The "Would my PC be able to run M2TW?" thread (all such queries here pls)

[Comrade Alexeo]

Alright...

So, I've been trying to convince a gamer friend of mine to try out the TW series for a while, and he's finally decided to give the M2TW demo a whirl. He's downloading it now and these are his specs:

2 GB RAM
2.16 gHz Intel Centrino Core Duo processor
256 MB NVIDIA Geforce 7400 Turbocache

Sounds to me like a pretty good system, but his processor concerns me...

I know that on my 512 MB RAM, 2.79 gHz Pentium 4, 128MB Radeon 9800 PRO, I can run detail and textures on medium, grass on, terrain low, buildings high, bloom off (cause its ugly!), reflections on, and largest unit size (in the demo at least) on 1280x1024 resolution with very good performance; the intro-to-battle videos can be a little slow, but once the gameplay starts I seem to have few problems.

Now, I suspect that my friend can do better than me, right?

[maestro]

Alright...

So, I've been trying to convince a gamer friend of mine to try out the TW series for a while, and he's finally decided to give the M2TW demo a whirl. He's downloading it now and these are his specs:

2 GB RAM
2.16 gHz Intel Centrino Core Duo processor
256 MB NVIDIA Geforce 7400 Turbocache

Sounds to me like a pretty good system, but his processor concerns me...

Now, I suspect that my friend can do better than me, right?

Firstly, his processor shouldn't bother you. Don't be distracted by mere clock speed. That processor is roughly twice as fast as yours! It's his video card that should worry you = it's pants. I suspect what we're dealing with here might be a laptop? If not then some dodgy propriatory system like a Packard Bell or something. The reason I mention it is that the turbocache series use shared RAM (at least the only ones I've seen so far) and they share system RAM with your PC. That's not a mega problem in itself with 2Gb of RAM, but the bandwidth for the RAM will be massively reduced. Not only will his video card be sharing resources with teh CPU, but the time taken to read / write info from the system RAM is waaaay slower than a video card with proper GRAM. For example, the latest ATI cards have a dedicated bus to the GRAM of 2GHz, and I suspect that your 7400TC is sharing space on a 677MHz bus, and it has to get the info over the PCIe bus too. Basically, all in all, the 7400TC are rubbish and should only ever be used when there is no alternative. They're just used to look good when salesmen are trying to sell a laptop. They can tell you how "it's got a 256Mb NVidia graphics card!" but what they don't tell you is that it's pretty pants cause it's a shared resource.


All in all, I suspect that your computer and your friend's computer will perform at very similar framerates in M2TW