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On Tue, 24 Jan 2012 16:22:58 -0500, Jim Henderson wrote:
> On Tue, 24 Jan 2012 20:12:40 +0000, Orchid Win7 v1 wrote:
>
>> People complained about, say, HalfLife 2, but in fact it turns out to
>> have surprisingly modest requirements. It played perfectly well for me
>> on a lowly £60 graphics card. And when you consider that the
>> top-of-the-line cards are usually £300 or so, £60 isn't exactly pricey.
>
> "Surprisingly modest requirements" by today's standards.
>
> 8 years ago when it was released, the requirements weren't particularly
> modest.
For example, the entry-level video card they recommended was the GeForce
FX 5700, which had a street price at the end of 2003 of US$199. The
recommended GeForce 6800 was sub-$300 when it came out.
Back in 2004, that was a considerable expense for a video card.
Jim
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>>> People complained about, say, HalfLife 2, but in fact it turns out to
>>> have surprisingly modest requirements. It played perfectly well for me
>>> on a lowly £60 graphics card. And when you consider that the
>>> top-of-the-line cards are usually £300 or so, £60 isn't exactly pricey.
>>
>> "Surprisingly modest requirements" by today's standards.
>>
>> 8 years ago when it was released, the requirements weren't particularly
>> modest.
>
> For example, the entry-level video card they recommended was the GeForce
> FX 5700, which had a street price at the end of 2003 of US$199. The
> recommended GeForce 6800 was sub-$300 when it came out.
>
> Back in 2004, that was a considerable expense for a video card.
Worked just fine with my GeForce 6600, which was about £60.
(That's not GeForce 6600 GT or 6600 Ultra, just a vanilla 6600.)
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On Tue, 24 Jan 2012 22:04:12 +0000, Orchid Win7 v1 wrote:
>>>> People complained about, say, HalfLife 2, but in fact it turns out to
>>>> have surprisingly modest requirements. It played perfectly well for
>>>> me on a lowly £60 graphics card. And when you consider that the
>>>> top-of-the-line cards are usually £300 or so, £60 isn't exactly
>>>> pricey.
>>>
>>> "Surprisingly modest requirements" by today's standards.
>>>
>>> 8 years ago when it was released, the requirements weren't
>>> particularly modest.
>>
>> For example, the entry-level video card they recommended was the
>> GeForce FX 5700, which had a street price at the end of 2003 of US$199.
>> The recommended GeForce 6800 was sub-$300 when it came out.
>>
>> Back in 2004, that was a considerable expense for a video card.
>
> Worked just fine with my GeForce 6600, which was about £60.
>
> (That's not GeForce 6600 GT or 6600 Ultra, just a vanilla 6600.)
In 2004 when the game was released?
The minimum and recommended configurations for the PC version as
originally released are on the Wikipedia entry for HL2.
Memory cost 4x-8x as much then as now per GB (you can today get 4 GB of
memory for what 512 MB-1GB cost then).
Jim
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On 1/24/2012 9:49 AM, Warp wrote:
> Invisible<voi### [at] dev null> wrote:
>> While playing through Core, I tried to shoot one of the enemies, and the
>> screen turned bright green and my headphones nearly blasted my hears off
>> with a loud buzzing tone. I had to reboot the PC to get it to respond
>> again. Putting the pain back into crashing, eh?
>
>> Best of all, when I loaded up the game again, all of the game saves from
>> the last two hours were gone.
>
> That's the downside of PC gaming. No such problems on the consoles.
> (Ok, there are similar problems with console games as well, but they
> are way, way more rare. Perhaps in 1% of all games, while the same figure
> on the PC side is more like 50%.)
>
Wow.. Except for things just not wanting to install, or maybe 1-2 games
that actually have crashed, and I had a fair idea why (like low memory
resources, or the like), I literally haven't seen any of this stuff... o.O
Ok, actually there was one case, with some of the Red Faction games
where a "known" glitch existed. Seems when the video-sync was not on
(its off by default), on faster machines you could end up having the
graphics engine de-synch from what ever the GPU was doing, or something,
and somehow that left you with your mini-sub a smoking wreck. lol
Turning on VSync fixed it.
When playing Arkham Asylum I was running on a machine that was "below
spec", so a lot of the animation was slower than normal, in some places,
so that "could" potentially cause the same sync issue, on a machine that
is on/over-spec.
Only other major one I had was trying to run Halo 2 on an XP machine,
using a trick that emulated some systems calls that are missing in the
older DirectX. At one point one of the cut scenes does some *major* disk
swapping, and this tries to trigger the Win Vista/7 extended disk
caching, or something, which loads bigger chunks, much faster, but XP
couldn't do that. So, the solution was to run a background program, for
system diagnostics, which somehow forced the machine to use the older XP
file fetch system, instead of trying to use the advanced, and missing,
one. This got you past the crash, but the diagnostic thing was brain
damaged, and kept eating up memory, with more and more data on what your
system was doing at the time. So, if you forgot to shut it down, after
you got past the problem, it would crash anyway, and memory was consumed
by the other "diagnostic" process... lol
Generally, the problems, when they exist, fall into some category of
some bit of hardware not liking how fast/slow/etc. the stuff you are
using is, and simply changing resolution may not be the problem, but
some other thing, like the VSync (which normally isn't at all
necessary). Sometimes its a conflict you can't fix "at all". Telltale
Games, for example, seem to especially have problem with mouse control,
under anything higher than XP, for no damn sane reason. They don't track
its movement like they should, but drag the cursor *slowly*... Who the
heck knows why.
And, yeah, console is nice, but that is just one more piece of hardware
that can break, it can't do what a PC can, in some cases, and they are
always trying to stop you doing things like you could for Neverwinter,
or others, where you can create your own content, official or otherwise.
And, frankly, getting stuck slogging two rifles at a time, for example,
in something like one of the STALKER games, to get money, to upgrade
equipment, without any way to "over muscle" my inventory, would make the
game play way longer, far more boring, and a massive pain in the ass.
lol Better to have something like that on a PC (no idea if they ever
made it for console though), where I can make "adjustments". ;)
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On 1/24/2012 1:12 PM, Orchid Win7 v1 wrote:
> On 24/01/2012 18:18, Warp wrote:
>> Invisible<voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
>>> On the other hand, if an Xbox breaks, the manufacturer can charge you
>>> arbitrary amounts of money to fix it. If a PC breaks, you can just
>>> replace the offending part, available from a bazillion sources. ;-)
>>
>> Do you have any actual figures how much it costs to repair an Xbox 360
>> after the warranty has been expired?
>
> No. But I imagine it's cheaper to buy an entire new Xbox.
>
> This is based on my observations of what happens with laptops. Typically
> is obviously absurd. The manufacturers are simply preying on the fact
> that nobody else can supply this part.
>
That is because, usually, by the time the battery needs replacing,
nothing uses it any more, so keeping them in stock isn't cost effective,
but your laptop is now, itself, worth $100. lol
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>> This is based on my observations of what happens with laptops. Typically
>> is obviously absurd. The manufacturers are simply preying on the fact
>> that nobody else can supply this part.
>>
> That is because, usually, by the time the battery needs replacing,
> nothing uses it any more, so keeping them in stock isn't cost effective,
> but your laptop is now, itself, worth $100. lol
I'm pretty sure as soon as you tear open the seal on the shipping
container the laptop came in, its value plummets to about 5% of the
original purchase price. I mean, who would buy a second hand laptop that
may or may not work, when you can just buy a new one?
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> Wow.. Except for things just not wanting to install, or maybe 1-2 games
> that actually have crashed, and I had a fair idea why (like low memory
> resources, or the like), I literally haven't seen any of this stuff... o.O
Actually, that reminds me: Ever since my PC went dual-core, The Settlers
will no longer run. Nothing I do seems to fix it. When you try to start
the game, it just summarily crashes with an obscure error message.
I keep thinking maybe I could run it in a VM - except that I'd need a
license for another copy of Windows XP, and nobody sells those any more.
> When playing Arkham Asylum I was running on a machine that was "below
> spec", so a lot of the animation was slower than normal, in some places,
> so that "could" potentially cause the same sync issue, on a machine that
> is on/over-spec.
Oh, I've seen plenty of PC games do things they shouldn't. What I'm
saying is that it's fairly rare for a game to *crash*. Sometimes a game
won't work at all, but it's unusual for one to intermittently crash.
(Unless that game is Cryostasis. :-P )
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On 24/01/2012 10:21 AM, Invisible wrote:
> Hmm, that's a thought... My new PC can handle Crysis, I wonder if it can
> run Batman on lowest detail settings?
The answer? Yes, it can. Batman seems to run just fine now. (Although I
haven't visited the batcave yet...)
> (Stupid, isn't it? Crysis was a
> cutting-edge masterpiece, whereas Batman has quite low graphical
> quality. And yet, Batman takes more compute power than Crysis? WTF?)
This still baffles me...
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Jim Henderson <nos### [at] nospamcom> wrote:
> On Tue, 24 Jan 2012 20:12:40 +0000, Orchid Win7 v1 wrote:
>
> > This is based on my observations of what happens with laptops. Typically
> > if you buy, say, a £300 laptop, a replacement battery costs £280 - which
> > is obviously absurd.
>
> If you buy from the manufacturer, it is.
>
> I bought a replacement battery for a Dell D610 (my old laptop) about 8
> months ago, and it cost me about $50 IIRC.
>
> Bought it through Amazon.
I had to get a new battery for my MacBook a couple of years ago, which ended up
I may have to - mine hasn't been the same since the beer incident).
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On Wed, 25 Jan 2012 10:05:48 +0000, Invisible wrote:
>>> This is based on my observations of what happens with laptops.
>>> Typically if you buy, say, a £300 laptop, a replacement battery costs
>>> £280 - which is obviously absurd. The manufacturers are simply preying
>>> on the fact that nobody else can supply this part.
>>>
>> That is because, usually, by the time the battery needs replacing,
>> nothing uses it any more, so keeping them in stock isn't cost
>> effective, but your laptop is now, itself, worth $100. lol
>
> I'm pretty sure as soon as you tear open the seal on the shipping
> container the laptop came in, its value plummets to about 5% of the
> original purchase price. I mean, who would buy a second hand laptop that
> may or may not work, when you can just buy a new one?
I repaired a broken laptop (my stepson's) for about $100, including
replacing the battery, and used it until I needed something more powerful.
Then I bought something more powerful.
I still use the older laptop, in fact I've got both sitting on the desk
here with me right now.
Jim
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