epsilon72 said: It makes it better.   It's not perfect, but it no longer goes into super lag-fest when a lot is going on.  The movement in the game itself is kind of choppy though, so sometimes it's hard to tell when it's a performance hit.  Quake Wars was the only game to give me real trouble (laggy input, specifically).  Kind of strange....

A few questions...

- What hardware are you running?

- What settings are you running the game at? - If you lower the resolution/graphics level and if the game still chugs then you're definately CPU limited.

- What programs are eating up CPU time in the background? If you have antivirus especially, turn it off. Anti virus programs check every file you open, so they can sap performance quite drastically.

"Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 2.8 GHz or AMD(R) Athlon(TM) XP 2800+ processor (Pentium 4 3.0GHz or equivalent for Windows Vista)
Memory: 512MB RAM (768MB for Windows Vista)
Graphics card: 128MB NVIDIA(R) Geforce(TM) 5700 or ATI(TM) Radeon(TM) 9700 (full list of supported chipsets below)
Sound card: 100% DirectX 9.0c compatible sound card
Harddisk: 750MB of free hard drive space, plus 200MB for Windows swap file
Internet: Broadband connection and service required for full gameplay and downloads. Features may change without notice."

You shouldnt be having trouble running it!

How can you Not be able to run Crysis? I was able to play Crysis Demo on a Geforce 6200se.

As for the OP, Computers are so cheap nowadays that you can even build a $500 that will play all the games of this generation, but also loads after the current console generation dies, without any upgrade.  It rivals the PS3 in price, but it plays more, cheaper and better games.

I would think that anyone who is serious about PC gaming should get a good case and a good PSU as a base. You'll have a more reliable, quieter, better looking machine for it and its pretty much a fixed expense. You pay once every 6 years or so for the PSU and a Case can last 10 years EASY.

I would say, buy a good case/psu and then budget your other parts on top of that, do you agree?

I have an e2140 clocked to 2.96GHz with a 9600GT and i run every game smoothly at max settings. Only game that doesnt run too hot is crysis. That game is confusing, I remember the air mission, omg i had to turn everything to low settings and it was still slow! But the game overall was still very much playable at medium and looked just as good as high. I've got a 22inch monitor as well, so i play all my games at 1680x1050 res. If you know how to overclock, you can easily avoid paying the high price of the higher grade cpu.
Still even with my current setup, I do plan to get a new system around June next year. My brother wants a new comp, so i'll probably give him my current comp and get a new one for myself.
Prices for computers are definitely more affordable. The e8400 costs only 250AUD and its a beast! I remember when the 2nd best CPU would be like 600+ dollars. Graphics card themselves are slightly cheaper nowadays as well. I got my 9600GT for 250AUD on release day, but its 198 now, and for the performance you get, thats a great deal. And rams, lol they're so cheap its not even funny!

Squilliam said: epsilon72 said: It makes it better. It's not perfect, but it no longer goes into super lag-fest when a lot is going on. The movement in the game itself is kind of choppy though, so sometimes it's hard to tell when it's a performance hit. Quake Wars was the only game to give me real trouble (laggy input, specifically). Kind of strange....     A few questions... - What hardware are you running? - What settings are you running the game at? - If you lower the resolution/graphics level and if the game still chugs then you're definately CPU limited. - What programs are eating up CPU time in the background? If you have antivirus especially, turn it off. Anti virus programs check every file you open, so they can sap performance quite drastically. "Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 2.8 GHz or AMD(R) Athlon(TM) XP 2800+ processor (Pentium 4 3.0GHz or equivalent for Windows Vista) Memory: 512MB RAM (768MB for Windows Vista) Graphics card: 128MB NVIDIA(R) Geforce(TM) 5700 or ATI(TM) Radeon(TM) 9700 (full list of supported chipsets below) Sound card: 100% DirectX 9.0c compatible sound card Harddisk: 750MB of free hard drive space, plus 200MB for Windows swap file Internet: Broadband connection and service required for full gameplay and downloads. Features may change without notice." You shouldnt be having trouble running it!

Well, it wasn't exactly "trouble" running it (it was by no means unplayable), but I like to maintain high framerates in online games so I won't be "hindered" by sudden framerate dips, which usually happened when a lot of stuff was going on. When I lowered the graphics settings things were still a little laggy, and reading posts on Quake Wars forums saying that you really should have ~2.6-ish AMD clock speeds for consistent 60 fps convinced me to try my hand at overclocking again. Now I'm running the game at ~high quality graphics settings at 1920x1080 (I was before the OC actually, and performance at those settings was similar to lower settings)
I'm running the game in Gentoo x86_64 linux with the 2.6.24 kernel (Linux native games ftw), no anti virus is running (because it's linux), and I have a 512MB 8800gt and 2048MB of ram. Performance is just a smidgen less when running it in windows.

This is more my quest to make the game run at a consistently high framerate, rather than to just make it 'playable'. I could probably make it even faster if I lowered the graphics settings too.

It looks like you might actually be more CPU limited than GPU limited here. I took a look at a couple of benchmarks that seemed to hit a wall at 80fps on the same processor. Are you running it locked? Because if you don't already know this it *might* be syncing you at 30fps. But yep you might benifit more from gameplay than pretty visuals in a an online FPS IMHO! :)

Are there any particle or physics options you could turn down? I think those utilize CPU time. Pretty much anything that might use your CPU instead of your GPU could possibly be turned down or off to speed things up if as I think you might be, CPU limited here.

Sorry, I didn't ask this before... but does your linux have a task manager that shows CPU utilization. If you bring it up and its maxed then youd be CPU bound for sure. If it's not then you could do with lowering those graphics settings.

I get spikes every now and then where one of the cores will be maxed out (probably to coincide with busy moments in the game.  I don't have the game set up to run in windowed mode to observe this in real time). Lowering the graphics might help a little, but the OC'ing has definitely helped some. I think I'll be fine until I decide it's time for an upgrade (which might be soon....that 5000+ BE and its overclocking abilities for the money look mighty tempting...)

So you'll be upgrading to a socket AM2+? You should be able to get 3ghz out of it, but it isn't much of an upgrade really. How high do they go? Oh yea do you have a decent CPU cooler?