Sorry for the delay in this update. I didn’t get to play much of the beta, due to the fact that Friday night I wasn’t able to log on till my “bed time” so I didn’t get to play then and Saturday was busy for me but I did get to find out if it worked and how it worked verses my wife’s PC. Sunday we had a tragedy in the family. A deep lost to many as my wife’s grandfather passed. So of course I was with the family during this time instead of testing, but hey there should be a second invite coming this month for testing.
First lets go over the stats of the Minimum System requirements, My System Specifications and My Wife’s System Specifications.
Minimum System requirements
OS
Windows XP, Vista/7
CPU
AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual-Core 4000+ or better · Intel Core 2 Duo Processor 2.0GHz or better
RAM
Windows XP: 1.5GB · Windows Vista and Windows 7: 2GB · PCs using a built-in graphical chipset, 2GB RAM recommended.
Video
ATI X1800 or better* · nVidia 7800 or better* · Intel 4100 Integrated Graphics or better*
*Minimum of 256MB of on-board RAM and Shader 3.0 or better support.
My System Specifications
OS
Windows 7 64bit
CPU
AMD Athlon(tm) 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 4200+ (2 CPUs), ~2.2GHz
RAM
4GB DDR2 800MHz
Video
ATI Radeon X1600 with 256MB of (I am assuming GDRR2) RAM supports Shader Model 3.0
My Wife’s System Specifications
OS
Windows 7 64bit
CPU
Intel(r) Core(TM) i5-2500K CPU @ 3.30GHz
RAM
8GB DDR3 1333MHz
Video
ATI Radeon HD 6870 1GB GDDR5 supports Shader Model 5.0
What are the differences?
If we break this down we can see that both my wife and I meet the requirements for the operating system and we both run Windows 7 64bit. When it comes to the processor my build is only a little better than the minimum required which is a 4000 model and mine is a 4200 model. I have two cores running at 2.2 GHz and my wife is running 4 cores 1.1 Ghz faster than mine. The ram both my wife and myself have more than the required myself at 4GBs and her at 8GBs but a big difference between our RAM is the speed, hers is 1333MHz which is almost twice as fast as mine which runs at 800 Mhz. Last but certainly not least is the video graphics my PC is actually two models under the minimum! Which means I shouldn’t be able to run the game right? Now my wife’s PC is way above the minimum required as you notice she has a 1gb on her card and I just meet the minimum for that, and she can handle a much higher shader model than the minimum where as again I meet the minimum. Now that is something to note, that I do meet the minimum stats on the card but the model number means that my card may not be fast enough to handle all the video data that will be processed.
So did it run?
I am happy to say the game did run on my PC build even though my card wasn’t as fast as what they say is the minimum required. Now we have to look at how well it performed. My build was laggy to say the least on the default settings which had almost everything at max. Now i did resolve he laggy issue by turning down the graphic settings. I put the texture pack at medium or high, I know I tested with both but I forget what I left it at. I turned down things that would tie up the GPU such as shadows and dynamic lighting. This made the game very play able and the only issue I seemed to have was when we would go to in game conversation the detail textures would take a minute to load. A problem that I remember seeing on the Xbox with Mass Effect alot maybe its a BioWare thing with lower end systems. Anyway I didn’t know how much I was going to care about getting an upgrade for my graphics card until we tested it on my wife’s build.
Her build ran the game amazingly! We had everything on High, I turned up the view distance and things like that, next test I will turn EVERYTHING up to max see if it runs as smooth. I am hoping to get my PC run at least half as good as hers. I have a ASUS Radeon HD 5670 1GB DDR5 coming in the mail. Now it is a PCI Express 2.1 Card and I believe that my ma inboard is only a PCI-E 1.0 slot, I may be wrong about this I am going to look into it, but basically that means is it will have the bandwidth of the small number. So for example if you put a 1.0 card in the 2.0 slot it will bottle neck and only run at the 1.0 speed. Same thing for the other way around, if my main board is 1.0 but the card is 2.0 it will only have the bandwidth of 1.0. Which shouldn’t cause a huge problem since the bandwidth isn’t that much better luckily it is backwards and forwards compatible. Though I have heard of reports of problems butting newer cards in the slower slots on paper it should work. So we will see if it works, I will probably post about that on my Facebook when I get the card in.
So what is next?
The next beta test is supposed to be between 25-28 of November and is also supposed to be the final beta test. I plan on seeing how it will it will run with a graphics card upgrade in my PC and if I have time I would also like to test the game on the laptop I bought my wife when we were dating.
In Conclusion
This game really should have the honor of you getting an upgrade to see how beautiful it is. They really put a lot of detail and effort into this game and it would be a shame to not play it on the right hardware. Next time I will let you know if you have a similar build to mine if you just need to update your graphics card or not. If you have to do the minimum then just make sure you have at least 256MB of ram on your graphics card and it handles shaader model 3.0.
Let me know if you have any questions!
