Goodbye to Hellgate: London … MMORPG on 56K dialup! (Part 2 of a series)
I chose a Nvidia BFGTech GTX280 as my test card and I ran Hellgate: London with every detail that was possible to max, maxed out – including 4x AntiAlising and 16x Anisotropic filtering whenever possible. What a surprise! This time, general performance was excellent and there were no slowdowns due to the graphics card that was used OR my NetZero 56K Internet connection. My PC’s CPU is e8600 at 3.99Ghz and 4GB PC8500 with Vista32. The full disclosure is as follows:
Test Configuration – Hardware
- Intel Core 2 Duo E8600 (3.99 GHz ).
- ASUS P5E Deluxe (Intel X48 chipset, latest BIOS).
- 4 GB DDR2-PC8500 RAM (2×2 GB, dual-channel).
- Nvidia GTX280 (896MB, reference clocks) by BFGTech
- ATi Radeon EAH4870 DK (1 GB, reference clocks) by ASUS
- SoundMax Integrated HD audio
- Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 Hard Drive
- 850 watt OCZ power supply
Test Configuration – Software
- ATi Catalyst 8.11, highest quality mip-mapping set in the driver; Catalyst AI set to “advanced”
- nVidia Geforce 178.24, high quality driver setting, all optimizations off, LOD clamp enabled.
- Windows Vista 32-bit SP31; very latest updates
- DirectX November, 2008.
- Hg:L patched to its latest versions. vsync off in the control panels to “application decide”. 4xAA enabled in-game; all settings at maximum, 16xAF applied
- Highest quality sound (stereo) used in all games. Vista32, DX10 game run under DX10 render paths; HD4870 used DX9c.
- NetZero 56K Dial-up (to play online) and WildBlue Satellite (for updates) Internet connections
Maxed-Out DX10 settings at 19x12
