Inside: SereneScreen Fan Forum - View Single Post - What's it look like? (Snapshot of Goldfish Aquarium)

feldon34 · 03-27-2003, 03:10 AM

Originally posted by drfish
Wow! That looks so great! Jennifer better let me upgrade her video card now! So what kind of machine is it going to take to run that thing at, say, 1600x1200 32bit and 60+fps??? Are my Athlon 800 and Radeon 8500 going to make the cut? Jennifer's got a 700Mhz Celeron, if I stuck a PCI Radeon 7500 in there could I do 1152x864/32bit/60+fps?

Sorry we did not answer this sooner.

I have not run the Goldfish Aquarium, but I can venture some guesses.

32-bit is very demanding for very little benefit except your monitor not switching modes.

SereneScreen Marine Aquarium 2 uses approximately 10-20% of a 1.2 GHz Athlon, as little as 4% of a 2 GHz Athlon depending on video card, etc. This is all at 1024x768 16 bit color.

I would imagine that your CPUs will be fine. You might run into problems with an unoptimized beta version, but those wrinkles would likely be smoothed out by the public releases.

I am not familiar with ATI cards much, but I know those are very recent models. I would be surprised if the setup you describe would not be able to run GA smoothly at least in 16 bit and maybe at slightly lower resolutions than that. Also I think Antialiasing/Anisotropic Filtering would have to be off.

I also don't know if the PCI would have an effect. Theoretically, PCI can push way more data than a video card would ever need, but someone might not have spent the amount of time necessary to optimize PCI.

Someone using an ATI care to comment?

03-27-2003, 03:10 AM	#118
feldon34 Forum Administrator Join Date: Dec 2000 Location: Rock Hill, SC Posts: 10,938	Originally posted by drfish Wow! That looks so great! Jennifer better let me upgrade her video card now! So what kind of machine is it going to take to run that thing at, say, 1600x1200 32bit and 60+fps??? Are my Athlon 800 and Radeon 8500 going to make the cut? Jennifer's got a 700Mhz Celeron, if I stuck a PCI Radeon 7500 in there could I do 1152x864/32bit/60+fps? Sorry we did not answer this sooner. I have not run the Goldfish Aquarium, but I can venture some guesses. 32-bit is very demanding for very little benefit except your monitor not switching modes. SereneScreen Marine Aquarium 2 uses approximately 10-20% of a 1.2 GHz Athlon, as little as 4% of a 2 GHz Athlon depending on video card, etc. This is all at 1024x768 16 bit color. I would imagine that your CPUs will be fine. You might run into problems with an unoptimized beta version, but those wrinkles would likely be smoothed out by the public releases. I am not familiar with ATI cards much, but I know those are very recent models. I would be surprised if the setup you describe would not be able to run GA smoothly at least in 16 bit and maybe at slightly lower resolutions than that. Also I think Antialiasing/Anisotropic Filtering would have to be off. I also don't know if the PCI would have an effect. Theoretically, PCI can push way more data than a video card would ever need, but someone might not have spent the amount of time necessary to optimize PCI. Someone using an ATI care to comment? "Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed. Everything else is public relations." - George Orwell "If voting changed anything, they'd make it illegal." - Emma Goldman