WOI - System requirements... Should I bother?

[Rampstrike 0]

Just a question... I really want WOI, as I have, play, and absolutely love all of the previous titles in this series, but after reading about the sytem requirements and the framerate hits, I just wanted to ask everyone's opinion.

 

My system is an HP Pavillion zd8000 laptop: P4 2.8, 768MB RAM, ATI X600 128M Graphics, Windows XP.

 

I can play all of the previous TW titles just fine, with grahics settings on High and in 1440x900 widescreen. I only notice slowdowns when flying near lots of active ground units and/or in areas with LOTS of air activity going on. WOV used to bring it down to a slideshow with all of the SAMs over Hanoi, but I used the mod to cut down on the SAM activity and now all is fine again.

 

So, in your expert opinion(s), will I be able to play WOI with decent graphics settings and without droppig down to single-digit framerates, or should I just wait until I can afford an upgrade?

 

Thanks for any (constructive!) input...

 

Cheers,

Ramp

[+littlesmoke 64]

yes, you should definitely get it. You can always lower the game settings. I've customized mine to look close to WOE, and have had very little drops in framerates.

[column5 62]

Get it, but have your expectations set reasonably--it will run slower and you will have to reduce some of the settings.

[Spinners 15,966]

I'm in a very similar position and running a four-year old desktop with an Intel Celeron 2.2, 758 RAM and a new NVIDIA GeForce 7300GT 128MB graphics card.

 

Looking at it another way, as an alternative to replacing my rig, what could I upgrade first?

Edited February 29, 2008 by Spinners

[Syrinx 13]

I'm in a very similar position and running a four-year old desktop with an Intel Celeron 2.2, 758 RAM and a new NVIDIA GeForce 7300GT 128MB graphics card.

 

Looking at it another way, as an alternative to replacing my rig, what could I upgrade first?

 

Adding extra memory is the quickest (and cheapest, at least here in the UK at the moment) alternative. That's what I'd do.

[+christian59 8]

SHADOW ARE FRAME RATE KILLER

[+Typhoid 231]

I stumbled across an interesting setting that helps a lot with the memory.

 

right click My Computer - click on the advanced tab - performance - settings - advanced - virtual memory - Change.

 

select custom size and the max that it will take. What this apparently does is use a portion of the harddrive as a memory addition. It can have a huge impact on how well things run.

 

what to change first? memory and try to balance the memory - meaning that if you have two, or more, memory slots put the maximum you can but the same size in each one. If they are balanced they will perform better than sum of the total (if that makes sense).

 

I found upgrading my card did a lot. Currently running a nVidea 7600GS with 512meg.

 

also do a program run of msconfig and (carefully!) turn of extra stuff that you don't need. File indexing, for example, is a real processor and memory drain.

 

with all of that, my 2.4ghz P4 can kind of keep up with higher graphics settings. I have also turned off shadows and made the terrain distance at near - both of which will kill performance.

Edited February 29, 2008 by Typhoid

[+Viggen 516]

I am running a very low grade machine that has SFG, WOV, WOE, FS2004, and FSX tons gigs of mods. I have WOI on it and have only run into problems twice. Also if you do get it remember to turn off the shadows as they are the problem.

[Heck 496]

By all means, buy it. I have an intel 910 shared video chip, which only shows 96 megs of ram in dxdiag, a 1.4 processor, and 2 gigs of system ram. Even with this poor video, I am able to run this sim at most of the highest graphic settings and get only an occaissional slow down in frame rates, even with a lot of modded things that could kill frame rates, like the speech.ini mods that add location and direction calls to the radio calls.

 

Ps: Typhoid, thanks for the great info.

 

Heck