Gazza33

What is the minimum card would run BF2 on medium settings?

Cheers.

EDIT: Oh yeah, it's an AGP 8x mobo.

GrandpaNoob72

The EA recommended minimums are:

128MB, and one of the following chipsets:

1. Nvidia FX5700 or higher
2. ATI Radeon 8500 or higher

I ran BF2 for a little bit on an X700 Pro 256 AGP, it had some trouble with high everything, so I dropped it down to medium everything and it played fine (mobo is Nvidia chipset)...

konai_konai666

I've recently figured out the minumum for good performance on 128MB Radeon 9700/9800-level cards is Low textures/ everything else on Medium @ 1024 res with 2x AA and that keeps me around 30 to 50FPS usually, and at that, it doesn't ever lag. At this point though, I'd reccomend the X700 Pro as the first card up capable of providing decent performance at Medium across the board (256MB high-speed/GDDR3 being crucial to attain lagless play above low texture settings, that being, -the most straining part of the engine excluding the complex shadowing IMO).. At that though, I'd reccomend a 6800 vanilla over it (in it's price/performance-range) and for best overall value (next to the plain 6800) would be the X800XL, which would easily buy you a year until you had to dail down to lower/med settings in current games.. I'm still having a heck of a hard time deciding here between the X800XL AGP and a 6800GT as a year-lasting upgrade (I could crossfire the XL next year by buying another XL for pretty cheap as a PCI-E master card and hybrid mobo supporting both of 'em) but then be stuck with more rendering passes as SM3.0 became standard, deminishing performance, though I'd never be able to run AGP 6800's dual.. Hard choice really, but I guess I shouldn't sweat it so bad: I'll be going R580 when it drops enough in price next year, so I'm almost ready to hop in the 6800GT bandwagon just for the image quality enhancement/ higher average performance than the X800XL as I'll likely only use it for a year or a few months more than that if it ages well.

TYCOON

Battlefield is just like Cs Source, its all in the processor.
My 6600GT in the family 3.0@3.2Ghz p4 gave very poor framerate
With my 6600Gt and 3200+ venice with a 200Mhz overclock I saw almost 10-30fps more @ higher settings.

konai_konai666

TYCOON has a very good point here too. I notice a HUGE difference in performance in BF2 (to the point of laggfestivalous-unplayability) even when only %50 of this extremely bandwidth-strained (by deseign) processor is being used by folding.. I'd even thought for awhile about replacing this with a Sempron64 2800+ 256k cache simply because even something slow like that I'd believe to be equivalent at stock with this P4 3.0 OC'ed to 3.2 to begin with, even with half the available bandwidth because it's just a much more logical processor.. But alas, that wasn't going to happen very easy as I don't really want to waste time on a dead 754 socket or being stuck with this 9800se for another half year right now.
6600GT sound like the definitive buy unless you have an extra $100, in which case, the X800XL is a very good choice, then the 6800GT; being in a kinda hard place at $300, only about $100 cheaper than the 20-pipe 7800GT unfortunately not available to us legacy (AGP) users..

Gazza33

Quote: Originally Posted by TYCOON Battlefield is just like Cs Source, its all in the processor. My 6600GT in the family 3.0@3.2Ghz p4 gave very poor framerate With my 6600Gt and 3200+ venice with a 200Mhz overclock I saw almost 10-30fps more @ higher settings.

Was that P4 a HT model?

I have a 3.0ghz HT P4

NCXCStud

yeah, BF2 is a very CPU intensive game. Also, i've noticed that since i "updated" my drivers for my Audigy2 ZS i got a HUGE performance upgrade...also. Having more than 1GB of ram helps tremendously as well