I have an AMD 3400+ with a 128MB 9800 Pro. Back when I purchased the system in June of 2004, this was a fairly reasonable machine. I don't tend to play the latest first person shooters, tending more towards strategy games, and I haven't noticed meaningful performance issues with anything I've played.
I did find that my laptop, a 2.4 GHz P4 with a nVidia 420 Go, wasn't really up to anything I play currently. Which was generally OK, since my wife was now using it for wireless web browsing in bed, in front of the TV, etc.
Recently she Pepsi syndromed the laptop. Literally, with diet Pepsi. Now it still runs, but it behaves quite oddly, refusing to accept keyboard input sometimes, and generating random keystrokes other times. I found I couldn't open the case despite unscrewing everything I could find. I can pay a local technician to take it apart and fix it, no doubt, but I was toying with the idea of using this as an excuse to replace it with something that could run current games.
To try and get a handle on how various laptops compared to my desktop system, I ran 3DMark06, and I was taken aback and appalled at how slowly it ran. I ended up with an average of about 2 FPS in both tests 1 and 2, which wasn't what I expected at all. Overall 3D score was 552.
I see through ORB that there area people with comparable CPUs with a NVidia 7600GT getting 20-24 FPS from those tests. What happened in the last 2 years? I expected to be a bit behind the leading edge, but not by a factor of 10.
Are newer games really that demanding? I recently ran the Company of Heroes demo, and it seemed to be fairly happy. Of course, I saw that the automatic settings were 1024x768, low quality textures, low quality reflections, no damage textures, etc. Is the difference really that great?
In other words, will I really see a significant difference in upgrading to a 7600GT or 7800GS?
- Gus
I did find that my laptop, a 2.4 GHz P4 with a nVidia 420 Go, wasn't really up to anything I play currently. Which was generally OK, since my wife was now using it for wireless web browsing in bed, in front of the TV, etc.
Recently she Pepsi syndromed the laptop. Literally, with diet Pepsi. Now it still runs, but it behaves quite oddly, refusing to accept keyboard input sometimes, and generating random keystrokes other times. I found I couldn't open the case despite unscrewing everything I could find. I can pay a local technician to take it apart and fix it, no doubt, but I was toying with the idea of using this as an excuse to replace it with something that could run current games.
To try and get a handle on how various laptops compared to my desktop system, I ran 3DMark06, and I was taken aback and appalled at how slowly it ran. I ended up with an average of about 2 FPS in both tests 1 and 2, which wasn't what I expected at all. Overall 3D score was 552.
I see through ORB that there area people with comparable CPUs with a NVidia 7600GT getting 20-24 FPS from those tests. What happened in the last 2 years? I expected to be a bit behind the leading edge, but not by a factor of 10.
Are newer games really that demanding? I recently ran the Company of Heroes demo, and it seemed to be fairly happy. Of course, I saw that the automatic settings were 1024x768, low quality textures, low quality reflections, no damage textures, etc. Is the difference really that great?
In other words, will I really see a significant difference in upgrading to a 7600GT or 7800GS?
- Gus
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