Recommended hardware?

Farbourne

Rear Admiral
Does the Standoff team (or anyone else for that matter) have a list of "hardware requirements and recommendations" for running Standoff, like actual store-bought games generally do?

The background is this: I've been playing Standoff Eps 1-4 (and doing all my other computing for the last five years, for that matter) on a 7+ year old laptop. Standoff usually ran just fine, even with everything I could turn on turned on, but the old girl (my laptop) just had her CD drive break, half of her 1GB of RAM die on me, and I don't trust the hard drive to live much longer. Plus, I don't imagine that all the beautiful new bells and whistles that the Standoff folks packed into Ep 5 (and back) will work on my tired old laptop with it's outdated laptop video card (I can't even get updated drivers for it anymore!), or look very nice even if I can get them to work. So I'm going to invest in a new computer very soon.

But it's been about 8 years since I last bought a computer or payed attention to computer capabilites or statistics, and I'm sure a lot has changed since 2002. This new home computer is probably going to be a relatively bare bones system (used primarily for family web browsing, e-mail, ripping CD's, etc), and of course playing old DOS and Win95/98 games I've grown up loving. It will NOT be a high performance gaming platform. But if I can invest a few extra dollars here or there to make Standoff Ep 5 look good, I'm willing to do so (knowing I'm buying a new system soon, I've actually been waiting to play Ep 5 until I get my new system).

Anyone have any suggestions? For Standoff specifically (i.e. "avoid such and such a graphics card", or "this chipset works really good with Standoff") or for just computer buying in general (I know there are a ton of knowledgable folks here who love to give advice).

Thanks in advance!
 
My brother can play Standoff Episode 5 just fine on a 6-7 year old system based on the now-ancient (pre-64-bit era) Athlon XP. But I don't think that's with the HDR enabled.

My point is that I don't think CPU will be a problem as the current generation of low-end CPUs should be able handle the game. The main issue will be the graphics card - for this, I often find Tom's Hardware monthly Best Graphics Card for the Money recommendation to be useful even if the prices don't necessarily reflect what I experience in Australia. I would hazard a guess that the current low-end recommendation would be able to deal with Standoff quite handily, but I can't say for sure. You'll definitely need a current or recent generation of video card for the HDR effects, though.

For the record, my 13-month-old system is a Core 2 Quad with Radeon HD 4850, which is probably overkill for just Standoff even at 1600x1200, if you're looking for an upper limit for what's necessary.
 
Yeah, the graphics card is going to be the main factor. Now, I *think* it's still recommended that you go with an Nvidia graphics card - there was a huge load of teething problems with Standoff on ATI graphics cards. At the same time, it seems that all these problems were resolved with the last patch (ATI players, correct me if I'm wrong), so that may not be an issue any more.

Needless to say, you don't need a top-of-the-line graphics card for Standoff. For example, my graphics card (an 8600GTS) is now more than two years old, and there have been at least two new generations of graphics cards released since then - but it's still good enough for Standoff (though I can't quite squeeze out the highest settings without major framerate issues). So, if you buy whatever mid-range graphics card is on the market at the moment, you'll be safe.
 
Well, the funny thing about nVidia is that some of the current generation of video cards are effectively rebadged version of the GeForce 8 line. I haven't had any issues with Standoff and Radeon, so I suppose it comes down to personal preference, but perhaps going with a GeForce might be better if you want to be certain about compatibility.

According to the hierarchy chart in that article I linked to, the 8600 GTS is on par with the HD 4650, so it looks like you shouldn't need to spend any more than what that is worth.
 
Thanks everyone for the input. I finally went ahead an got a system, and ended up getting a relatively low end one (but still infinitely faster than my 8 year old laptop!). It's primarily a family system for web browsing and word-processing afterall, and I couldn't justify spending the money on a real gaming box when all I really play right now is Standoff and a bunch of "classic" (i.e. old) games.

So I fired it up last night and installed SecretOps and Standoff. SecretOps looks great, by the way...whatever you guys did to enhance it was magical.

Standoff looks even better...but I wanted to try to see everything I could, so I turned everything on and up (knowing my integrated chip probably couldn't handle it). I was right...it was absolutely gorgeous, but I was also right about the graphics...the integrated graphics chip really couldn't handle it and the framerate was way too slow. I'm sure I can turn some settings down and get good performance, but I had 3 questions.

1). What is the HDR option that (by default) is unchecked in the Standoff setup screen?

2). What do folks think might be a good set of settings (i.e. what screen resolution, which effects, etc.) to get a good running game on a modern but weak integrated graphics chip (specifically, it's an NVIDIA GeForce 6150 SE Graphics integrated chip, running on an AMD Athlon II X2 240 Dual-Core machine with 3GB RAM, running Windows 7)?

3). Is it worth picking up a budged (i.e. <$100) graphics card and dropping it in the machine, given that Standoff is pretty much the most graphically intensive thing I plan on running in the near future? Something like an ATI Radeon HD5450? Or will I not see much of an improvement compared to the internal chip?

I don't mind doing this, because Standoff is free, and so I might as well spend the money I would have spent buying it on a card. By the way, thanks again for a great game!

Sorry for these very specific (and probably stupid) questions, but I've been out of the loop on computer and gaming technology for a number of years now, and I know a lot of folks here have tried the gamut of different types of hardware. Standoff Ep1-4 used to run just fine even on my old laptop, but I want to take advantage of as much of the pretty eye candy that they put in as possible...
 
It's primarily a family system for web browsing and word-processing afterall
Sorry for offtopic, but this made me chuckle ;)

Ever since I can remember, people (especially those selling hardware) talk about some systems being "(just) good enough for word processing" (usually those 1+ year behind the current generation). So, word processing continually requires better hardware? (Well, at least if you use Microsoft Office that's pretty much given... ;))


Seriously, in theory, you could do word-processing and even browsing with a Windows 3.11 system... Well, okay, since Youtube (and "Web 2.0" in general) happened, you pretty much really need progressively improving hardware for web browsing. But it stands for word-processing. Yes sure, modern word processors have more features than the old ones, but generally the <10% of the features you'll use at all have been there since back then. The ratio of new features / required hardware just doesn't pay off in my opinion.

That all feels like conspiracy going on between hardware and software vendors to drive sales (at least between game developers and graphics cards manufacturers they even openly admit that - but it's a different story because (most) people demand game graphics to "improve" each year)
 
Sorry for offtopic, but this made me chuckle ;)

Ever since I can remember, people (especially those selling hardware) talk about some systems being "(just) good enough for word processing" (usually those 1+ year behind the current generation). So, word processing continually requires better hardware? (Well, at least if you use Microsoft Office that's pretty much given... ;))


Seriously, in theory, you could do word-processing and even browsing with a Windows 3.11 system... Well, okay, since Youtube (and "Web 2.0" in general) happened, you pretty much really need progressively improving hardware for web browsing. But it stands for word-processing. Yes sure, modern word processors have more features than the old ones, but generally the <10% of the features you'll use at all have been there since back then. The ratio of new features / required hardware just doesn't pay off in my opinion.

That all feels like conspiracy going on between hardware and software vendors to drive sales (at least between game developers and graphics cards manufacturers they even openly admit that - but it's a different story because (most) people demand game graphics to "improve" each year)

Good points. It actually struck me as I was buying the system that *most* of what we use computers for these days could be done with 20-year old hardware. Honestly, how much power does one need to tweet what kind of coffee they just had at Starbuck's to the world? In fact, most of what's on the Web that eats bandwidth doesn't really need to be there...I don't find my web browsing experience any more satisfying these days than I did in 1997 (well, maybe a little, but just because Geocities no longer exists :) ). CNN.com is covered with videos and popup ads, when all I want to do is read the text of the story. ESPN.com is overburdened with Flash animations when what I really want to see is what the A's-Yankees score was. Weather.com has beautiful map animations of moving cloud radar images, but what I really want to know is if I should drive my car or ride my bike tomorrow.

And operating systems... I now have to learn my fifth new Window-based operating system in fifteen years (and it's only five because I hid from Windows ME and Windows Vista), whereas everything I knew about Unix in 1995 still works just fine to this day. And runs with a smaller memory footprint. And in many cases is more powerful.
 
The most demanding on my systems is keeping a browser open for over a day(try it and look at the memory/CPU usage), this goes for FF even more then for IE.

Games run fine on any system straight off the shelf.
 
1). What is the HDR option that (by default) is unchecked in the Standoff setup screen?
That is the "bloom" effect, where light saturates the color over and object (see sun's shape, engine flames blurring over the rest on the images. It's a pretty eye candy, but it consumes 3x more processing power than without.

2). What do folks think might be a good set of settings (i.e. what screen resolution, which effects, etc.) to get a good running game on a modern but weak integrated graphics chip (specifically, it's an NVIDIA GeForce 6150 SE Graphics integrated chip, running on an AMD Athlon II X2 240 Dual-Core machine with 3GB RAM, running Windows 7)?

3). Is it worth picking up a budged (i.e. <$100) graphics card and dropping it in the machine, given that Standoff is pretty much the most graphically intensive thing I plan on running in the near future? Something like an ATI Radeon HD5450? Or will I not see much of an improvement compared to the internal chip?
I don't know about your integrated card, but in my personal experience integrated graphics just sucks. I bought a GeForce 8600GT for 40$ CAN (about 32$ US at the time) a year ago and it works great for me.
 
3). Is it worth picking up a budged (i.e. <$100) graphics card and dropping it in the machine, given that Standoff is pretty much the most graphically intensive thing I plan on running in the near future? Something like an ATI Radeon HD5450? Or will I not see much of an improvement compared to the internal chip?

It is worth it. Integrated graphics is not THAT bad, it is much worse. I'd reccomend you a GeForce 9600 GT (you can gat it aroun d $100 on ebay), as there were some issues with ATI cards IIRC
 
As someone who had to test Standoff on integrated boards, I can tell you 100% they suck the ass of a dead Wu!

Mostly they were Intel cards, but the result always seemed to be the same...

There's not much harm in dropping a bit of change for gfx that will come in handy not only for Standoff, but for other modern titles as well...
 
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