Friend wants to know... Help please

[dragonz]

My friend is running this vid card on his Dell laptop:

NVIDIA GEForce2 Go with Integrated RAMDAC and 16.0 MB of memory

He is wondering if that would be good enough to play a new upcomming MMORPG called World of Warcraft (probably similar to Everquest, Asheron's Call, and those types of games), or if he will be forced to upgrade. With only 16 MB of memory I have my doubts... If any of you know what it takes to play one of those MMORPGS and knows a little about vid cards please help me out!

[Jaeden]

I'm a regular poster on the Official World of Warcraft Forums. For upcoming MMORPGs, there is absolutely no way he will be able to play any of them, and World of Warcraft will be on the least requirement MMORPGs that will come out, and it's guessed that the requirement for WoW will be 32 MB.

In order to put all details on "High" and Resolution over 1600 x 1200 with abosulutely no lag on EverQuest 2 is a 3GHz processor and 256 MB Ram Video Card. I can find an article about it.

[dragonz]

Thanks a bunch

It's too bad that he won't be able to play though someone else brought up the question on the boards, and that reminded him that he had the exact same vid card in his laptop as the guy on the forums, and no money for upgrades.

Come to think of it, my desktop might not even play it.

[no1_vern]

Sorry didnt see Jaedens' answer before I posted. If your friend doenst need all the "eye candy" just a good playable system, he may get by. It depends on what he wants.

Blizzard hasnt published a 'minimum required system" spec yet. But they claim
"Yes, the game will require a 3D graphics card. Again, we will support a wide range of 3D cards. "
FRom http://blizzard.com/wow/faq/faq_tech.shtml

I suggest you tell him to wait until the game comes out to try it himself before junking his system. It might work acceptably it might not.

[Jaeden]

He still has plenty of time to upgrade. WoW is going to be released earliest next July. Beta hasn't started, and blizzard has stated the beta will last 8 months.

[I am the 0mega]

Originally posted by Jaeden
I'm a regular poster on the Official World of Warcraft Forums. For upcoming MMORPGs, there is absolutely no way he will be able to play any of them, and World of Warcraft will be on the least requirement MMORPGs that will come out, and it's guessed that the requirement for WoW will be 32 MB.

In order to put all details on "High" and Resolution over 1600 x 1200 with abosulutely no lag on EverQuest 2 is a 3GHz processor and 256 MB Ram Video Card. I can find an article about it.

That sounds like a serious load of bull. Even at 1600x1200. Although obviously CPU speed is unnaffected by resolution, video cards are.

As of right now, in anything you can play, even UT2K3@1600x1200x32 with everything cranked, and 16x Aniso and 8x FSAA, a 256MB frame buffer has at most a 2-3% performance increase over a 128MB DDR version of the same card.

Oh. And another thing. There are plenty of cards- such as the GeForceFX 5200 Ultra 256MB DDR- which would choke to death on a game like EQ2, the 256MB frame buffer helping not at all to sustain the card being throttled due to a weak architecture, low clock, and 4 pipes. And weak shading performance. And limited memory bandwidth. And belonging to a family which has too few registers to play DX9 games acceptably.

3GHz? I'll believe it when i see it. (Not when i see the official specs, when i see the game- any moron can require that speed for acceptable gameplay; it takes a minute or two of optimization to drop the requirement back down to 2/3 that...

[rawk]

whats the best £100 range graphics card for gaming?