[silverwolf]

I noticed their are none for the SCP but if you had to make a minimum requirements list what it would be. I am coming close to building my own rig and am curious if my components could handle all the eye candy smoothly

[CP5670]

FSO is pretty easy on any modern hardware actually. Most cards you could select would be good enough, although it depends on the resolution and AA settings you want to use. Some of the media vp packs tend to hog the video memory, but I don't think any recent card should have issues with that.

[silverwolf]

so an athlon m 2800+ and a geforce fx5200 128mb should be able to handle it?

[Trivial Psychic]

You may want a better video card, but I'd still suggest sticking with nVidia... say, a 6600 in AGP if you can find it.

[silverwolf]

meh i'm working on a budget if you can find that card for around 30 then i'll give you kudos

[Taristin]

It'll run fune. Just don't try to make it look like omniscaper's pics and you'll survive.

[CaptJosh]

I have an FX5200 and it works pretty good. I don't try to use any of the super-fancy stuff, though.

[CP5670]

The 5200 is okay but is fairly old and was a poor card even for its time. You can get an X300 on ebay instead for about $20 if you have a PCIE board. (don't get the SE) Although even the 5200 should be okay with FSO as long you keep the resolution down or forego the adveffects vp.

The mobile 2800 is rather expensive for what it is though; look for a sempron 2800 or 3000 instead, which may gave you extra cash for the video card.

[WMCoolmon]

5200 is basically an mx440 with DX9 support, IIRC.

[silverwolf]

The 5200 is okay but is fairly old and was a poor card even for its time. You can get an X300 on ebay instead for about $20 if you have a PCIE board. (don't get the SE) Although even the 5200 should be okay with FSO as long you keep the resolution down or forego the adveffects vp.

The mobile 2800 is rather expensive for what it is though; look for a sempron 2800 or 3000 instead, which may gave you extra cash for the video card.

actually its bundled with my mobo for a combined cost of 107 plus shipping *is on a 200 dollar budget XD*

[CaptJosh]

The FX5200 does not, I repeat NOT have support for hardware DX9. How do I know this? Because I tried to force Half-Life 2 into DirectX 9 mode using the mat_dxlevel 90 command at the dev console. It switched modes and everything slowed to a crawl. The highest hardware DX mode supported by the FX5200 is DirectX 8.1. DirectX 9 features are rendered in software mode using this card.

[CP5670]

It actually can do DX9 stuff in hardware but is horrendously slow at it. The thing with HL2 and any FX series card is that the game defaults to DX7 mode and tries to prevent you from using DX9, as the entire FX line sucks at DX9 despite technically supporting it.

[CaptJosh]

Um, DX8 mode, thank you. Not DX7. And the real problem is that they don't have OpenGL mode, as near as I can tell.

[CP5670]

oh right it's DX8; I was thinking about COD2.

[WMCoolmon]

Actually, that's what I remember as being the big problem with the FX5200 - it can do DX9 stuff, like advanced pixel shaders. So when you fire up Halo, it bumps things to the highest supported pixel shaders - but the card doesn't have the horsepower to handle the extra graphics. So you get massive amounts of lag, and virtually no increase in any kind of actual processing power from the MX440.

I could be wrong about that though. However, I also remember reading in reviews that the 5200 isn't really worth it.

If the 5200 doesn't have OpenGL mode, that's just another reason to go for the MX440...I'm pretty sure it could do hardware accelerated OpenGL, and OpenGL is actually more stable under fs2_open right now.

However, $30 for a graphics card is pretty limiting so I doubt you'll get much better short of going on eBay as CP suggested. ('s not a bad idea, you might be able to snag a card from someone else upgrading to a GT or to PCI-X.)

[CaptJosh]

Um, I said Half-Life 2 doesn't have OpenGL, not the vid card.

[silverwolf]

so basicly if i don't max out the graphics settings I should be fine. i'll be happy just for the HT&L and those nice models to work ^^

[MP-Ryan]

I'm running it (without adveffects or a lot of options turned on, mind you) on a AMD Thunderbird processor overclocked to 1.34 Ghz, and a GF4 Ti4600 video card.  The requirements aren't high if you can live without the extremely fancy graphics options.  I've got specular and glowmaps on, and it's running in OpenGL at 1024x768x32 on high, so it's not ugly either =)

[WMCoolmon]

Ahh, I assumed when you said "they" you meant the 5200 series, rather than HL2.



A 5200 is going to be worse than a Ti4600; in fact, AFAIK, it'll even be worse than a ti4200. It'll run fs2_open, but I'm not sure it'll run more than 1-2 HT&L models smoothly, depending on which is the one being rendered.

You might be better going for one of the MX or TI cards, because they'll be cheaper since they don't support the advanced DX9 features (that fs2_open shouldn't need at all). If advanced pixel shaders are ever implemented, you'd have to upgrade to use those, but seeing as how the 5200 simply wouldn't have the horsepower to render them, it's not really a loss.

[CP5670]

yeah, a 4600 is almost twice as fast as a 5200. If you need AGP, a 4200, 4400 or 9600 off ebay are your best bet for under $30 shipped. You may want to consider waiting a bit and saving up about $50 for the card, for which you can get a used 9700, a much better choice than any of these cards.