One of the games that will force some PC upgrades (mine included) just came out in demo form.
I know we have the anti alien blasting camp here, but gaming is the biggest driver of the high end PC segment, so it is important. The game I am speaking of is Far Cry. This is one of the games that is touting having A64 optimizations (although I'm not sure they do any good until 64 bit desktop Windows is out). Still, Athlon XP64 systems should do well with this game even without the 64 bit optimizations. I grabbed a couple of initial reactions from comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.action:
Wow! Far Cry totally #*$&ing rocks. AI, combat feel, physics reaction of dead bodies, tactical choices ... can't wait for this one, I'm going to buy it the day it is out. Can't imagine what kind of hardware is needed for full graphics options though ... running on a P4 2.4 Ghz, GF4 ... "medium" is the best it can do with a decent frame-rate outdoors. Maybe they'll continue to optimize it.
This is stunning...runs like a pig with all the options turned up(XP2800+..Geforce 4600..1 GB Corsair), as was said already, but with the auto detect settings it still looks great and runs fairly smoothly. Perhaps the water effects at the beginning are slowing it down because they are sublime! You'll be booking your hols after the first minute. Freedom of movement and interactivity with other objects is cool. A few too many keys for my liking..I mean, a "hold you breath" key ? Kinda goes without saying doesn't it ? It's early days, and I hope they get it running a little better on everyday PC's . God knows how/if this would have run on my old 1800+ Geforce 3 !
Between this, Half Life 2, and Doom 3, there is going to be some serious hardware upgrades from gamers over the next 6 months. This bodes well for both AMD and Intel (assuming Prescott can perform well with these games). Last year there was hardly any reason to upgrade, but this year appears to be different.
