is my cpu fast enough?

paesano · Post by **paesano** » Sun May 15, 2005 4:24 pm

hey, i was shopping for a graphics card and a website told me that to play 3d games like half life 2, doom 3, vampire bloodlines... i'd need at least a 2.4 ghz processor, i've only got 2.0. is anyone here able to play vampire with less than 2.4?

Hoax · Post by **Hoax** » Sun May 15, 2005 5:19 pm

One of my friends plays on a 1.8, but he has a rather beefy video card. I myself play with 256MB of RAM, not the reccomended 384. Just goes to show the developers aren't always right. (On a side note, neither of us have terribly great performance, but we still both love the game.)

Mavrik · Post by **Mavrik** » Sun May 15, 2005 5:23 pm

Other then changing out my ram from 256MB to 512MB, this computer of mine which handles the game pretty decent was bought from Wal-Mart back in 2004 hehe... so yeah, what ever is on it seems to work.

Jhez · Post by **Jhez** » Mon May 16, 2005 1:16 am

Well...

I play it on a 1.7 Centrino with Radeon9700 graphics card and 512 Mbyte Ram. The performance is dismal. I have stuttering sound and pictures (which is _very_ annoying when you are feeding and want to stop before they die) and a heck of a long loadperiod.

The reason I don't upgrade my graphics and ram? Well, as it is a portable, it was probably not intended for first person shooters...

;-)
Jhez

dj_venom · Post by **dj_venom** » Mon May 16, 2005 1:23 am

It depends what kind of processor you have. For instance, AMD Athlon are regarded as the best for gaming, so they could beat other higher gigahertz. Meanwhile, there is the AMD Semperon, which is absolutely terrible compared to what the gigahertz is. So if you say what the processor is, we might be able to give a better answer.

Also, check out the store's warranty, talk to them beforehand. Try to set up a deal allowing you a full refund if you return it, that way you can buy, test, and hopefully not need to, return.

Santoza · Post by **Santoza** » Mon May 16, 2005 2:20 am

I have an AMD Athlon XP 3200+ 2.19 (cost: probably under 100 now)ghz and the game runs great...entirely smooth, 3-5 second average level loads. Even though it is only 2.19 ghz, with AMD, the 3200 type numbers they apply to their processors can be more or less equated with the Intel equivalent. So maybe it is more like 3.2 ghz.

I also have 1 GB ddr ram (512 mb x2) at a 400 mhz frequency (cost: ~100$). And more importantly a "ATI Radeon 9800 XT Pro" video card , which was the very top slightly ahead of Half-Life 2's release, and since VB:TM uses the same engine at less demand, the card is pretty perfect for it (cost: i got it for free, it used to be around 400 but it's amazing how outdated video cards become and how fast, but now that it's lost it's state-of-the-art luxury pricing I think it is probably where performance and price meet at their peak).

Celacena · Post by **Celacena** » Mon May 16, 2005 5:15 am

Size is not important

I'm using an AMD Athlon 2.x GHz, Radeon (5700?) graphics card at 256Mb and 1GB RAM - with that set-up VtMB works very well - I recommend upping RAM to over 512, but the video card probably makes the biggest difference to gameplay.

With using computers to play games, you really need to concentrate on the core specs of your machine and spend the money on the heart of the system rather than being induced by 'free' peripherals.

spend as much as you can on getting clock-speeds/RAM/graohics better than you think you need. my system is over 2 years old and still coping with the modest upgrades I have made.

yrthwyndandfyre · Post by **yrthwyndandfyre** » Mon May 16, 2005 6:20 pm

I'm vanilla 1.5GHz Intel, but with a 128 Mb Radeon and 1.25 Gb Memory. It's probably not so much pure CPU but overall hairy-chested muscularity of your computer. I'd love to play this on my workstation at work. It's easily twice as powerful as this one.

Looking at the minimum system requirements, I presume that if you have the minimum everywhere else, you need the 2.4 to make up the difference, but memory is a lot cheaper than CPU.

Celacena · Post by **Celacena** » Tue May 17, 2005 4:25 am

graphics card

I started the game with 128 graphics, but found it chugged too much. my 256 was under £80 ($150-ish) and improved smoothness by some margin. memory is relatively cheap, but you've got that in spades already.

there are some details you can afford to lose which also improve smoothness without affecting atmos.

load times are presumably about HD speed as much as processor once RAM is big enough. increasing RAM made most difference to that - cost me £50-ish to get another 512Mb. I haven't got enough slots to use all the old RAM I've taken out though.

Rowan11088 · Post by **Rowan11088** » Fri May 27, 2005 6:39 pm

Hey all, sorry to revive a dead thread, but I was asked to by a mod. Anyway, just wanted to know if V:TM is any faster/smoother now with patch 1.2 and the unofficial patches, and possibly with the ability to unpack the VPAK files (just heard about this) with those tool thingies. A friend of mine has the game and it didn't work on his comp, so I tried it before, and it was somewhat laggy, to the point where I eventually gave up on it. it wasn't as bad as most people complain about though, so if there's even a marginal increase in performance now as compared to unpatched, I'll borrow and install it again. I've got a 1.6 Ghz laptop, 512 MB Ram, and a Mobility Radeon 9000 Gfx card. not very robust at all I know, but it always seems to run things surprisingly well. So, any advice?

Silvanus · Post by **Silvanus** » Mon Jun 20, 2005 3:32 am

I am running VtM Bllodlines on a Celeron 1.1 (sock 370) with ATI Radeon 9250 - 128Mb with 512MB Ram. Apart from a small bit of stuttering in the beggining of each load - The game runs fine.

Lucita · Post by **Lucita** » Mon Jun 20, 2005 2:02 pm

Haven't played it for a while...so no idea about the recent unofficial patches and a speed increasing....though I am going to test it in a few weeks when I have off from university.

I am interested if the new dual core chips will give the game a better speed too....gotta wait for that test a bit more until I buy a new computer....

yrthwyndandfyre · Post by **yrthwyndandfyre** » Mon Jun 20, 2005 5:52 pm

Well, I'm in the "hell of barely playable", meaning that by shutting a lot of services off, I get reasonably good performance. I noticed no performance improvement whatsoever from patch 1.2 (I have yet to install 1.5), and unpacking the data files had no effect whatsoever except exposing me to lots of nice, juicy source code to grovel through (ergo I'm not complaining).

My thinking is that if there was a performance improvement to be had, I would certainly have seen it. No such animal as 'imperceptible' in my world. No luck so far, though.

phodin · Post by **phodin** » Tue Jul 05, 2005 9:46 pm

bad luck...

I have a Pentium 4 2.4Mhz, with 768 DDR 400 RAM and a ATI Radeon 9600 pro with 128 Mb (128 bits).

I already patched to 1.5 and have all the latest drivers.

My game always crash. I'm playing on the minimum configurations and it stills resets my computer from time to time.

The place I got more problems with is at the Grout's place (the malkavian), I can't get past the "thunder room", it always crashes.

Anyone had anything like this?

yrthwyndandfyre · Post by **yrthwyndandfyre** » Wed Jul 06, 2005 7:57 am

I would look at adjusting your video driver features if the problem is mainly in that specific room. Dancing lightning all over the place. I find that certain AGP features are anathema in certain games, for example if I turn on Glow in Invisible War, the game becomes all but unplayable. One of the changes that made the most difference in VTMB was to set all play options to default to highest performance, lowest detail. You might try that.

phodin · Post by **phodin** » Wed Jul 06, 2005 11:38 am

Just tried that. All the configurations of my video card are on the highest performance and I configured the game at the "worst" display possible.

It still crashes after one hour.

Tenser · Post by **Tenser** » Mon Jul 11, 2005 2:14 am

Dunno whats so special about 2.4 GHz there. AFAIK the game needs 2.6 GHz for full graphics quality on middle resolution, and to play it without any swapping you need 1 GB RAM.

But I have a 3 year old computer (1.8 GHz, 512 MB, Geforce4) and it runs really acceptable. I'm however going to get 1 GB of RAM now, because I want faster area loading.

@phodin: You very likely have a hardware problem. Don't other games crash as well ?

El Guapo · Post by **El Guapo** » Sun Jul 17, 2005 7:07 am

the problem its on the game

i have a pentium 4 2.0 GHz, 768 RAM and a GeForce 6800 GT 256 on the Win XP

and the performance SUCKS!! on the zumbis part is almost impossible to play. i have tried everything , i change my swap file to 4000 mb and still sucks
im thinking that the problem its on the game.

Tenser · Post by **Tenser** » Mon Jul 18, 2005 5:07 am

You need 4GB *FIXED* Swapfile size ?

And you better do the following:

- Set the current swapfile size to 0 on the current drive
- Create a swapfile on another drive
- Reboot
- Defrag current drive
- Create swapfile on current drive, with min size = max size
- Set the swapfile size to 0 on the other drive
- Reboot

Then it should work fine.

This isn't specific for Bloodlines, its required for ANY game. Get a nice, unfragmented swapfile of fixed size and performance goes up substantly.

Raa · Post by **Raa** » Wed Jul 20, 2005 1:16 am

I have an Athlon ("Barton") at about 2.2GHz and controls response often becomes quite sluggish in battle. I blame that to my anemic GeForce4 MX 64MB adapter though - using older GPUs tend to put main CPU to work too much. With a beefier card I guess it should do more then enough.

384/512MB they say... I have 512 and it starts stuttering even when walking a large hub like Downtown. Since I have separate drives and leds, I can clearly see it is swapping too often. And if I have just one other program active, like a browser window, loading times at least triple! 512 probably could be just barely enough, if there were no other programs installed and most services should be turned off. I guess this game is really playable only with a gig of RAM.