Cerberus guild

...when i find myself chatting more ingame as hunting anywhere, cause the fps gives me headache

...when its more fun to scroll through the 1000xbags in bank trying to find something i *know* i put in there somewhat before instead of going hunting for it

...voluntarely staying out of Alien raids because diashows are old fashioned

Help appreciated, give your 2c or just flame my arse for being elitist

btw, current system is 1.4Ghz AMD ThunderBird, 512MB & Ati Radeon 9600PRO

I'm much in the same boat as yourself, although I have 2 GHz P4, 1GB RAM, ATI 9800 PRO. I am getting an nVIDIA next time, and I recommend you do the same if AO is your main game... it just works better on nVIDIAS platform, sadly.

Wouldnt necessarily buy right now, but maybe when you get Dual PCI-EXPRESS mainboards for the Athlon 64 platform... then you can install 2 x nVIdia 6800 Ultra in SLI mode for double graphic perfomance I'm hoping to get this early next year.

Maybe i dont have that much cash to buy those toys, rather im looking P4 3Ghz Prescot&1gig mem (400mhz) and Epox board. I dont have the dought for any higher Intel setup, and the lowcost AMDs suck
What id like to change in this setup, is the memory to be faster than 400, but cant in anyway afford them. One gig @400mhz costs 170ish euro and the prices of 512mb@533mhz starts at about 200 euro. Hard decision

you should be able to play good enough with current setup...
But memory leaks, graphic engine is something medivial, etc...
It's your your call....btw I'm playing on similar stuff...1,7Ghz and 9200 radeon

Timpu.....Im playing AO on a 1.2ghz AMD Thunderbird, 512 mb 133 mhz Ram, and a GeForce5900 128 mb, and Soundblaster Audigy2.
Sure, it aint fast....but I play at 16bit, 1600x1200 and it works well enough for me.
One thing I would advice you to check.....what is your screens current refresh rate in Hz? Anything below 75 is too low...and will give you a headache. Set it to a minimum of 75......prepferably 100 if your monitor has the capacity for it. A flicker free picture is vital for your eyes and head, and ultimately your gaming enjoyment

My setup is 2.4GHz P4, 1GB RAM (333 I think), 128MB Geforce4 Ti 4200. No AA, high quality textures, 1152x864 rez. Rubi-Ka is usually acceptable framerate but SL used to get quite bad. Don't know about AI since I still haven't seen an invasion yet.

But I voted for the mushrooms. I like that fungi

OOoo this all makes me feel a bti special. I have an Alienware
AMD 3.2GHZ, 1gig Corsair XMS Ram, Alienware Extreme Edition Geforce 5950. Funnily enough AO runs perfectly on any rez I can run it....

Now just to get a net connection that stays online for more than 15 minutes and I'll be rocking.....

Oh and agree completely about that refresh rate. Get that as high as possible

Doh, just checked out some thing on new hardware issue...
The new comp would be on intel 9xx platform, and hence there would be PCI-Express graphics port...That means no no to using my current Radeon, and somewhat serious extra costs.
Did some study on the matter of new cards, and it would cost me atleast 400eur to get decent performance. No point buying new card with same performance lvl as current is.
So, i must wait until they launch cost effective middle-performance cards...or dig out allready empty wallet for doubled total upgrading costs.
so quick calculations of costs:

Motherboard Epox 140Eur
Processor Intel 3Ghz 200Eur
2x512 DDR400 200Eur
Radeon X800 256 470Eur (or some equivalent of Nvidia)
Total 1000Eur
Abit rounded up numbers from actual prices i got offered but youll get the picture.

So, i think ill just bite my tongue and play on what i got...maybe theres too much hassle still on market because of this new PCI standard theyr pushing since spring...
Aint gaming fun

I know what you mean ;/ I gotta wait too, till the uber products become more mainstream... but then it won't be uber anymore, will it?

I am considering to downgrade from XP to 2k, to try and make AO run a little bit more economically on my system, but I really hope it doesn't come to that.

playing on a AMD Athlon XP 2500+ with barton core, 1gb DDR400 Ram, GeForce 5600 Video Suit 128mb, and with a few tweaks here and there i got AO running really really well in 1600x1200

One other note Timpuri, from the looks of the prices you have listed, you should order from your neighbor sweden, bc it looks expencive from
where im sitting....

these prices i listed are from my local shop i supposed to have good connections to...i dont like to order comp parts from the net, or attleast that was the thing previously. Nowadays its so much different to buy stuff on net, that i might even consider it. But offcourse if i get shit-in-da-box whos responsible of the warranties, its so easy to just take the part to the closest shop and let then deal with it but if its bought from net you gotta cover the expenses to the part being shipped to manufactorer, retailers and importers wont touch it...
I dont know how large difference is there in prices, but if its in tens Euros after shipping costs i wouldnt bother. Half the price i would consider it really much though

Edit.
Id perhaps should wait for the launch of Ati X700 and Nvidia 6600, they supposed to have better power/value ratio, and what the tests so far show, they got plenty of kick...dont have to get the top-of-the-line to be able to play

Well Timpuri I got one of these recently:

Asus GeForce 6800 GT 256MB

and in my P4 2.2Ghz machine with 768mb Ram AO runs fine most of the time but even with this I can get a lot of lag. Seems to be more to do with the graphics engine of AO and particular situations (cities, Inferno garden etc). I'd maybe stick with you've got if you don't have lots of money to blow on new hardware and just try and tweak the performance as much as you can...

Only other advice..reboot often! Clear the graphics memory once in a while, especially after alien attacks.

I have a P4 3g, 2g of dualddr ram, and a ati 9800 radeon pro

While the new video cards out by ati and nvidia do have some significant advantages, there are a few situations where any gpu/cpu will grind to sludge.

One situation, pre AI, that still exists, are some SL dungeons and catacombs. In particular, looking in the direction of the big main room full of glowing-sparkly mobs in penumbra. Once in there, every time we killed one, fps improved. Another, that many of you never really saw much, happened at large events/raids. But since AI, a common one is alien invasions. I suspect the biggest problem is occlusion (every surface/texture has to be intersected with every other in your line of sight, to find out what blocks what), because if your gpu/cpu is otherwise capable, turning down viewdistance drasticly works amazingly well. What that does is reduce the amount of area in your line of sight, basicly removing most of the objects it has to occlude.

Try this before the next invasion:
/option ViewDistance 0.2

And to restore:
/option ViewDistance 1.0

Now, don't expect this to save you if you have an older card. I suspect that there are just some things that older cards can't do, because I had a geforce 2gts, which while otherwise great, could not handle shadowland dungeons at all. Also, the above option doesn't save you in shadowland dungeons/catacombs anyway, since I suspect that the setting is over-ridden anyway. You can also turn down nanos/buffs, since these involve lots of particle effects.

Another option is to turn graphics settings down to medium or lower, and for older cards, about the only thing you can do. Me, I really like the high textures, specially when it comes to looking at pretty girls, so I'll live with the shorter view distance.

Now, the 'lag' people have when running up to old athens hill, or when zoning and turning around, again isn't lag either, the game is pulling textures from your hard drive in a hurry. Your gpu/cpu isn't going to help as much here as a 7200 rpm drive will.

I got all graph settings tweaked heavily down, and still theres alot of situations where this game is unplayable. I need to instal my system again for sure, because i think my comp is swapping too much and that´s one thing that makes my fps hit the dirt. But before i install everything again, i need to make a decisiond whether to invest on new hardware. Some of you have amazing comps as is, but if id invest in that technology at this point id say it would be money wasted. I think the only way to make this is to buy the new chipset hardware (im thinkin of going Intel this time) so it means new graphics card aswell. Offcourse i could stick to AMD and only buy new motherboard (with agpx8 support) and athlon at this point, but that 9600pro radeon i got would need to be upgraded in near future too. So would the money invested for new but soon to be obsolete technology be wasted, This PCI-E is coming with a bang, all major card manufactorers allready have em on line.
This is a bad time to think my comp aint good enough, if i upgrade it "ok, this is plenty now"-style i will regret it later and if i buy top of the line harware i will regret it due the prices be so ridicilous.
I´ve never bought hightech, ive allways stick to older stuff because of power/value in mind. This time computer technology bites me up my arse with this new chipset features...

This all come to one question:
Do i want to play computer games?

HAHA, what a silly question You know what the alternative is, hehe

But seriously, if you have a 1GB or more RAM, you can consider disabling disk swapping altogether by setting your Windows virtual memory (pagefile) size to 0. I find this has helped reduce some annoying stuttery behaviour when disk operations take too much CPU. Another solution, of course, is to invest in a disk controller that removes the CPU load that IDE drives create. SCSI works much better in this respect, but of course isn't really a viable platform for home computing due to higher prices.