on this puter i have win xp 1.3g amd cpu 448 mb ram a gefroce 440 mx 128 4x video card

and did not play bigger than large maps.

to speed up turns i would start them and click on the map in a spot i did not have planets so i did not have to see the ship move.





look at the ship there is alot missing. but the game played here is other pic






on this puter i have a 1.9 g amd cpu 512 mb ram and a geforce 5600 fx 256 mb 8x video card





ship looks better !!




here the planets and the way the sun shine is seen where about pic it is not also look the rings aroun plantes.

so the geforce 440 will play the game just won`t get the graphics you would like to see but i guess the thing was it played it.!!

Bro, tell us exactly what brand and model of computer that you are using. I will look up the specs and tell you what you can do to make things better.

By the sound of it, his machine is Dell and probably and as he stated, hes not too good with hardware stuff. So what I recomend is him, to go to a small computer store with hes machine and ask if they could upgrade the 3D card for him.

This costs a bit more, but atleast there wont be any horror stories where a guy has tried to literally SAW his PCI-E card to fit AGP slot. Best situation would be to get some nerd kid from the family to do this for him

I think its safe to assume that hes motherboard has AGP slot, since the integrated graphics is so old. There are plenty of good choices from Nvidia and ATI ranging various budget ranges.

Can't wait to see what Evil and Wheel say when they see this.

What would I have to say? I just bought a NVIDIA GeForce 7600GT on Saturday and disabled the old 6150 LE integrated immediately. Paid 189.00 with a 30.00 rebate making it 159.00 overall. Not a bad investment on my part. Also noteworthy, at the moment NVIDIA is offering a "free" upgrade. Buy another, better featured card within 90 days and they will only charge you the upgrade price (after sending them your "old" card, of course). And yes, it has to be one of their cards, ahem.
P.S.: PCI-E  

get some nerd kid from the family to do this for him

I am that.

FreeLacer=GC2? No.

FreeLacer=GC2? No.

I haven't played freelancer, but your screenshot suggests your controlling one ship or a small group of ships kinda like descent freespace(a title I do have). Where as GCII has hundreds and at times thousands of 3D rendered ships on screen. Not to mention the planets and various other things on screen. It's quite a bit more CPU and graphics intensive. Plus I don't really see any Dynamic lighting or other Direct X9 enhanced graphics in the shot.

Hmm, over 30 star systems with tons of ships and planets in one game? shots:


Oh and Im controlling one ship, I can buy new ones too. There are planets too.

Hey. Not a bad looking game with the second shot. Freelancer you say?

..wanders off to check dealtime.com..

Freelancer was indeed a fairly good looking game for it's time. It's time being 2003 and even at that point it was operating on an outdated engine. It had plenty of other problems too. But a fun game all in all.

2003 was also a time when DX9 was just introduced. It's also the year when nvidia had their entire DX8/DX9 debacle. In which old DX8 cards where never able to live up to expectations (worked horribly with DX9 games) and where quikly replaced by DX9 supporting cards. I think the Geforce4mx was a DX8 card.

But seriously for $150 to $200 (3 to 4 games) you could buy a system that out preforms your current system by a factor 4. I'm not entirely sure what the rest of your system specs are but i'm guessing 2002 ish. If you want to play any new game (2005/2006/2007)at a reasonable level it's well worth the investment.

Galciv2 is an excellently scalable game I've played it on my dos& win98 box(athlon 1.9 /9800pro) and it runs fine if you select the right resolutions.
And i've had it tax my gamebox (x2-4400 + 8800GTX) to it's limits, with galciv2's pure graphical splendour. )
Backwards compatiblity is a noble goal, but it does have it's limits. It really doesn't make sense from a commercial point of view to invest the time to make this game run on computers that are that old. I can't really imagine more that 5% of actual gamers run a computer with those kind of specifications.

I think the Geforce4mx was a DX8 card.

GeForce4 MX 4000 is a DX9 card, but all the other GeForce4 MX cards, including the 440, are DX7.

You cant really compare games like that. GC2 might look small scale but I bet there are alot more polygons in GC2 than Freelancer, in normal scenes. New 3D gimmicks tend to need more horsepower and they are used alot in GC2. This leads to the point that old cards just cannot produce nice looking picture, since they do not support all the newest 3D tricks.

I also wish that games would be more optimized today, but the sad fact is that ever growing speed of computers tend to make programmers sloppy. Why fine tune to software to its max, when processor speeds are rising so fast? Also there is not much anybody can do for the old hardware since technology development is running on high gear. My year old X1900XT will be obsolete in about 6 months or so. I know it could run easily another couple years but I want to crank up the details to the max.

I will soon get an X1600 card. oh my I have an AGP slot.

nope, GeForce FX5500.

Ok, good that you're getting a new card. Just FYI, comparing the graphics of freelancer and GC2 is a joke. As was your "lower the requirements" post, I hope.

Please, post with intelligence :/

Or just switch my dads card and mine. he doesn't need a good one. he is installing GCII now to see if it works.

Best of luck.

Im exited, guess, why.