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Gamers, Upgrade your Systems
jbischof writes "Looking to upgrade your aging PC? Ace's Hardware has a new upgrade guide tailored specifically to gamers. The data shows exactly which upgrades - processor, motherboard, gfx card, or combination of the three - will give the best performance boost on all the latest and most popular games (according to their recent poll)."
OK, so I'm only vaguely impressed with Ace's gaming system... Seems to me like they're splitting hairs over upgrades of off-the-shelf equipment. Here's my question for all of you slashdotters:
Given the above article, and the premise that slashdotters have a wider range of experience than Ace, what would be the ideal configuration for a stereo-video enabled gaming system? Say I want something that can run Stereo-Quake or Stereo-Descent... Also assume that cost isn't really a factor (wish that were true, but I'm just pipe dreaming here...).
Besides the CPU and motherboard, there's also things like monitors (stereo projection monitors?), controllers (throttles, immersion gloves, goggles), stereo audio systems (THX?), and even room design. What would slashdotters put together with a beefy $50K to $100K budget, eh? Assume that the project is to put together the ultimate stereo-Quake VR simulator, and that you have access to the code of the game...
Actually, the article has a suprising (at least for me) conclusion: strategy / RPG games may benifit by upgrading your video card (they're really starting to take advantage of that stuff) whereas first person shooters require more CPU (due to increased AI). The FPS games used were Battlefield 1942 and Ghost Recon.
This is fairly contrary to what I've heard in the past, which was always the opposite.
Windows will still write to the pagefile even if you have RAM to spare.
For example, my machine with 512 meg of RAM has an OS footprint of about 89 meg with XP installed. That leaves me with over 400 meg of physical RAM free. But when I run a game that uses up 100 meg of that RAM, 60 meg ends up in the page file. There's no good reason for it to do so that I know of, but it happens anyway. I almost never hit the limit of my physical RAM but I'm still stuck with that page file and the thrashing that goes with it.
I've found that turning it off in Windows performance settings can get a temporary boost but long before I hit the ceiling I start getting "low on memory" errors. If the OS would utilize the RAM to its full potential first, I'd be much happier. Otherwise why do I have 512 meg in my machine?
Perhaps someone needs to make a Linux for Gamers distribution. Include all the free games, all the demo games, and make it stupid easy. Include a stupid easy email client and Mozilla ... and XMMS. It needs nothing else. Sell the idea to people like Blizzard, Sierra, and EA. It could be like console systems, with upgradable hardware. It could have software that checks for driver updates for their hardware, and has an overclocker app.
Shit, you could even do the hardware route. I bet AlienWare would pick it up if it were good enough. They're doing the MS Media Center thing as it is.
No sig for you. YOU GET NO SIG!
Tell me about it. I have 640MB RAM, and Windoze still grinds away at the swap file all the time.
I've completely disabled virtual memory on a few Winboxes, and the performance (and often stability) increase is astounding! We have a P2/400 hooked up to the home theatre for DivX, MP3, etc. It used to play DivX horribly slow off the network, stuttering, skipping, and freezing all over the place. We found out it was buffering it in swap... turned off virtual memory, BANG, played without missing a frame.
Unfortunately, a number of apps and games seem to be designed to specifically use VM, and won't work with it turned off, so I always end up having to turn it back on.
Conspiracy to convince people they need ever faster machines? Who knows.
"Mind, as manifested by the capacity to make choices, is to some extent present in every electron." -Freeman Dyson