half-life 2, Doom3 and Battlefield 2

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punjman

New member
How is it that I can run Half-Life 2 with all sorts of bells and whistles on and have minimal loss of frame-rate, same thing with CS:Source, but when I play BF2 the 'reccomended' settings are everything set to 'low'?

My system spex aren't anything to brag about but here they are:

2.8gHz P4 CPU
Soyo Dragon2 mobo(don't remember the chipset but it's 800mHz FSB)
Turtle Beach Santa Cruz Soundcard
1024mb of PC2700 DDR Ram
GeForce 4 FX 5600 (256mb DDR) video
7200RPM 8mb buffer 120gig Serial ATA hdd

I don't get it. Halflife and Doom 3 run cherry on my system, but BF2 chokes online even on low settings.
 
> I don't get it. Halflife and Doom 3 run cherry on my system,
> but BF2 chokes online even on low settings.
>

Your video card sucks. It's not even officially supported by BF2:

<blockquote><font class="small">In reply to:</font><hr>


- Video Cards
Battlefield 2 only supports the following video cards:
Radeon X700 (PCIe)
Radeon X600 (PCIe)
GeForce 6600 (PCIe)
GeForce PCX 5900 (PCIe)
GeForce 5800 Series (AGP)
ATI Radeon X800 XT Platinum Edition
ATI Radeon X800 PRO
ATI Radeon 9800 Series
ATI Radeon 9600 Series
ATI Radeon 9550 (RV350LX)
ATI Radeon 9500 / 9700 Series
ATI Radeon 8500 Series
ATI Radeon X300 Series
NVidia GeForce 6800 Ultra
NVidia GeForce 6800 GT
NVidia GeForce 6800
NVidia GeForce FX 5950 Series
NVidia GeForce FX 5900 Series
NVidia GeForce FX 5700 Series


<hr></blockquote>
 
> Your video card sucks. It's not even officially supported
> by BF2:

I beg to differ. As I said, I can run 3 other graphically intensive games perfectly, and they have more stuff going on at the same time. There's no reason I shouldn't be able to play this. Oh well. At least I didn't buy it.

The funny thing is, BF1942 did this same thing when it was released. It ran like shit on all kinds of systems that were at or above is reccomended requirements.
 
> I beg to differ. As I said, I can run 3 other graphically
> intensive games perfectly, and they have more stuff going on
> at the same time. There's no reason I shouldn't be able to
> play this. Oh well. At least I didn't buy it.
>

It's below the recommended specs. Simple as that. Just because you can play HL2 and D3 well doesn't mean you can play BF2 well. It says right in the readme what's supported. I have an FX 5900XT and I can play the demo just fine at Medium. Considering that Radeon 9800s now go for about $100, there's no reason not to upgrade. Considering that the FX 5600 is just a smidge above the 5200, I'm not surprised it doesn't run well. BF2 is using a next-generation engine. It's not as effecient as the Source engine, but how can you expect games to advance if old hardware doesn't get left in the dust?
 
> How is it that I can run Half-Life 2 with all sorts of bells
> and whistles on and have minimal loss of frame-rate, same
> thing with CS:Source, but when I play BF2 the 'reccomended'
> settings are everything set to 'low'?

This is the very reason I've given up on PC gaming as a whole. I'm not willing to upgrade my hardware every other month because the developers feel the need to have a few hundred more polygons on the screen at once.

Am I the only one who still thinks the original Half-Life looks impressive?

How about the original Doom?
 
> This is the very reason I've given up on PC gaming as a
> whole. I'm not willing to upgrade my hardware every other
> month because the developers feel the need to have a few
> hundred more polygons on the screen at once.
>

Yeah, it's annoying when they force requirements higher than they need to be. There's no technical reason that any new game can't be made widely scaleable, in terms of texture res and character/item poly count. It's relatively trivial to implement. Textures can be resized in advance or at load time, and it isn't hard to whip up some low-poly versions of character and item models. I guess it's a combination of the fact that the developers don't want lots of less-than-impressive screenshots appearing in gaming magazines and on the net, which could make the game look less appealing to potential game buyers, and they figure most PC gamers are going to have the latest and greatest hardware anyway, so making it more scaleable isn't worth the slight effort.
 
<blockquote><font class="small">In reply to:</font><hr>

Yeah, it's annoying when they force requirements higher than they need to be. There's no technical reason that any new game can't be made widely scaleable, in terms of texture res and character/item poly count. It's relatively trivial to implement. Textures can be resized in advance or at load time, and it isn't hard to whip up some low-poly versions of character and item models. I guess it's a combination of the fact that the developers don't want lots of less-than-impressive screenshots appearing in gaming magazines and on the net, which could make the game look less appealing to potential game buyers, and they figure most PC gamers are going to have the latest and greatest hardware anyway, so making it more scaleable isn't worth the slight effort.

<hr></blockquote>

A good example of bad scaleability is SimCity 4, for the longest time I though I was ripped off, it wasn't that much better than 3000, the graphics weren't that impressive, and the "true 3D" was useless since it was still exactly the same in terms of camera angles and such. It was only recently that I realized that the default low settings and turning everything all the way up make no difference in performance what-so-ever, infact it seems to lag a lot less with the settings cranked up. Now at least I can see the improvements (Though I still think the game could've been just as good built on the same technology as 3000)
 
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