this PC good enough? (was forum=10)Follow

Even if it, by grace of God, did run, you wouldn't beable to play FFXI very well.

Ye gods, I'm reminded instantly of the days when people were upgrading their computers to play Unreal Tournament. Yes, the first one.

Unfortunately, FFXI's minumum requirements include a Pentium III with at least 800Mhz, so you're going to have to upgrade.

Even if you made the requirements, it wouldn't run particularly well on low settings. I ran FFXI on a Pentium III 866Mhz with 512MB RAM and a 128MB ATI Radeon 9200SE and it had slowdown like crazy.

My AMD Athlon64 3200+ (2.0Ghz) with a 256MB Nvidia GeForce7600GS and 1GB RAM was an improvement, but it still slowed down some with about an alliance-worth of players or in places like Lower Jeuno and Whitegate.

I have yet to try it out on my new Athlon64 X2 4600+ (2.4Ghz dual-core) with the same hardware as listed above, but I assume it won't be that much better, simply because the game's not optimized for a PC.

Anyways, your CPU is going to make the most difference with FFXI due to how it was made, or rather ported from PS2, which lacks the powerful GPU that most PCs have. All your video card really needs is to be able to handle hardware TnL, which any modern card will do pretty much.






Edited, Feb 7th 2007 10:36pm by JediKitsune

Edited, Feb 7th 2007 10:38pm by JediKitsune

In general, CPU/RAM upgrades will help FFXI more than GPU upgrades will. Under normal circustances, FFXI is not very taxing on the GPU (though certain effects, such as bard songs or sandstorm weather can chew through fill rate); I'm using a Radeon 9550, and it runs the game very well at 1280x1024 (with 3D rendering also at 1280x1024), and the 9550 is discontinued...


The PS2 GPU isn't actually all that bad. It's fill rate, relative to it's resolution, is relatively enormous; 20x overdraw at 60fps, 640x480, is easily doable (i.e. not even close the the unrealistic theoretical maximum). It's only real drawbacks are the lack of multitexturing and pixel shaders (though to be fair, pixel shaders will still cutting-edge technology when the PS2 came out) and the paltry 4MB of embedded RAM (though to be fair, the main memory -> VRAM bandwidth on the PS2 is also extremely high).
The main reason why the PC and PS2 versions perform differently is not a matter of raw processing power; it boils down to the two systems having, not just different architectures, but completely different design philosophies, as I'm sure anyone who has had to port a PC game to PS2 can tell you.

Anyway, with regards to the OP, this

simply will not do. For starters, that video card is horribly outdated (and was horribly out dated when FFXI came out...) and simply will not work. The CPU is under the game's minimum requirement (P3 800 MHz) and I certainly wouldn't want to try playing with that little RAM. HD should be fine, but you may want a bigger one if you plan to do much of anything other than FFXI; the game currently takes up 7.65 GB of HD space. I'd also recommend a new motherboard; the one you have only supports RAM up to PC133, which is IMO to little memory bandwidth to play the game acceptably.

Luckily however, the needed upgrades should be relatively cheap; a top-tier (for FFXI) system can be built for under $750 after all.

Granted, you can TRY playing on that comp; after all, the Riva TNT is (barely) DirectX 8.1 compatible, and that CPU is only 9% below minimum spec. If you want to know for sure if it'll work, you may want to try the official benchmark program.

I run this game on a P4 1.6gig, 2gig ram, 128mb viddy card, all effects I can possibly turn off, off. I get 5fps in alzahbi, and like 15 if I'm lucky in the Mire.

Short answer for you? No.

It's good enough for Minesweeper.

I don't think you can put more than the original game on that HD, lol. Expansions, no way.