Forum Discussion
System Requirements for Rift to run smoothly.
I would like to first introduce myself. I am currently a mathematics graduate student that has worked as a programmer in the video game industry in the past. Now days game design and programming are h...
If you don't have the info handy, you can try running this utility called GPU-Z that will tell you a lot more stats about your graphics card: http://www.techpowerup.com/gpuz/
I have a 4-5year old laptop that was pretty powerful at the time that gets 2.7 Gtexel/sec fillrate with 120 parallel shaders and 256MB of VRAM, and now I have a gaming PC that gets 137 Gtexel/sec fillrate with >1500 parallel shaders (and all running twice as fast) and 2GB of VRAM. Graphics power has come a long way in 5 years. Most Rift demos run like crap on that old laptop.
I'd suggest going to Logical Increments, figuring out how much you want to spend and go from there. (And it's not all about the graphics card, your CPU is still important too)
Honestly, it's really not very fun playing Rift demos and games on an old PC -- you miss out on a lot of graphic quality, fluidity, and framerate. And if you can't get a solid 60FPS that never dips, "you're gonna have a bad time".
I have a 4-5year old laptop that was pretty powerful at the time that gets 2.7 Gtexel/sec fillrate with 120 parallel shaders and 256MB of VRAM, and now I have a gaming PC that gets 137 Gtexel/sec fillrate with >1500 parallel shaders (and all running twice as fast) and 2GB of VRAM. Graphics power has come a long way in 5 years. Most Rift demos run like crap on that old laptop.
I'd suggest going to Logical Increments, figuring out how much you want to spend and go from there. (And it's not all about the graphics card, your CPU is still important too)
Honestly, it's really not very fun playing Rift demos and games on an old PC -- you miss out on a lot of graphic quality, fluidity, and framerate. And if you can't get a solid 60FPS that never dips, "you're gonna have a bad time".