I'm building a new system. Here is what I was hopping I could get by with in order to support six sessions with absolute bare minimum settings.
Athlon 64 X2 3800+ (2.0Ghz)
GeForce 7600 256MB
3GB RAM
What do you guys think?
Six sessions possible?
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In order of importance, 6 boxing on a single pc requires:
CPU speed limits your FPS which limits how fast your toon can react to your commands, 2ghz may work but it is the bottom of the barrel
256mb of video ram is 42mb per session and that's a bit low. Once you pass the 256mb on the video card, the computer starts swapping over to system ram and then things really start to go down hill.
Can those things do it? Probably, but you won't be happy with the performance.
- memory
cpu speed
video ram
CPU speed limits your FPS which limits how fast your toon can react to your commands, 2ghz may work but it is the bottom of the barrel
256mb of video ram is 42mb per session and that's a bit low. Once you pass the 256mb on the video card, the computer starts swapping over to system ram and then things really start to go down hill.
Can those things do it? Probably, but you won't be happy with the performance.
I responded to him in email already, but I'll respond for the sake of the thread. I'm going to say it will be fairly safe with minimal graphics settings.
X2 3800+ will work great as long as EQPlayNice (Pro for the good stuff, or the MacroQuest 2 equivalent) is utilized. That's only 3 sessions per core, and 3 sessions will run quite well on a single 2GHz processor, with room to spare.
The SAFEST bet would be to have a 512MB card, but the given specs should be ok. All you have to do is launch the 6 sessions at the same time, and get them all to the character selection. This way, each session is guaranteed the necessary VRAM. You can also save some texture RAM by using 16-bit windows color depth instead of 32-bit. The difference is negligible for EQ1, and EQ1 doesn't require you to use 32-bit like most of the newer games do anyway.
X2 3800+ will work great as long as EQPlayNice (Pro for the good stuff, or the MacroQuest 2 equivalent) is utilized. That's only 3 sessions per core, and 3 sessions will run quite well on a single 2GHz processor, with room to spare.
The SAFEST bet would be to have a 512MB card, but the given specs should be ok. All you have to do is launch the 6 sessions at the same time, and get them all to the character selection. This way, each session is guaranteed the necessary VRAM. You can also save some texture RAM by using 16-bit windows color depth instead of 32-bit. The difference is negligible for EQ1, and EQ1 doesn't require you to use 32-bit like most of the newer games do anyway.
Well, it's not so much "newer vs older" because some of the technically newer cards perform the same as some of the older cards. The cheap versions of the newer cards for example give up some of the things that make the new generation good. I found this comparison chart that might help:
http://www.guru3d.com/article/Videocards/326/2/
According to the chart, all of the listed 6800 cards have a 256-bit bus, but the 7600 has a 128-bit bus (this is essentially bandwidth, and twice as much bandwidth is always good). In fact, from the listings, the 7600 is probably going to be comparable to an overclocked 6800, and wont have all (but will have some) of the fancy new features of the 7xxx series.
I would get the 6800 over a 7600 any day.
http://www.guru3d.com/article/Videocards/326/2/
According to the chart, all of the listed 6800 cards have a 256-bit bus, but the 7600 has a 128-bit bus (this is essentially bandwidth, and twice as much bandwidth is always good). In fact, from the listings, the 7600 is probably going to be comparable to an overclocked 6800, and wont have all (but will have some) of the fancy new features of the 7xxx series.
I would get the 6800 over a 7600 any day.