When it's too old and full of outdated standards, it's time to bite the bullet and simply get a new system entirely, if you're planning on gaming with it. I had to do it because I knew the usefulness of my Athlon XP 3000+ would be just about none for modern games. Throw in only a gig of RAM, AGP videocard... and you get the idea.
I got mine for about a thousand bucks and it plays UT3 excellently on maximum settings.
Of course, one of the sticks of RAM died shortly thereafter and I spent $100 on 4 GB of DD2-800... and next month I'm likely buying dual 750 GB SATA Hard Drives to replace the dual 300 GB IDEs I currently have...
At least now if I need to upgrade, most of my stuff could transfer over to a new system, as opposed to my soundcard and hard drives (and some peripheral stuff like mouse, keyboard, etc.) which are all that I was able to use in my new system compared to the old one.
Nice post...but you kinda prove the post Peregrine is making.
Planning on gaming isn't correct...it's planning on
next-generation gaming that you're referring to. I don't know how gaming stores in the US stores look, but in Belgium, I notice one trend:
the trashcan game department is growing.
With a "trashcan game", I mean one that can be played on a low or medium PC (by today's standards). They're usually sold at five to ten bucks top. Years ago, stores would rarely have such a "trashcan" department. Older games simply weren't available anymore, or a slight handful random ones at the most. Nowadays, practically all stores have them, and the amount of this "previous generation" games is almost nearing the new games (certainly in variety, but that's kinda obvious). And if you know where to find, an old computer that can play these games isn't hard to come by. It wouldn't surprise me if I could get a computer that can play UT99 and the game itself for less than the price of UT3
sans computer.
Why spend 1000 bucks on a PC if the added effort is exclusively for gaming? The entire advantage of having a PC instead of a console just happens to be those extra programs to get things running (well, there are others, but the console department is making rapid improvements into providing that).
Compare it to cars...when they were just invented, they were slow, loud, polluting, and so on. Everyone bought one, which allowed car manufacturers to invest that money to make safer, better and more quiet cars. People upgraded their cars (okay, mostly, they went with a new one...you get the picture), and yet again new models were produced. Yet faster, quieter, less poluting. This cycle repeated for some time, but stopped in the end.
Why? Not because the manufacturers are running out of ways to improve cars, but because people simply didn't
need faster cars (what use is a maximum speed of 400 miles/hour if you can never even get beyond 50 in your local city?).
That's what I'm saying here...games
can be better and more realistic and all that ****...but who
needs it? The ones who do exist, but they're only a small portion of the total amount of gamers. Not all roads cater for Formula 1 cars and the latest ferrari's, right? Then why should all games be made for the most recent hardware?
Anuban said:
Finally someone that makes sense and gets that the graphics in UT2k4 in no way match up to the graphics in UT3. When people say otherwise I have to laugh and shake my head ... even without the bloom the differences are enormous. Especially in the detail of the models (character, vehicles, weapons) and the detail of the static meshes. The texture quality/depth blows UT2K4 out the door. I play them both at least once a day and man it is shocking. And lets not even talk about the realistic movement of the bots now (look at them run with weapons and compare that to how the bots in prev games look when they run and of course hopping while they are running.
There is no normal bumpmapping in UT2k4 and that makes a huge amount of difference in how the weapons look ... in UT3 they look "heavy" and real ...and battle worn. Not in UT2K4. And enough can't be said about the differences in the lighting sub-engines between the two. In fact in this area there is flat out no comparison. Combine that with HDR and UT3 blows UT2K4 out the water graphically ... as it should ... this is three years later and things have advanced.
When people say UT2K4 is just as good looking as UT3 I have to remind people of Gears of War ... now if someone can say with a straight face that UT2K4 looks as good as Gears they have a lot of nerve (not to mention they are lying and they know it) but the truth it of course it doesn't, and if UT3 looks just as good (or even better in some aspects) as Gears as the vast majority of gamers and critics agree it does then of course this also means there is NO comparison in the visual fidelity of UT3 to UT2K4.
I haven't heard anyone in this thread or another say that, Anuban. If that's supposed to be a sneer at me and people agreeing with me, you better read our posts more carefully. UT3 looks better than UT2004. The question we're asking is "so what?". You're acting as if realism makes games, or that current games are better than ever just because they
look better than ever. The average gamer doesn't give a wooden nickel about bumpmapping, realistic bot movement or the details of Malcolms nosehair. They just want a fun game...and you can achieve that with far less than UE3 has to offer.
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