elrichwizard
First Post
A GeForce 2 can be had for about $70 I think. If you upgrade to that, you should be able to run on the PII 400Mhz.
Actually, ATI has been OpenGL compliant since before the NVidia days if I recall. Regardless, current drivers are OpenGL 1.3, so scratch that.
<speculation>I think the issue is the engine was built with several GeForce extensions to optimize on those cards. Fine and dandy, but I think some of those optimizations may be crippling non GeForce boards.</speculation>
Last night I finished chapter 1. The finale battle slowed the system to 1.3 frames per second at 800x600, the minimum allowable resolution. The game has developped a tendency to freeze up, last time taskmgr.exe was toasted when the forced power-down left an error on my hard drive.
1.3 GHz @ 266 MHz FSB
512 MB DDR RAM
64 MB DDR ATI VIVO
XP Home
It was a full install of XP Home over a two month old W98 OS. This was about six months ago, mind you. That is, I had an old OS, but I never did the upgrade option, I just installed the full version over top.
My bad on the video card, I forgot to mention it's a Radeon 64 MB DDR VIVO. ATI manufactured, it has no model name or number, since back then, there were no third party cards. It was one of the first generation Radeons.
Oh yeah, and I mean't nothing bad by mentioning the GeForce ogl extensions. You're right, ATI has ones too. Just happens that NWN uses the GeForce ones, no biggie. Other games may very well use the ATI ones. Of course, neither are cross compatible. It was just a theory on why so many ATI users are seeing problems. Afterall, ATI has made leaps and bounds with their drivers, and if you ask me, they're on par with NVidia now.
Do you have any sources regarding ATI not having hardware OpenGL support. I've heard it before, but it's always been in flame wars where no one is interested in having a real discussion. I'd be curious to find out, because if true, ATI has lost a long-time die hard customer.