Upgrade For Shock Force?

[legend42]

My machine is currently this:

Pentium [R]4 CPU 3.00GHz

3.01 GHz,1.00 GB of RAM

GEFORCE 6600

Will this play Shock Force?It plays all CM games fine, It did not play TOW very well at all.

Would or Should I upgrade with the following for Shock Force?Is it worth it?or buy a new machine?

3.4 GHz P4 125$

1 GIG of RAM 90$

Radeon x1950 230$

[Redwolf]

A Netburst Pentium-4 is a power-consuming chip that's slow for gaming. An upgrade by just over 10% clockspeed won't do you much good.

Why in the world would you change to ATI?

You sure you don't have a 6600GT? A GT will certainly be fine for CMSF. A 6600, it depends. They are available with different width memory. If you have one of the castrated versions you are screwed.

2 GB RAM is certainly a good idea but keep in mind that DDR RAM is very expensive right now compared to the super-cheap DDR2.

[Schrullenhaft]

A videocard would probably be the best upgrade for your system. If TOW didn't run all too well with your current system (assuming you've patched it and checked all of the tips for helping performance), then CMSF may also perform similarly. That isn't an absolute, but TOW is a fairly good approximation of CMSF's performance.

A total of 2GB of memory can also help a bit, but I don't think it would help as much as a videocard upgrade. Likewise with the CPU upgrade, as Redwolf pointed out, a 400MHz performance increase on one of the Netburst (Prescott, Northwood, etc.) P4 CPUs is probably not going to amount to much in terms of gaming.

CMSF is an OpenGL game. Typically Nvidia has done OpenGL the best in the past, though ATI has caught up somewhat. There were some issues with shadowing in CMSF with ATI videocards, but I don't know if that has been fully resolved (or if shadowing has been changed significantly enough for it not to matter). The X1950Pro (Newegg listing) or X1950XT are the fastest performers for the AGP slot. I'm not absolutely sure how much of a performance difference exists between these cards and the fastest Nvidia cards for the AGP slot - the 7800GS, 7900GS or 7950GT. The 7900GS and 7950GT from XFX seem to be non-standard offerings for the AGP bus (they are typically engineered for PCIE bus) and thus they may be a bit problematic from a driver standpoint, requiring drivers from XFX or hacked Reference drivers. Be aware that most of these videocard upgrades may also require a beefier power supply; 400W+ should be considered the minimum (with a +12V amperage of 18A+ minimum on one rail or 15A each on two or more rails).

If you intend to play the classic CMx1 series, then the Nvidia cards are a better bet in terms of supporting fog-tables (at least under XP; under Vista they seemed to have disappeared at the moment). Nvidia has also had a a somewhat better driver history than ATI/AMD, but that isn't always the case. In the Linux world Nvidia has done a much better job in the past compared to ATI (if Linux support is an issue for you).

Upgrading to a new PCIE-based computer would probably be an even better idea, however it will cost you much more than upgrading your current computer and it isn't absolutely necessary in order to play CMSF. However a moderate clock-speed Intel Core 2 Duo will probably run CMSF better than your Netburst Pentium 4; not by staggering amounts better, but noticeably better.

[ July 04, 2007, 06:29 PM: Message edited by: Schrullenhaft ]

[Redwolf]

legend42 told me in mail he has a 6600GT which makes his base system not too bad.

The problem here is illustrated with him saying he has to spend $90 on 1 GB RAM. In the DDR2 world you get 2x1 GB for $65 and even less these days. The prices of AGP cards are also inflated.

Given that a 2.0 Core2 Celeron (that is a fast chip, not comparable with Netburst Celerons) costs $66 the whole thing looks bleak for upgrading. Even if you don't do overclocking then this will be a nice chip.