My New Ram Came In! YES!

[etoven]

God my laptop's fast now!

[Great Rumbler]

Yeah, you're going to need at least double that if you want to play Crysis...with all the effects turned off and the textures turned all the way down.

[A Black Falcon]

My new computer should be able to handle that game, at least... I'm much more interested in strategy games though, of course. C&C 3 is just like the reviews said: exactly like past C&C games, with prettier graphics. Supreme Commander though (Total Annihilation 2, essentially)... now THAT is a genre-defining game. I'm sure that whatever Blizzard does for their next RTS (whenever they stop swimming in their WoW-funded money pools...) will be even better, but still, Supreme Commander is probably the most significant RTS in years.

... what, off topic? Oh well. RAM is good. Crysis isn't the only game in the world. :)

[Great Rumbler]

My new computer should be able to handle that game, at least...

Don't be surprised if it doesn't.

[Dark Jaguar]

I've seen the specs for his new machine. His video card supports DX10 and everything. I'm willing to say that yes, Crysis will run fine on it. Though, if it can "scale up" like Oblivion using the .ini file, then it's full potential may not be unlocked for a few years.

[A Black Falcon]

GR, if a new $1900 (plus shipping) computer won't play the game, nothing will. And I don't think Crytek is making a game which won't play on anything other than the absolutely newest hardware... PC games are never made that way. (but even if they were, I think my computer would be able to run it. DX10 video card, Core 2 Duo, etc...)

[Great Rumbler]

You're biggest problem will be with the processor. According to information that came out earlier this year, the minimum specs for a processor is 2.8GHz. You're probably okay for RAM and graphics card though.

[Dark Jaguar]

Is that a 2.8 Pentium 4 or is it that it has to be core 2 duo on top of that minimum speed? Core Duo makes up for lower processor speeds.

[A Black Falcon]

Is that a 2.8 Pentium 4 or is it that it has to be core 2 duo on top of that minimum speed? Core Duo makes up for lower processor speeds.

In fact, a 2.4Ghz Core2 Duo is at least twice as fast as a 2.4Ghz Pentium 4. And that's just using one of the cores, not both.

http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/03/26/t...age13.html

... I thought it was well known that with the Core2 Intel went on the road other companies were on earlier with getting more performance out of lower clock speeds instead of just pumping up the megahertz again and again...

[Dark Jaguar]

Well that's the thing. Around the 3 GHZ mark the returns for shrinking down are starting to vanish due to... physics basically. You can only make things so small. We're nearing these limitations and so we need other ways to get dramatic speed increases. Parallel processing is one of those ways.

[A Black Falcon]

And so, eight core CPUs are coming soon.

[Dark Jaguar]

In fact they are, and GPUs as well. With multi-core GPUs, I think dedicated physics cards are eventually going to be replaced before they really even become that popular. Simply put, they can design the GPU with all the physics instructions of the dedicated chip and then just have one of the cores dedicated to those instructions.

[A Black Falcon]

Actually though, my point was that Intel isn't just increasing the number of cores, but increasing the efficiency of each core... otherwise, you wouldn't be getting more than double (and sometimes more, depending on the application) the performance from a Core 2 Duo than a Pentium 4 at the same clock speed when running applications that do not make use of the second core. But yes, beyond that, multiple cores is the current thing...

As for GPUs, though, huh... I hadn't thought of that, but yeah, while I don't know of any current ones, it certainly does make sense that they'd be in development. As well as an AMD CPU that might actually compete with the Core 2... :) Right now AMD is well behind.

With multi-core GPUs, I think dedicated physics cards are eventually going to be replaced before they really even become that popular.

Yeah, that sounds about right. Very few people are going to spend $300 for a dedicated physics card that supports like five games, but greater physics potential from a powerful graphics card with onboard chips? Yeah, that would get support.

[DMiller]

And so, eight core CPUs are coming soon.

They are already here actually if you get a Mac. :) Technically, it's not an 8-core CPU since it is two quad-core CPUs, but it is 8 cores all-together.

Intel has really taken over with the Core Duo line. AMD was pretty stiff competition with Intel for a few years, but the Core Duo is one of the best things to come out of Intel in a long time and blows away anything AMD has at the moment. AMD needs to do some work to get back in the race.

[A Black Falcon]

I'm pretty sure that AMD is definitely working on a new CPU, that I think is coming out this year, but Intel's eight-core (yes, really dual quad core, but close enough) is too, so who knows if AMD will actually close the gap... AMD was supposedly ahead for a while before the Core2 came out, but it sure hasn't been since last June.