Upgrading for a game
Saturday, March 18th, 2006 - 2:22am
The last time I can remember upgrading for a game was Wing Commander (with each segment coming out being another upgrade), which definitely dates me. But I just had to say that I am SOOO jonesing for Oblivion (preordered for some time now) that I bought a Geforce 7800 GS OC (agp) card with simply this game in mind (though I can see a lot of advantages past this with this card).
My situation made me ask...what is the last game that you updated for just to play?
And on an semi-unrelated note, what would be a good demo or such that I could try out that would tax this card? I'd love to see what the real limits are.
Money can't buy you happiness...but it can buy you a boat big enough to sell right up next to it!-David Lee Roth
Moved to games.
I think I upgraded a few things around the time Half-Life 2 came out but usually if it's been a year or so and a deal comes up, I jump on it
Certis beat me to it. - Elysium
I built a whole new computer after dealing with performance issues in Battlefield 2 for a couple of months.
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I don't imagine master craftsmen leaping away from completed projects and shouting "Done, motherf*ckers! - 1Dgaf
I bought a whole new PC (parts, that I assembled) for the supposed release of HL2. I finally got to use the PC to full use a year later for the actual HL2 release.
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Hmm... I think it was because I wanted to see No One Lives Forever 2 with some anti-aliasing... picked up an A64 2800+ with an ATI Radeon 9800 pro. It ran Half Life 2 (despite the stuttering bug, which was fixed about a year later) and Far Cry and F.E.A.R. without any problems, so I'm waiting for the Next Big Thing to make me upgrade!
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Play Spore? Buddy time!
I just jumped up to about an AMD64 2800+ system, purely for Oblivion. I tried to justify it other ways, but, yeah, it's for Oblivion.
Morrowind -does- look sweet with 1600x1200/8xS FSAA.
Sadly, I may have to wait a bit on Oblivion, the HSF on my 6600GT is crapping out, and need replacement.
Mystic Violet wrote:
When Gothic 2 came out I simply told my wife "our PC is not gonna cut it". Insta Card Blanche!
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wow tough question... I think my subconscious has created some non-game related reason to justify every PC upgrade that I made... Wow I really cannot think of any upgrade that was done for games... scary
Decisions are just decisions, there are neither "good" or "bad"
LobsterMobster wrote:
Risking sounding like a plant for Zalman again, I really like these replacement video card heatsink/fans. Provantage has the images reversed right now: the one shown is the aluminum and copper model but the link is for the all copper. As a rule I replace the banshee-shrieking OEM fans with one of these silent ones. At least Asus is trying to make silent, fanless video cards out of the box.
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Women can't be in the same room with me without abandoning men forever - rabbit
Back when I was just out of college, I bought an Apple IIe by programming for a guy for a while. Pay was $8 an hour plus the computer after a certain amount of billed hours. (Later I got $10 an hour.) Then, after I had a job with NASA, I traded it to a buddy for his 8086 box. Every upgrade I've done or computer I've bought since then has been for games.
The Apple was fun since the assembler was not that hard to learn. I dabbled in it, doing some low-level graphics and sound screens, figuring I'd learn it over time. When I switched to the PC, I realized that system programming was a nightmare, so I ditched it and stuck to scripts and stuff. This probably helped me get into my first sysadmin job (which, thankfully, was in UNIX.)
I still miss the days of peek and poke. So to speak.
"Sometimes I go around saying, 'Kommisar Paulson has seized the commanding heights of the economy!'" - Paul Krugman, asked if recent changes to banking are socialistic.
I upgraded for Betrayal at Krondor. Way back then I was good at tweaking boot disks to get just about any old DOS game to run on the tiny amount of memory those computers had, but no amount of fiddling got that wonderful game to run. I had to wait 6 months to get my first 486 to run the game.
I upgraded video cards for several games. I cant remember them now. I think I can recall the best games I played on each computer though, which creates a sort of timeline
Apple IIe: Arkanoid
386: Master of Magic, all Sierra and LucasArts adventure games
486: Betrayal at Krondor
Acer P1: Terra Nova
Compaq P2: Warcraft, Diablo, Starcraft
Dell P4: WoW, Rome: Total War
ThePolypusher
WAR - Dolz
hehe, i hope you are joking
We still have to do this at work for low level DSP debugging, and it can get annoying. But I agree with the sentiment that there is just something satisfatory about writing assembly code and watch the memory move the way you wanted 
Back on topic, while I don't remember what game made me upgrade. I am a big graphics card junkie.
cards I had:
Riva TNT
Geforce
Elsa Erazor
Gainward Powerpack III Golden edition
Radeon 9500 modded to 9800pro, which I accidently fried (but the amazing thing is the card still worked as a 9500, even after I completely messed up by putting a ~0ohm resistor parallel to the Vgg... I turned the digipot the wrong way, sigh...)
Gecube 9800Pro
finally
Nforce 7800 GTX 256mb -> stepup to 512MB version.
Decisions are just decisions, there are neither "good" or "bad"
LobsterMobster wrote:
Wow, that's exactly the HSF I was looking at to replace the OEM model.
Do you know if it'll mount cleanly on an eVGA AGP 6600GT? Reports I've read indicate that the PCIe->AGP bridge chip can get in the way.
Mystic Violet wrote:
I'm running them on two Asus 6600 GT in an A8N-SLI motherboard. It was a little tight with the existing video RAM heatsinks but fits fine. Can't say on the eVGA though. Zalman's website says it fits 6600 series and on the next model up (that I just found out about), the VF900, they say 6600 except AGP. I'd assume that the VF700 would work fine, caveat emptor.
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Women can't be in the same room with me without abandoning men forever - rabbit