Pirates!

[B00tDisk]

If I may, Wayne, I've been running HL2 in 1024x768 with the bells and whistles all turned on with a GF5200 for a couple of weeks now, and I must say it's performance has amazed me - and this was the card I wanted to yank out and stomp on after the slideshow of Doom3 (even at 640x480).  

I have Pirates!* and it plays very well and looks great at 1024x768.

*Incidentally the original poster has it wrong - Pirates! wasn't an Amiga game first.  IIRC it was available for all the 8-bit platforms long before the Amiga.  I played it on an Apple-II and C64 for ages.  Certainly it got better on the Amiga, but Pirates! Gold for the PC was pretty much head and shoulders above the Amiga version.

[B00tDisk]

Wayne wrote:
Hey B00t,

Haven't tried HL2.  (isn't it just a doom clone?)  

Only if you equate first-person perspective with Doom.

Half Life (all iterations of it) are much, much more.  There's a huge sci-fi story going on and you're part of it.  It's phenomenal.

Tried the Doom3 demo on the 5200 and it had be thinking "people would actually pay for this game???"  Frame rates, even at 640x480 were roughly 10 to 12 fps.  

Yep.  I think they really screwed up on D3.  Not in having the tech in the engine but in trying to put all of it on the screen at the same time.  Ultimately, flagship games that show off new tech engines are there not only to sell lots of copies of the game but to lure in developers who might want to spend a cool five figures on the engine itself to develop their own game.  The engine developers (Valve, iD, etc.) have to show their colors really strongly to get outside houses to drop the cash required to license the tech.  This I understand but damn if D3 wasn't just trying too hard...:-/

Hopefully it'll run a smidge better on my 5950 I've got in the mail...

Playing Pirates! was the reason that a new video card is on my Christmas wish list.  Even moreso after seeing the game played on an identical machine with the X800 video card.  I just don't have half a grand to drop on a video card to play Pirates!

My plan now is to wait for Christmas and hope for a price drop on the 6600 GT/AGP.

Wayne

I'd go ahead and get it now (Pirates! that is).  It looks pretty spiffy on my system with it's anemic little 5200 card, no reason it won't look good on yours.

[B00tDisk]

Wayne wrote:
Well, having gotten a NVidia 6600GT (AGP version) for Christmas to replace my FX5200 card, the difference is amazing.  Still can't play the Doom3 demo worth a damned, but Pirates is easily 2x faster than it was before, as long as you didn't spin the "details" settings to super-high.

When it's one-on-one, ship-versus-ship, it's about perfect but enter another ship (attacking an escorted ship for example) and everything slows down quite a bit.

NVidia 6600GT gets a thumbs up in my book, at $200.

Wayne

Wait, when you say "Doom3 demo" do you mean the alpha that was leaked ages ago?  Or is there a commercial demo?   Because if it's the alpha, forget about it.  Totally unoptimized code...it won't run well on much of anything other than the systems they displayed it on at E3 that year.

I got a 5900 for Christmas from my boss and it (Doom3) flies on it.