a game backwards compatible with older video card cuz there are logical operators (if... else) in any game programming languages.

Just writing an if else control structure doesn't mean that the actual code for a no-shader branch magically writes itself. Writing that will take considerably more time than what you are insinuating with your statement.

 

[ArchAngel777]

Just writing an if else control structure doesn't mean that the actual code for a no-shader branch magically writes itself. Writing that will take considerably more time than what you are insinuating with your statement.

/Agree...

The more code a developer has to write means the highest cost of video games...

 

[Continuity28]

Okay, here's what's going on.

A game developer at some point decides how they will code their game, and for what hardware. If you developed a game that could ONLY work in DirectX 8 or higher, or used certain features as a bare minimum, you'd alienate a lot of cards. Farcry was developed very well, and has a very low minimum that they coded for, as does Half Life 2. In order for your GeForce 2 to work on Farcry, the settings need to be dropped WAAAY down. All you see is "Medium" and the resoluation, but really the settings go far beyond that. Medium for DirectX 6/7 and Medium for DirectX 9 is very different. You select Medium on a 6800 Ultra, and it will completely blow away Medium on a GeForce 2.

Everquest 2 isn't coded to work with GeForce 2, it has more to do with laziness or interests of the developers/publisher (most likely Sony), than making you upgrade.

When people say Farcry looks great, they don't mean using just any card BTW... their Farcry is better than yours... so don't let "I can run both cards on Medium" fool you...

 

[mwmorph]

Farcry has many problems with water and lighting with medium everything. I mean alsomt everything else looks great but in the demo running on ym geforce2, lighting will jsut pop into existance right in front of you and deep water looks like crap.
Developing for DX7 is much harder than developing for DX8. DX7 to DX8 was a huge change in APi. DX8 and DX9 are much more similar and is much easier to develop for DX8/9 than DX7/8/9

 

[Raduque]

Originally posted by: SupremeServer

Originally posted by: ArneBjarne
GF2 doesn't have hardware pixel and vertex shaders so it doesn't meet the minimum requirements to run EQ2 end of story. You can stop your little conspiracy theory right here.

You know it's true, the new stuff are there to make people upgrade their video card, FarCry ran nicely without it so why can't EQ2? FarCry beat the crap outta EQ2 in terms of graphics even without pixel shader, so what's the point this pixel shader crap for the people who just wanna play the game and don't care about highest quality? Are you an employee of SONY or Nvidia? When a game company design their game to make it not backwards compatible, it's a sign of brain wash.

Update:
According to nvidia's website
http://www.nvidia.com/page/geforce2pro.html
My video card does support pixel shading.

The Nvidia Shading Rasterizer is not the same thing as Pixel and Vertex shaders. Just try running the 3dMark 2001se Nature demo on a GeForce2 TI. It won't run because the card doesn't even have DX8 shaders, much less the DX9 level that EQ2 requires.

 

[Makaveli]

The reason why your Gf2 is so smooth in Farcry is because its running in Dx7 mode. as many have stated, I surely will not look as good as the 6800 u had before. Ditch the Dx7 videocard and buy a DX9 card if u wanna play Everquest 2. IF u wanna play all the new games with reduced features and lower settings all the power to u, your only fooling yourself, the 6800 will eat the Gf2 for breakfast, lunch and dinner!

 

[Rubycon]

the 6800 will eat the Gf2 for breakfast, lunch and dinner!

Most definitely.

The GF2 is five years old!

 

[Continuity28]

Originally posted by: Makaveli
The reason why your Gf2 is so smooth in Farcry is because its running in Dx7 mode. as many have stated, I surely will not look as good as the 6800 u had before. Ditch the Dx7 videocard and buy a DX9 card if u wanna play Everquest 2. IF u wanna play all the new games with reduced features and lower settings all the power to u, your only fooling yourself, the 6800 will eat the Gf2 for breakfast, lunch and dinner!

Well again though, he said he's not much of a gamer. If you're not gaming there's no need to upgrade. But you can't expect to play these types of games with reasonable quality and still avoid not buying a gaming video card.

So to the OP: If you can accept not playing games like EQ2 and playing games like Farcry at greatly reduced quality, then there's no need to upgrade.

 

[mwmorph]

well, a ti4200 will run eq2. it's around 40-45 now in ths fs/t forums.

 

[gf4200isdabest]

Originally posted by: mwmorph
well, a ti4200 will run eq2. it's around 40-45 now in ths fs/t forums.

That's because it's the best.

/Was hoping my screenname would someday sound stupidly old fashioned.
/Just not happening.

 

[johnnqq]

funny...i have a geforce2 gts and i can't play unreal tournament 2004 any higher than 50fps at 800x600 lowest quality, but at the same time i can max out the quality settings and run the game at 1024x768 getting 20fps...not too shabby.

 

[Continuity28]

Originally posted by: johnnqq
funny...i have a geforce2 gts and i can't play unreal tournament 2004 any higher than 50fps at 800x600 lowest quality, but at the same time i can max out the quality settings and run the game at 1024x768 getting 20fps...not too shabby.

You're not really maxing any of the settings though, you're just led to believe that based on the graphics menu... Setting all the settings to high means setting it to high based on your hardware, not for the game. If someone with a newer video card put the same settings on high, their game would still look better because "High" means something completely different in game terms between the cards.

It's simple really, if you set a function to "high", and "high" requires a certain video card ability, and yours is old and hence does not possess it, "high" will be the same as "medium" that didn't require that ability. You feel good because you put it on high, but its really just high in words, not quality.

 

[munchow2]

Well if you just want to run the games regardless of how it looks then yes it is pointless for you to get new videocards because my old ATI Rage 128 MIGHT run some games too . People get new cards so that they can view things on high quality and make the gameplay experience more enjoyable. How much one invests in the enjoyment of computer graphics is up to the individual person.

 

[SoundTheSurrender]

I think this guy is bsing. it smells like sh!t in this thread.