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The bad news is that Dungeon Siege is very CPU-dependent. Tom's Hardware says

"..It's a different picture with Jedi Knight II and Dungeon Siege. Here, the CPU performance becomes a limiting factor starting from a specific point, where faster cards can no longer make full use of their advantages."

http://www6.tomshardware.com/graphic/20 … ts-01.html

The good news is that your Radeon will give you everything your G4/450 can push to it, 8500s giving perhaps 80% of the framerate available with the 9700 Pro on current top Athlons and P4s. (Note how the top end cards flatten out).

http://www6.tomshardware.com/graphic/20 … ts-03.html

Plenty of rendering power to burn on FSAA and AF, if the game enables them. Should look purty...

The bad news is that Dungeon Siege is very CPU-dependent. Tom's Hardware says

"..It's a different picture with Jedi Knight II and Dungeon Siege. Here, the CPU performance becomes a limiting factor starting from a specific point, where faster cards can no longer make full use of their advantages."

http://www6.tomshardware.com/graphic/20 … ts-01.html


The good news is that your Radeon will give you everything your G4/450 can push to it, 8500s giving perhaps 80% of the framerate available with the 9700 Pro on current top Athlons and P4s. (Note how the top end cards flatten out).

http://www6.tomshardware.com/graphic/20 … ts-03.html

Plenty of rendering power to burn on FSAA and AF, if the game enables them. Should look purty...

Well, the good thing about my Radeon8500 is that while my CPU might be getting on a bit, the GPU lets me turn graphics options up very high, as long as extra geometry doesn't need to be processed. I can play at high resolution with all options on, as long as I don't mind it being a few frames per second.

Jedi Knight II is a good example of this - it runs really smoothly indoors (60-80 fps), less smoothly when people turn up (20-40 fps)and grinds almost to a halt in large outdoor scenes (12-16 fps) with lots of people (4-8 fps).

How's your father doing, Bat? And did you ever pick up those books? (my offer still stands)

I don't care about networking, so that's okay with me. I guess it may upset a few people though...

I'm far more interested in the mods that have appeared for DS. Many of them seem worth playing, and I'd hope that Mac users can take advantage of this and not be shut out.

The bad news is that Dungeon Siege is very CPU-dependent. Tom's Hardware says

"..It's a different picture with Jedi Knight II and Dungeon Siege. Here, the CPU performance becomes a limiting factor starting from a specific point, where faster cards can no longer make full use of their advantages."

http://www6.tomshardware.com/graphic/20 … ts-01.html


The good news is that your Radeon will give you everything your G4/450 can push to it, 8500s giving perhaps 80% of the framerate available with the 9700 Pro on current top Athlons and P4s. (Note how the top end cards flatten out).

http://www6.tomshardware.com/graphic/20 … ts-03.html

Plenty of rendering power to burn on FSAA and AF, if the game enables them. Should look purty...

Well, the good thing about my Radeon8500 is that while my CPU might be getting on a bit, the GPU lets me turn graphics options up very high, as long as extra geometry doesn't need to be processed. I can play at high resolution with all options on, as long as I don't mind it being a few frames per second.

Jedi Knight II is a good example of this - it runs really smoothly indoors (60-80 fps), less smoothly when people turn up (20-40 fps)and grinds almost to a halt in large outdoor scenes (12-16 fps) with lots of people (4-8 fps).

How's your father doing, Bat? And did you ever pick up those books? (my offer still stands)

Loyd Case, tech writer for Computer Gaming World once upon a time, (apparently former?) Director of Technical Marketing for Nvidia, now at ExtremeTech.com and just returned to CGW as columnist, devoted his first 'Cracked Case' column to "The New CPU Bottleneck: A funny thing happened on the way to the graphics revolution."

"The dirty little secret is this: as [..], the bottleneck has moved. The problem now lies in two areas: PC memory bandwidth, and your  CPU."

Even in a game as ostensibly vidcard-dependent as UT2003, you can see a very large difference between benchmarks on flybys and botmatches, both of which the game can run. The latter has all the AI code to run, physics and collision detection to perform, etc. etc. Botmatch scores are a fraction of flybys.

As to the other matter, thanks for asking.

I figure enough time has passed now for an edit. Should've used a private message for that anyway; not always thinking clearly these days.

Well, if anyone's at the MWSF tomorrow, let me know how this looks:

http://www.insidemacgames.com/news/stor … cleID=6823

(they're showing the alpha build)

My brother played it for a little while today. It looked pretty good. Some of it reminded me of NWN, based purely on what I saw today. The way the inventory was set up and health indicators especially. However, I was more interested in NWN so that's all I can say.

I've ranked NWN as vapourware - until it ships, that is.

I'm more interested in DS as it's a real thing, out there for PC and with real dates for the Mac.

Did you get any idea for how smoothly it ran, and what type of Mac (and GPU) it was running on?

I've ranked NWN as vapourware - until it ships, that is.

I'm more interested in DS as it's a real thing, out there for PC and with real dates for the Mac.

Did you get any idea for how smoothly it ran, and what type of Mac (and GPU) it was running on?

I saw two computers playing NWN, so for now I'm happy.

Looked pretty smooth to me, I didn't watch very long and my brother's not home right now so I can't ask him for more details. I did see him in battle a couple of times, and though there weren't exactly very many enemies there were quite a few, and I didn't notice any hangups. I'm fairly certain the computer it was running on was one of the new Dual-opticals, as all of the other computers in the game section were the newest towers, other than that I have no idea (that I noticed anyway). The only person really hanging around the booth was the Bioware guy.

Something to make Gary happy...

'Tom's VGA Charts II- Part II'

[graph of DS on Athlon 1000 system vs. 2700+ {2.1+GHz}]

"Dungeon Siege benefits from a faster CPU across the board. Interesting observation: The performance of the Radeon 7500/8500/9000 boards takes a dive on the Athlon 1000 system."

http://www.tomshardware.com/graphic/200 … ts-03.html

1 GHz Athlon, fast PC133 RAM, about 37 fps.

I can't recall if I read anything about Dungeon Siege having SMP support, but if it does, upgrading to one of those dual 800 Powerlogix upgrades might be a worthy investment.  Even if it doesn't, the sound will probably be offloaded to the second proc so you might still see a nice improvement.

Wouldn't it be more like

"Look! A big Balrog thing way over there!"
"Hey it's closer all of a sudden"
"How did I get killed by that thing?"

Wouldn't it be more like

"Look! A big Balrog thing way over there!"
"Hey it's closer all of a sudden"
"How did I get killed by that thing?"

Yeah, it would. My bad...it does help both appreciation of graphic splendor and one's survival odds when the screen updates more often than the calendar.

(And, I keep forgetting to mention- great avatar! I always knew Andy Kaufman faked his death...how's Elvis?)

Who's Andy Kaufman?

That's me in the avatar.

I figured that, but couldn't resist trying the joke- it's not always easy knowing what makes it Down Under. I understand Letterman does, and you've mentioned South Park, which I wouldn't really have figured, so...

Andy was a famous comedian up hereabouts, so talented yet bent it became harder and harder to know when he was putting people on, and when he really took something seriously, and moreso over time...so that when he died, quite young, in '84, many actually believed he'd faked the whole thing as a giant, next logical step put-on, in somewhat the way many still believe Elvis did (in his case, to escape and anonymously roam the country, far from the cage of celebrity)... makes sense they'd travel together, or at least see each other at intervals.

At thumbnail size, there is a considerable resemblance. (Suppose Andy might've played too much Call of Cthulu, under the influence of your game drugs?) :idea:   :!:         


"'Here I come, to save the day!'

Mighty Mouse is on his way" (Saturday Night Live, '75)

*******************
Kyle, the Covetous Je- er, Paladin from "The Fellowship of The Lord of the Rings"

(Edit- a quick Google search turns up many references. #1,

http://andykaufman.jvlnet.com/

...loads a sequence of three pages. The second, half out of frame, shows the resemblance well enough...you're sure you're not him, recently out of Mandos for, oh, swearing at the bossfella, maybe? (More smileys, too nuanced for stock)

(Edit, too- Holy crap. The Andy Homepage mentions "..the paperback edition of Lost in the Funhouse which includes new and revised material, an enhanced bibliography and a never before seen look at Andy's 1969 letter to Elvis Presley!!

For an exclusive first look at part of the actual letter Andy sent to Elvis, CLICK HERE!!"

Kismet? The Twilight Zone??)

I'm trying to figure this out.
Mac Dungeon Siege:
(1) Another Mac game with no editor while the PC version does. (Westlake could have ported the editor, and DS would sell more copies. Look at the fiasco with Neverwinter Nights editor.)
(2) Can't connect to PC players of the game. I can't play with my friends who have PCs. (I'm not getting a PC just to play this.)

This is bad enough. If it turns out that Macs can't use the "Siegelets" why the heck is the game being made?

I'd love an editor for this game, but apparently it's heavily tied to the Windows UI, so I understand why it won't be ported. It's a shame to me, but I can see the reason.

I'd hope that siegelets will work - that'll greatly extend the life of the game - but without confirmation either way, I feel it's reasonable to give Westlake the benefit of the doubt on this.