Community Event / Creation Elite: Dangerous on a 6 year old computer

[NeilF]

From my personal experience it's the harddisk that plays a big role in computer bottleneck. Also the video ram and ram. Vram depends on how big your screen resolution you want to play on. Obviously GPU has to be decent to run high graphics mode if you want it all turned on. CPU isn't that important, that's from my experience , 3d games uses mostly GPU power for rendering real time pixel on screen. I have the Asus COG8580 with GTX680 on board 3G vram. 16G physical Ram. SSD for C drive and 10k RPM for games and programmes. Works fine for most games. The cpu is i7Quad 3.6Mhz if not mistaken with hyperthread so there are 8 core registered on the task manager. I am absolutely crazy about modding afterwards ... so my ASUS COG system case allow me to add more to the system as I deem fit in future. If you are willing to spend good money go for the ASUS COG they are pretty solid.

Hard disk? Bottleneck? :S

IMHO, as a rough guide:-
Regular ED gameplay: GPU > CPU > HD
For some more intensive stuff (eg: Factions): CPU > GPU > HD

 

[RAMpack]

Hard disk? Bottleneck? :S

In games like Skyrim or GTA5(PC), a SSD may make a big difference. But I can't see it mattering too much in this.

 

[hawkenfox]

Hard disk? Bottleneck? :S

IMHO, as a rough guide:-
Regular ED gameplay: GPU > CPU > HD
For some more intensive stuff (eg: Factions): CPU > GPU > HD

Well especially if you don't have enough memory to go along on a old computer, and memory swap from ram to harddisk usually causes bottle neck. Not many people think that was an issue but with 7200RPM harddisk they do. I have tried it myself on a 10yr old dell machine. Changing the harddrive with higher read and write speed up the whole system by at least 20% on some game titles.

 

[stephen_usher]

Well, age isn't so much of a problem. My nearly 6 year old Mac Pro's playing ED nicely:

Spoiler

It looks like your graphics card might be the bottleneck. Even a cheap new card will out perform the one you have.

 

[NeilF]

Well especially if you don't have enough memory to go along on a old computer, and memory swap from ram to harddisk usually causes bottle neck. Not many people think that was an issue but with 7200RPM harddisk they do. I have tried it myself on a 10yr old dell machine. Changing the harddrive with higher read and write speed up the whole system by at least 20% on some game titles.

I very much doubt HD speed effects ED much. And as for memory, I rarely even hit 50% ram usage when playing the combat demo with my 6GB.

Of course I can't comment on the beta.

 

[hawkenfox]

I very much doubt HD speed effects ED much. And as for memory, I rarely even hit 50% ram usage when playing the combat demo with my 6GB.

Of course I can't comment on the beta.

Yes at this moment it's still too early to tell. I am sure there are alot of content not yet available even in the beta, once they are all there plus future expansion and the news from frontier that ED will have higher graphics mods which today's computer may not be able to handle well, but would be possible in the near future.

I am not saying GPU or CPU aren't that all important ... it just that generally people forgets about the harddisk plays quite a role in loading graphics and mem swap, after upgrading the GPU, RAM and CPU. Just putting a comment here so if someone wants some idea about upgrading a very old computer Harddisk may be the cheaper option to change... depending of availability of older hardwares.