Requirements

[Nachos]

Ok I'm using a computer which I paid for it myself and I'm quiet obsessive about it. I'm always defarg, scanning and checking the registry.
Today I added 1gb RAM( it was too updated; 256 RAM) and I can't play a game which I double the requirements. I can play it, but after a while it crashes.

Game requirements:

                  Min                            Máx
CPU                  600 MHz                  1.5 GHz
RAM                 128 MB                  512 MB
Graphics card: ATI Radeon 7000         NVidia Geforce3
                         NVidia RIVA TNT2 ATI Radeon 8500

Internet connection: 56 kb/s                    --


My computer:

CPU               1,6 GHz
RAM                1,25 GB
Graphics card:   GeForce4 MX 440 ( old, I know)   

Internet connection: 2,5 mb/s


WHY THE FUCK IS THIS HAPPENING? (the game crashing after some minutes of playing)

IT SHOULDN'T HAPPEN




                           

 

[Venetia]

Weren't you having a problem a while back with your video card? If the game crashes while playing a 3D game, and only then, it's very likely routed to your old video card.

Vid cards aren't designed to last much longer than 3-4 years. Sometimes they work for way less time (if you tax it a lot or it's malfunctioning), and sometimes they last longer (when you don't use it much, or you got lucky). But they all die eventually, like a beloved small pet

You more than meet the min. requirements, so it's highly likely that it's a video card hardware failure. There may be other things to try out first, but honestly you can get a MUCH better vid card for pretty cheap nowadays. Anything new'd probably be bottlenecked with your CPU, though.

 

[Nachos]

ok yeah. but i'd rather buy a new computer befour buying a new vid card.

 

[Venetia]

try this:
http://freestone-group.com/video-card-s ... y-test.htm

this will stress out your video card, and it should tell you pretty quickly what it's outputting and whether or not one or more components is failing.

 

[Nachos]

this will take long..

ok an earth is rotating and a number is appearing on the top-right corner..

ok the number kept going up and nothing was showing on the upper thing so i closed it 'cos i needed to use the computer.

does that solves anything?

 

[Tohsaka]

What game are you trying to run? I know a lot of games do that to me, especially the older ones.

 

[Nachos]

http://www.metin2.es/

http://metin-2.com/

it also happened to me with AoE: The Titans expansion

 

[___]

A few possible problems:
One, your gimpy pc (sorry, but it's true :D) does not support the amount or frequency of ram you installed. Check your motherboard specs if you can find them, but if that thing was an older OEM Compaq or HP for instance it may only support 256 or 512 mb per slot, I used to see that quite a bit with OEMs that matched your specs. One quick way to test this is to right click my computer and go to properties. If it's significantly underreporting the amount of ram you have, you know this is your problem. The only fix is to buy ram of a proper size, speed and spec to match your board.

A second possibility: your new ram is faulty. If you got cheap ram, that's especially likely to be true. The best way to test this is to use a memory diagnostic program. Memtest86+ is a great one, grab the ISO, burn it to a disc, boot from cd and let it run. If you don't have a burner on that old box, you probably have a floppy drive and you should be able to run memtest from that as well. Run a full extended test, this will take a little while, and see if it reports any faults. If it does, your ram is bad (or you're dealing with the previous problem, so check for both issues). In either case you'll need to return/exhange it.

If neither of those things turn out to be a problem it could really be anything, but obviously your new ram chip should be your first suspect since that's the most recent change you made to the system, so it's good practice to start there.

 

[Nachos]

The My computer properties are showing 1,25 GB RAM, the exact amount I have.
I don't know, maybe it's the video card

 

[___]

If a video card stress test isn't causing any problems, it's unlikely that it's the video card. Though the GF4 MX series was not exactly known for its power and stability.

 

[Ellie]

It's weird, I have ALWAYS had trouble like that with games, no matter what my PC spec. It's as if the minimum spec that they tell you isn't right.

The only sort of normal commercial games that have worked right for me are Guild Wars and... that's it, pretty much.

And that's on a:

Pentium 4 3GHz "HT"
2 GB Ram
256mb built-in graphics card

Is there some special reason why games don't generally work on certain PC's? (Other than the graphics card - though in Nachos case this doesn't seem to be the problem if a stress test works, and in my case a 256mb card, even if built in, I'd have thought would be enough?)

 

[Nachos]

hey do you know what's the gamma?

Spoiler

http://img255.imageshack.us/img255/2485/dibujomw3.jpg[/img]

 

[candle]

Gamma is generaly how far off in the distance you want to see in a 3D game. i.e., how far off it draws objects.  The higher the gamma, the farther you see, but the more taxing on you graphics card because it needs to draw more objects.

 

[Nachos]

that's what i wanted to hear!

 

[Shizu]

http://www.colormatters.com/comput_gamma.html

How do you define gamma?
5. Gamma can also be described as the measurement of contrast that affects the midtones of an image.

I don't remember any game that replaces Gamma levels for Rendering Distance, or the devs must have had no clue what it meant. @_@

 

[___]

It's weird, I have ALWAYS had trouble like that with games, no matter what my PC spec. It's as if the minimum spec that they tell you isn't right.

The only sort of normal commercial games that have worked right for me are Guild Wars and... that's it, pretty much.

And that's on a:

Pentium 4 3GHz "HT"
2 GB Ram
256mb built-in graphics card

Is there some special reason why games don't generally work on certain PC's? (Other than the graphics card - though in Nachos case this doesn't seem to be the problem if a stress test works, and in my case a 256mb card, even if built in, I'd have thought would be enough?)

Wyatt if you have an integrated video card, chances are that 256mb is mostly shared memory which means dick compared to real video memory. Basically, that shared memory is the same as the AGP aperture on older motherboards, it's a cache for your video card to hold extra data when it goes above its hardware capacity but it's not anywhere near fast enough to be used in real time. It helps with games that cache a large number of very detailed textures but don't necessarily render them all, primarily. It can help you bootstrap games that would otherwise not even try to run on your system, but the performance will be terrible and a game that's poorly memory-managed will crash waiting to access info in that cache. It may also help with fill rates, I can't remember if the output buffer is stored there or not. The difference between shared memory and aperture is mainly that the shared memory is usually a fixed amount, so you get double-fucked in that you can't increase it in places where it'd help you increase performance, or decrease it if you don't game a lot and you don't want part of your RAM getting wasted every time an app with 3d features is loaded.

Short story: 256mb integrated cards mean nothing. If that 256 is all shared, your video card might as well not have 3d acceleration. It's a cheap trick, IMO, to get people thinking they're buying something they aren't. Check the specs on your hardware and see how much of that memory is dedicated.

Gamma is generaly how far off in the distance you want to see in a 3D game. i.e., how far off it draws objects.  The higher the gamma, the farther you see, but the more taxing on you graphics card because it needs to draw more objects.

Sorry, DF, but noooo. Like Shizu said, it's another word for midtone contrast essentially. You use gamma to correct for screen glare and other external lighting situations - a higher gamma can help improve visibility when you're dealing with a lot of glare, in exchange for decreasing color range which usually results in lighter shadows and more homogeneous bright areas.