Ok, after playing FreeSpace Open for many months on my old PC, I felt like it was finally time to upgrade my old rig to something with more up-to-date hardware. So, after making a few bucks selling old junk on eBay, I cherry-picked some nice stuff on NewEgg and put it all together last weekend. Here's the switch:
Old PC:Old Dell P3 Motherboard mATX (Intel i815 Chipset)
Intel Pentium III 1.0Ghz (yes, you read that right)
Mushkin 512MB PC133 RAM
ATI 9700 256MB AGP Video Card
WD 160GB IDE Hard Drive
Windows XP SP3 x86
New PC:Asrock B75M mATX Motherboard (Intel B75 Chipset)
Intel Pentium G860 3.0Ghz (Sandy Bridge)
G.Skill 2GB 1333 DDR3 RAM
AMD FirePro 3D v4800 Video Card
WD 250GB SATA3 HD
Windows 7 SP1 x86
The old PC has held up amazing well over the years with most of the games I threw at it, but since I'm just a space-sim lover and didn't put many demanding titles on the old PC, it was adequate for the task. That is until I played Silent Threat: Reborn for the first time. Everything was fine until the Hades showed up (with all of its textures/polygons) and then the FPS went south in a hurry (avg 20-25). It got worse in the final battle - maybe 10-15FPS. I got through it but I was a little dissapointed that my trusty P3 wasn't up to the task of providing the eye-candy that FSOpen was supposed to supply.
Enter new hardware - and after I got everything put together, OS loaded, OpenAL installed and copied over my FreeSpace folder from my old PC I ran FSOpen for the first time. Well, it certainly loaded faster and, as a bonus, the opening movie played without the familiar audio skipping that had plagued me on all cut-scenes on my old PC. I went into the tech room and fired up the Warship Gauntlet just so I could get used to and performance differences between the 2 computers. What I found actually blew me away.
What I noticed immediately was the quality of the textures on the ships, especially the procedural textures. The moving "flames" of the exhaust from the capital ships (I never saw this on my old PC probably due to the age of my video card/drivers and the lack of support it had for some of the OpenGL features implemented in FSOpen) was awesome! That's why I opted for a "professional" series video card in my new rig that could handle the latest OpenGL features and has drivers super-optimized for OpenGL (that and many sims I play are OpenGL-based).
And thus the thread title - Wow, just wow! I just got done playing Silent Threat: Reborn again this week and the experience was like night and day. The beauty of the textures combined with the performance of new, optimized hardware brought the FSOpen experience to a whole new level for me. I didn't know what I was missing playing on old hardware. Hopefully this new rig will continue to serve me well in the years to come with the sims I love to play - like FSOpen.
I look forward to the continued growth/improvements that the genius coders here continue to build into this product for the enjoyment of all who love to play one of the greatest space-sims ever written.
Thanks everyone and cheers!
