swaaye wrote:

Actually that was the GeForce 3 / Radeon 8500 year. GeForce 256 was 1999.

Stuff did come out insanely rapidly back then. We went from DirectX 6 to 9 in like 3 years I think.

Indeed, I skipped GF1, GF3, GF5

I had Radeon, Radeon 8500, Radeon 9700. 😀 I didn't want to risk getting a burry GeForce. I was also caught up on ATI being cheap (Radeon LE, 8500 LE) and having extra-but-useless features.

ux-3 wrote:

For instance, AVP2 came out in 2001. This was the age right after Geforce, Pentium 4 and the gamechanging Athlon. But even when it was new, it ran beautifully on any Pentium 3 and a geforce 1 was plenty for decent framerates.

The weird thing about that era is that some games were still made for the Voodoo2 in mind for all their technical direction. Operation Flashpoint is a big example of this. You can even almost run AVP2 on a PCX-2.

It wasn't until NOLF2 in mid-2002 that the generation officially made the jump to at least use the Geforce256's stuff.

Besides, the average p4 system then was a p4 1.4ghz with gf2mx/gf4mx since that was more than sufficient for teh counter-strieks. god i'm starting to feel a little nostalgic about the WON days 🙄

2002 was a watershed year. System requirements suddenly just jumped up to double the previous year. Game developers of the time set minimum and recommended specs way to low in my opinion, listing a P3 (and even P2 in some cases) as acceptable for most games, but in practice following such requirements would result in the game looking and running like ass.

Some examples that come to mind off-hand would be the previously mentioned NOLF2, Dungeon Siege, NWN, Morrowind, GTA III and NFS: HP2. Even WCIII requires a GF4 Ti/ Radeon 8500 if you want to play at 1024x768 with all the bells and whistles. And of course, such cards require a reasonably fast P4/ Athlon processor.

The next major jump was 2004, with the release of titles such as HL2, Far Cry, TLotR: TBfME, Vampires Bloodlines, etc. Those started making even a very fast c. 2002 system seem slow.

sgt76 wrote:

Even WCIII requires a GF4 Ti/ Radeon 8500 if you want to play at 1024x768 with all the bells and whistles.

I never understood why WC3 ran so slow - it looks like a 1999 game with strong similarity to Dungeon Keeper 2 and DarkStone at maximum detail settings but runs at 10% of their performance...

Funny thing about Morrowind is that, assuming you aren't too GPU limited, Oblivion runs about the same. 😁 Morrowind is extremely CPU dependent (read: unbelievably inefficient!)

Well for the parts you have the 2.8C would be better than that Athlon 2100+. The Pentium 4's with usually only had AGP with only a few mobo's supporting PCI-E. Problem with AGP now is the last cards for the slot are too expensive IMO.

Unfortunately it is not a HyperThreading cpu. So as some of the others are saying, you'd be atleast better served with a Core Duo dual core chip or AM2+/AM3 Rig. These will all thrust you into being able to use a PCI-E motherboard and could pick up a good midrange card.

I got lucky and when P4 was still popular I picked up a Albatron PX915P4C Pro that suported PCI-E. I use a P4 3.2 w/HT on it. Currently also equipped with a 7800GT which is still better than anything released for AGP and I have room to grow within bounds of CPU bottleneck. I'm thinking of resurrecting my rig for XP with 2x STB Blackmagic Voodoo2's I just bought and seeing how much fun can be had with the system.

Well, XP is now on a boot camp partition on my iMac. I decided to install a bunch of the windows games I have to see what runs on XP ok and what doesn't. Basically, if it'll run fine under XP, I'll play it there instead. A few of the games I REALLY wanted to work surprisingly work just fine. Journeyman 3, Blade Runner, Outlaws...all installed without an issue. Outlaws has some strange issues with 3d acceleration turned on, but I can get around that.

I started to install the games that *wouldn't* run under XP or were just too damn old on my Win98 rig but ran into some problems there, but I'll save that for another thread.

So far XP on the imac is working fine for me. I'll save the project to build an XP specific box for later if I need it.