System Requirements for Laptop?

[CanuckSoldier]

Re: Civ on Dell laptops

Originally posted by Mudhut
I too will be buying a new laptop to run Civ 4 (my last computer purchase was the week before Civ 3 came out...detect a pattern here?).

I noticed that a poster above said that it would run on the Dell Inspiron 9300 with 128 Mb DDR ATI Radeon Mobility X300.

I was looking at the Dell 6000 - the cheaper model than the 9300 - and was wondering if anyone had that model and could verify that it would work (beta testers?). It would have a 1.56 G chip, 1024 RAM and the same video card - 128 Mb DDR ATI Radeon Mobility X300.

I understand what several posters have said about buying the best laptop video card you can (since it can't be changed), but all I care about is playing Civ 4. And I have to watch the $$...

Thanks,
Mudhut.

Well the X300 definitely supports the DX9 programable shaders issue, but if you can afford it I'd go for the X600, as it will have longer legs. The CPU and memory semm ok at least to meet the min specs for Pirates.

CS

[MrFun]

Originally posted by conmcb25
If I could do that I would have gotten the more expensive card

I caved in to temptation -- I'm buying the best video card available with the Dell laptop I ordered.

[GeoModder]

Originally posted by Imran Siddiqui
Hmmm... these are my specs:

1.7 Ghz Pentium III
512 MB RAM
GeForce4 Go 32 MB VRAM

What d'y'all think? Can I run it?

I have about the same specs, except a IV instead of a III and more (overclocked) Ghz. Mine should be able to run it according to the info available at present, so you should be fine I think.

[Imran Siddiqui]

Good deal .

And if it runs slow... well, it's a TBS, who cares!

[MrFun]

Originally posted by Imran Siddiqui
Good deal .

And if it runs slow... well, it's a TBS, who cares!

Imran, just stick to baseball and law and leave us more serious fanatics to TBS games.

[Joseph]

Civ 3 complete spec are as follow.
Win 98/2000/XP
P-2 400 mhz
Mem 128 mb ram
HD 1.73 free
CD 4X or higher
Video Win compatible video card, same with sound card.

Pirates was
98, ME, 2000, & XP
P-3 & AMD Athlon 1 Ghz or more
256 meg ram
HD 1.4 Gb free
DVD/CD 4X or higher
Video 64 MB Win w/T&L SVGA
Sound compatible sound card.

Now Act of War is
P-4 1.5GHz min. 2.2 recommended
mem 256 - 512 recommended
HD 6 GB free
DVD 2X or faster
Video 64 MB T&L, 128 recommended
Sound card as long it is compatible with DirectX 9.0c

Sid games have never been out reach for most player, so why would he do it with this one?

Also I just look at Rome total war and it will run on a P-3 w/1 Gb, w/256 mb of ram.

[Imran Siddiqui]

WOOOT! On the suggestion of someone else on this forum, I downloaded the AoE III demo, which requires a 64 MB V-Ram, but I was able to run it no problem with my 32 MB. I wonder if I can run Pirates?

So I should be fine for CivIV.

[Fidel]

my desktop is fine. as for laptop - are there any news as to whether the game would absolutely require hardware t&l or will it scrape by forced software t&l ?

[Targonis]

Keep in mind that since Civ 4 is turn-based, as long as the display options can be turned WAY down, it may still be playable on older and slower machines. Pirates had some action sequences that would have made it unplayable on the slower machines, but in this case, it MIGHT be ok. A key will be if the game will just decide not to run because it requires the vid card to handle certain function calls, even though a software rendering of certain calls could be implemented.

[Targonis]

Imran,
The Pentium 3 never went beyond 1.13GHz or so because of technical reasons. Are you sure it's not a P4 1.7GHz or a Pentium-M running at 1.7GHz?

The reason you can play newer games with video cards that have a small amount of memory on them is because AGP and PCI Express allow the video card to make use of main system memory. You could take an AGP video card with 4 megs of memory on it and run games on it that require 256 megs of video memory, but it will be very slow since the AGP interface(or PCI Express for that matter) is much slower than using memory that is on the video card itself.

A big question at this point is the video card requirement for many people. Does the game REALLY require a video card/GPU that has DirectX 9 acceleration on it? That's not the same as if a card works with DirectX 9. My guess is that it SHOULD run with just about any card as long as you have vid card drivers that support DirectX 9. Old ATI Rage based or NVIDIA TNT2 based graphics probably won't work here. Mobility Radeon or Geforce Go probably would.