I was getting 30 FPS in Burning Crusade on an ATI Radeon 9200, I get about 20 FPS out in Northrend aside from Dalaran where it sometimes lag spikes when there are lots of people on (or during the holiday events where there are more NPC's and stuff in the area)
In reality this game is far more detailed then the last expansion, and BC had a lot of detail in the artwork and overall design. Getting FPS drops in Dalaran isn't from your video card, it lags for everyone because it is a big city with lots of people in it. I know people who have higher end machines then me and they still get lag there, Shattrath was the same way in Burning Crusade. I think Blizzard paid more attention to detail when it comes to designing the game, everything from the armor to buildings is far more illustrated here, so while it may use the same game engine, there are visual enhancements that make Wrath look nicer then the original or BC.
Well duh it does not look as good as the PS2 games, but it still looks really good for a handheld game. The screenshots don't do handheld games justice for comparing graphics. I am enjoying it though and it is worth the purchase imo.
"To the MAC Jockey below. Intel has had dual cpu boards around for years, so I'm not sure what you're talking about. Understand MAC's are almost exclusively for the media industry (recording studios, video editing studios) they are powerful at what they do, but they don't do much. So lets put that little uneducated comment to rest." If anyone is willing to drop the cash, a Mac Pro makes all gaming PC's obsolete in terms of raw performance, 32 GB's of RAM may seem like overkill and the price point of a machine like that with the best specs is about 20,000 USD, but upgrading it would not be an issue for a few years aside from maybe putting in new graphics cards. I do not think that buying an 8 core Mac Pro is going to be that much more expensive then doing it yourself with a Windows machine but at the end you are paying for a quality machine as well with an operating system that is guaranteed to utilize such large specs.
Methinks that companies like Intel, AMD, ATI and Nvidia are bent on trying to max out Crysis so that they have a standard by which they can start setting for mainstream prebuilt desktops on the market. I have noticed recently that one can buy a gaming level desktop prebuilt for a fairly decent price, ones with 8800 GT's and quad core processors along with 3 GB's of RAM for around 1k, and while the components may not be the best on the market, it just shows that Crysis is trying to push the boundaries of hardware and what kind of performance people can get for their buck.
Still could not beat the 8800 GTX in SLI mode, obviously it's better then a single 8800 GTX but still it's going to be expensive for two of them in Crossfire mode but still probably cheaper then two 8800 GTX's. I am still annoyed that those power house graphics cards are over 500 dollars here in Canada, we are getting burned royally to be honest. One hopes that ATI offers this card at a pricepoint that is fair to Canadians since they are a Canadian company.
The new processors will probably require the same amount of power as the last generation AMD ones, but since they have power consumption adjustment features, it might not be a big deal. I know the new ATI cards have better power consumption and can run in CrossFire mode with less power requirements then Nvidia's SLI alternative, but at the same time you do wind up sacrificing a bit of performance for less power sucking in that sense. Either way, I have never had problems with AMD processors before and hopefully I can afford to get the Phenom 9900 next summer.
For the pricepoint I think you are getting a better value. Buy two of them and do CrossFire, you can get better performance then a single 8800 GTX, and the power requirements are much better then the 2900 XTX
DSgamer64's comments