Good offline CRPG for XP/Vista

[Bront]

I bought one of those (GeForce 7050), and boy am I screwed. The salesman lied to me that the played NFS Carbon on it with no problem. Well, he may have *played* it, but conveniently forgot to mention that it froze after 10 minutes or so. I can't even play Doom 3, NWN or any older 3D game without freezing, not to mention newer ones.

Ugh, I didn't even know they made something that... underpowered.

That's worse than most onboard cards.

 

[Ranger REG]

That's because they don't need to. There were only a few games that had consistent problems with dual core PCs, and those were fixed with patches. Even if you didn't patch it, you can solve it by setting the program to only use 1 CPU manually, so it isn't an issue.

So, I can play a game that requires 3.0 GHz single-core CPU on a 2.1 Ghz dual-core PC?

And how does one manually set a program to use 1 core in a multi-core PC?

 

[Ranger REG]

Ah, Arcanum. My idiot savant half-orc technologist who made his own friends makes me smile (and I'm still playing version of him in D&D)...

As for getting to work on Vista, I've heard running it as Admin under Compatibility mode *should* would. My want to check some of the patches at Terra-Arcanum as well.

Tried running it under Admin and set compatibility to XP, but still my mouse (or my touchpad) won't move the cursor.

 

[drothgery]

So, I can play a game that requires 3.0 GHz single-core CPU on a 2.1 Ghz dual-core PC?

You probably can, but it's mostly not because the extra core makes up for the difference. It's because all CPUs aren't created equal, and no game would require a 3 GHz CPU unless it was talking about a Pentium 4. Which did less per clock cycle than most other mainstream desktop CPUs, but compensated by running at a somewhat higher clock speed. Eventually, though, it ran into some issues which kept the clock speed from scaling as high as Intel planned, so AMD's Athlon 64 ended up outperforming it at lower clock speeds, and so ended up getting replaced with the Core 2 family of chips. A 1.8 - 2 GHz Core 2 Duo or a 2-2.2 GHz Athlon 64 is generally considered about the equivalent of a 3 GHz Pentium 4.

 

[Ranger REG]

You probably can, but it's mostly not because the extra core makes up for the difference. It's because all CPUs aren't created equal, and no game would require a 3 GHz CPU unless it was talking about a Pentium 4. Which did less per clock cycle than most other mainstream desktop CPUs, but compensated by running at a somewhat higher clock speed. Eventually, though, it ran into some issues which kept the clock speed from scaling as high as Intel planned, so AMD's Athlon 64 ended up outperforming it at lower clock speeds, and so ended up getting replaced with the Core 2 family of chips. A 1.8 - 2 GHz Core 2 Duo or a 2-2.2 GHz Athlon 64 is generally considered about the equivalent of a 3 GHz Pentium 4.

Well, I'm hoping the software developers would make it easier for us to glance at their software's system requirement labels (both minimum and recommended), especially when we now phasing out single-core for multi-core CPU. The last thing I want to do is convert the single-core requirement to multi-core standard, if there is such a formula.

It's bad enough trying to read the food's nutrition labels, no matter how much they claim they're understandable than before.

 

[Plane Sailing]

My vote would be to install dosbox or vmware player and obtain a copy of "Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis" and/or "System Shock", two of the most fun games I've ever played on a PC.

OK, they are old, but they are still two of the most fun games I've ever played on a PC!

 

[drothgery]

Well, I'm hoping the software developers would make it easier for us to glance at their software's system requirement labels (both minimum and recommended), especially when we now phasing out single-core for multi-core CPU.

It's not really single-core vs. multi-core. For PC purposes, it's Pentium 4 (and Pentium 4 derivatives, like the dual-core Pentium Ds and the Celerons of the Pentium 4 era) vs. everything else. My desktop at work (which I'm using right now) is a 3.4 GHz Pentium D (dual-core Pentium 4). My notebook at home is a 2 GHz Core 2 Duo. In virtually any benchmark and in observed performance running the same applications, my notebook is faster.

It really wasn't the software guys' fault. If the development path Intel started with the Pentium 4 had been successful in the long run, Intel would have stuck with it and AMD would have come up with something similar, and clock speed numbers would work going forward (and, really, the high clock speed / low instructions per clock type of design isn't dead; the Xbox 360, PS3, and IBM's POWER6 server CPUs work like that). If Intel had never bothered with the P4 (and covered the 'Pentium 4 era' by extending the Pentium 3's life a little longer and then making a desktop version of the Pentium M), then clock speed numbers would have been pretty comparable.

But instead we had a bubble where the dominant CPU platform (at least in terms of sales -- and for a year or so in terms of performance) was very much out of sync with anything that came before or after it. It would have been silly, in 2002 or 2003, to write specs that weren't based on a Pentium 4 (and indeed, AMD's Athlon XP model numbers at the time -- no matter what they were supposed to stand for officially -- were intended to give some indication of which Pentium 4 to compare it against); that's what the vast majority of new desktops used.