Plan to play Far Cry 2 on PC? Better start upgrading.

[diskoboy]

Check out the recommended specs for Far Cry 2. (found at Joystiq)

Recommended

CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo Family, AMD64 X2 5200+, AMD Phenom or better
Memory: 2GB
Video card: NVIDIA 8600 GTS or better, ATI X1900 or better
512 MB of graphics memory

Supported video cards:
NVIDIA 6800, NVIDIA 7000 series, 8000 series, 9000 series, 200 series. 8800M and 8700M supported for laptops.
ATI X1650 – 1950 series, HD2000 series, HD3000 series, HD4000 series.

That almost hurts to look at.

[OldSchoolGamer]

CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo E6750
Memory: 2GB
Video card: NVIDIA 8800GT w/512 MB of graphics memory

That is my spec so.....BRING IT ON!!!!! :evil:

[Sudo]

I'll be playing this on either 360 or PS3 if I bother with it at all, since there's no way my computer could run it.

[roushimsx]

I built my machine for fairly cheap back in late 2006, upgraded my videocard on the cheap earlier this year, and it meets/exceeds those recommended specs. Nice to see that they're not pulling an Origin and specing it out for a machine that doesn't yet exist.

Seriously, a decent dual or quad core Intel chip is dirt cheap, 8800GTs have plummeted in price, and RAM is cheap.

Anyway, upgrading months before a game comes out is downright stupid. Why not wait until right before release to minimize the cost of the highest quality components?

People love to hold onto their ghetto machines too much :( Upgrade, damnit! Don't say that it does everything that you want it to do if it doesn't handle the games you want to play! If you can't play STALKER or Half Life 2: Episode Two at acceptable framerates, you're doing yourself a damned disservice. Quality PC components are cheap! If you have to overhaul the whole PC/build a new one from scratch, turn the old one into an HTPC or home media server. Donate it! Sell it off on the board at work to someone who could get better use out of it.

[walrusmonger]

Glad I went with a laptop with an 8700m GT (512mb) graphics card.

[Sudo]

I built my machine for fairly cheap back in late 2006, upgraded my videocard on the cheap earlier this year, and it meets/exceeds those recommended specs. Nice to see that they're not pulling an Origin and specing it out for a machine that doesn't yet exist.

Seriously, a decent dual or quad core Intel chip is dirt cheap, 8800GTs have plummeted in price, and RAM is cheap.

Anyway, upgrading months before a game comes out is downright stupid. Why not wait until right before release to minimize the cost of the highest quality components?

People love to hold onto their ghetto machines too much :( Upgrade, damnit! Don't say that it does everything that you want it to do if it doesn't handle the games you want to play! If you can't play STALKER or Half Life 2: Episode Two at acceptable framerates, you're doing yourself a damned disservice. Quality PC components are cheap! If you have to overhaul the whole PC/build a new one from scratch, turn the old one into an HTPC or home media server. Donate it! Sell it off on the board at work to someone who could get better use out of it.

My PC was top of the line when I bought it in 2004 (P4 3.2GHz, 1GB RAM, Radeon X800 Pro, SB Audigy 2 ZS). I was big into PC gaming at the time, so it made sense to go all out. These days I don't really bother with PC games much, I'm much more into consoles. The only PC-exclusive game I'm going to be playing this year is Spore most likely.

[roushimsx]

My PC was top of the line when I bought it in 2004 (P4 3.2GHz, 1GB RAM, Radeon X800 Pro, SB Audigy 2 ZS). I was big into PC gaming at the time, so it made sense to go all out. These days I don't really bother with PC games much, I'm much more into consoles. The only PC-exclusive game I'm going to be playing this year is Spore most likely.

It never really makes sense to go all out when you buy or upgrade a PC. Components drop in price too quickly to make it sensible to ever buy top of the line gear; you're better off setting a hard limit on a fresh PC buy of ~$1k and then just doing small upgrades over time. Setting a hard limit at $200 on a new videocard (with $150 being a more reasonable target) and waiting on CPU price/performance to fall to what I consider a reasonable price and speed (if I'm not going to be seeing at least a double in performance then it's just not worth upgrading at all for me!) has yes to steer me wrong.

Really, I've invested more money in hard drives than anything else as time went on. I'm a fucking data packrat and hate deleting stuff or burning it off to DVDs. I mean, you never really know when you're going to want to access something. For the longest time, I'd ripped my entire PS1 collection to my PC, renamed them all with PS1 Renamer, and kept them in a nice little subfolder of cd images in case I ever wanted to play them. It took a few years before I broke down and burned them all off. :(

...I still haven't broken down and burned off a bunch of the PC games I've ripped, but then again, I'm not done ripping yet. Woo! Shame there's not something like PS1 Renamer for PC games. I'd love to be able to rip to a.bin/cue, b.bin/cue, c.bin/cue and have the program go through and rename 'em all to Star Trek 25th Anniversary CD Rom Edition [U].bin/cue, Star Trek Judgment Rites [u] [Disc 1 of 2].bin/cue, etc. Man, would that rock something fierce.

Shit, you know what I need to do? I need to rip Under a Killing Moon and Pandora Directive and play through those suckers again. Good fucking god did those rock. God damn it, it's all Far Cry 2's fault.

Fuck! I want to replay Far Cry! Damn it! I hate videogames.

[Kitsune Sniper]

You forgot to mention the rumored 12 GB install requirement.

Haven't these people heard of PNG compression? Or Targa? Jesus!

[The 1 2 P]

My laptop would freeze on the menu screen for this. So I'll be getting the 360 version.

[roushimsx]

You forgot to mention the rumored 12 GB install requirement.

Haven't these people heard of PNG compression? Or Targa? Jesus!

Good! Use that hard drive space!

At least it's not as bat shit crazy as a full X-Plane (http://www.x-plane.com/sysreq.html) install. That shit is fucking bananas.

and the airports & cities still look like poo :'(

[BHvrd]

You forgot to mention the rumored 12 GB install requirement.

Haven't these people heard of PNG compression? Or Targa? Jesus!

Age of Conan is a 25 GB install.

Btw roushimsx I hear ya! I'm usually in the same boat about pc's ....going insane, never enough space...*stresses*><

[Tommy]

I built my machine for fairly cheap back in late 2006, upgraded my videocard on the cheap earlier this year, and it meets/exceeds those recommended specs. Nice to see that they're not pulling an Origin and specing it out for a machine that doesn't yet exist.

Seriously, a decent dual or quad core Intel chip is dirt cheap, 8800GTs have plummeted in price, and RAM is cheap.

Anyway, upgrading months before a game comes out is downright stupid. Why not wait until right before release to minimize the cost of the highest quality components?

People love to hold onto their ghetto machines too much :( Upgrade, damnit! Don't say that it does everything that you want it to do if it doesn't handle the games you want to play! If you can't play STALKER or Half Life 2: Episode Two at acceptable framerates, you're doing yourself a damned disservice. Quality PC components are cheap! If you have to overhaul the whole PC/build a new one from scratch, turn the old one into an HTPC or home media server. Donate it! Sell it off on the board at work to someone who could get better use out of it.

Seems like your very passionate about PC specs, which I can respect but your coming off like some type of computer weirdo demanding that people get rid of there machines and move on with technology. Please realize that there is more to life than upgrading a machine everytime a new game comes out.

Anywho, I will just have to play it on my PS3. Some peoples kids. :?

[Sudo]

It never really makes sense to go all out when you buy or upgrade a PC. Components drop in price too quickly to make it sensible to ever buy top of the line gear; you're better off setting a hard limit on a fresh PC buy of ~$1k and then just doing small upgrades over time. Setting a hard limit at $200 on a new videocard (with $150 being a more reasonable target) and waiting on CPU price/performance to fall to what I consider a reasonable price and speed (if I'm not going to be seeing at least a double in performance then it's just not worth upgrading at all for me!) has yes to steer me wrong.

Really, I've invested more money in hard drives than anything else as time went on. I'm a fucking data packrat and hate deleting stuff or burning it off to DVDs. I mean, you never really know when you're going to want to access something. For the longest time, I'd ripped my entire PS1 collection to my PC, renamed them all with PS1 Renamer, and kept them in a nice little subfolder of cd images in case I ever wanted to play them. It took a few years before I broke down and burned them all off. :(

...I still haven't broken down and burned off a bunch of the PC games I've ripped, but then again, I'm not done ripping yet. Woo! Shame there's not something like PS1 Renamer for PC games. I'd love to be able to rip to a.bin/cue, b.bin/cue, c.bin/cue and have the program go through and rename 'em all to Star Trek 25th Anniversary CD Rom Edition [U].bin/cue, Star Trek Judgment Rites [u] [Disc 1 of 2].bin/cue, etc. Man, would that rock something fierce.

Shit, you know what I need to do? I need to rip Under a Killing Moon and Pandora Directive and play through those suckers again. Good fucking god did those rock. God damn it, it's all Far Cry 2's fault.

Fuck! I want to replay Far Cry! Damn it! I hate videogames.

I pretty much agree with you about the "not going all out" part. Well, I do now at least. At the time it made sense to me, since I had recently come into a lot of money and just blew a large chunk of it on a custom-built Alienware rig. Big mistake. It was definitely an awesome machine, but no longer is these days obviously. I'll most likely be building my own PC sometime next year, but for now there are way too many PS3 and 360 games I want to play.

[roushimsx]

Seems like your very passionate about PC specs, which I can respect but your coming off like some type of computer weirdo demanding that people get rid of there machines and move on with technology. Please realize that there is more to life than upgrading a machine everytime a new game comes out.


That's just it, you're missing the point! You don't have to upgrade every time a new game comes out and you don't have to spend an arm and a leg upgrading when you do decide to swap in some new parts here and there. The only big investment is the initial one, though every now and then there's a generational gap that you're going to have to cross (such as when the graphics card bus gets a significant upgrade or when processors make a major leap).

Too many people think that an upgrade means sinking hundreds if not thousands of dollars into a whole new system, but you really don't need to go that balls out crazy unless you either hate money or really have a machine that old that it's impossible to upgrade bit by bit anymore. Like I said before, my motherboard, ram, and CPU are two years old aren't weren't terribly expensive then. My videocard is more recent but bought with an emphasis on best bang for the buck and a hard $$$ limit. I didn't need some silly crazy neon ninja custom case, just someone that's easy to play around in without cutting the hell out of my hands and provides solid airflow to keep the ol' system running cool. Water cooling is for the birds. Etc etc etc.


I pretty much agree with you about the "not going all out" part. Well, I do now at least. At the time it made sense to me, since I had recently come into a lot of money and just blew a large chunk of it on a custom-built Alienware rig. Big mistake. It was definitely an awesome machine, but no longer is these days obviously. I'll most likely be building my own PC sometime next year, but for now there are way too many PS3 and 360 games I want to play.

Oh no doubt, most people make a similar mistake. I had a chance to be on the bleeding edge at one point and sunk way more money than I should have on a fucking fresh as can be P2-400. I mean, it seemed like a killer idea at the time and I sure did love me some Quake II and Unreal at 800x600, but I could have gotten away with spending half as much as I did on a P2-333, Voodoo2 8mb, recycled my old STB Lightspeed 128, and maybe not gone so apeshit on the RAM (I mean, really, 64mb would have been fine; 128mb was total overkill at the time). Hell, I think ZSNES was running just fine on a P2-300 even, so it's not like I can look back and say, "well fuck it, at least I was able to play SNES games full speed!".

I fucked up a second time when I picked up a GeForce SDR for $300 as soon as they came out. Didn't fully sink in until it died on me 6 months into ownership and I couldn't get it exchanged under warranty for a variety of reasons (none related to overclocking, which I didn't do!). Rolled back to the voodoo until the GF2MX cards came out and I've been staying in the budget lane ever since. GF4 4200? Word! Radeon 9500 non-pro? You bet! 7600GT? It was cheap and damn good.

But like, my sole criteria when I was specing out the machine was, "I need to be able to play Unreal as best as humanly possible". Anymore I just care about stuff being acceptably playable. Hell, people were bitching about STALKER being an absolute system specs whore, but I found it to be quite pleasing to the eye on medium detail in a moderate resolution on my 7600GT (which was just a $130 budget card when I bought it in 2006). It wouldn't handle Crysis worth a damn, but that's just a matter of waiting for the then top of the line graphics cards to gradually drop in price. They always drop in price. Always.

...but if the PS3 version supports mouse and keyboard, I'll probably wind up playing it at some point. I love being able to just toss in a game and know it'll work without any hitches and that it doesn't have any fucked up copy protection that'd detract from the game experience. I just don't like how games tend to scale when they go from PC to consoles :\

Far Cry Instincts had some neat remixed levels, but ram limitations and bugs really put a damper on things (nothing cooler than having enemies spawn directly in front of you!) and Half Life 2's extendability was totally removed (no free mods? how's the TF2 updates doing? Portal without a mouse? Gotta pay for Flash Portal? Ugh). Apparently Enemy Territory didn't pan out very well either, but I guess UT3 on PS3 did? Two games I'm not really into though....

I like to think that the higher costs in hardware on PCs is offset by the lower costs in software. Not only are games typically $10+ cheaper when new, they plummet in price much quicker (gotta move that stuff off the shelf!) and if you frequent places like Target, you can find some pretty crazy random deals and clearance specials.

tl;dr- You know, I love Ubi Montreal and all, but I kind of wish Crytek was doing this one.

[OldSchoolGamer]

I built my machine for fairly cheap back in late 2006, upgraded my videocard on the cheap earlier this year, and it meets/exceeds those recommended specs. Nice to see that they're not pulling an Origin and specing it out for a machine that doesn't yet exist.

Seriously, a decent dual or quad core Intel chip is dirt cheap, 8800GTs have plummeted in price, and RAM is cheap.

Anyway, upgrading months before a game comes out is downright stupid. Why not wait until right before release to minimize the cost of the highest quality components?

People love to hold onto their ghetto machines too much :( Upgrade, damnit! Don't say that it does everything that you want it to do if it doesn't handle the games you want to play! If you can't play STALKER or Half Life 2: Episode Two at acceptable framerates, you're doing yourself a damned disservice. Quality PC components are cheap! If you have to overhaul the whole PC/build a new one from scratch, turn the old one into an HTPC or home media server. Donate it! Sell it off on the board at work to someone who could get better use out of it.

I agree completely! And I am not saying that is for everyone BUT at the same time don't whine and bitch when you can't run something at an acceptable rate, hey I built my system repacing a six year old system that was low end to begin with, sure it sucked but I didn't complain.