Upgrading thoughts

[MrH2o]

I've been thinking off upgrading my comp for awhile now, still I don't wanna buy a monster just to find out i need to buy something better when Crysis or some other high end game is out later next year. I'm not really sure what the new games requiers so whos better to ask then the makers of the game?

What do you guys recommend (the guys working with games or are in anyway active in the questions) I have 1gbram now, shall i update to 2 or maybe more? What about the gfx card? Are todays card supporting dx10 and are they good enought to run games like Crysis or Unreal 3 powered games? shall I wait until Vista comes out? (one year of bugs and errors?) What about 64bits? If i buy it can i still play todays games?

Please tell me, since you people work with games daily and prolly know whats "hot" more then half a year from now.

[hessi]

dx 10 isnt even released and as far as i know there are no dx 10 cards avaible right now.

hardware requirements should be read after tests of game testing magazines and hardware benchmarks.

getting more than 2GB of RAM now doesnt make sense under a 32bit system. windows can access 3GB actually. (technically it could be 4GB but it isnt possible somehow)

64bit cpus allow your applications bigger "words". 64bit cpus run pretty fast even while in a 32bit mode.

my recommendation: wait until your games have shipped and check out their needs and buy a highendmachine next year!

[Mazy]

I'm waiting until Vista is out. I'm thinking March 07'ish, or whenever it feels right. But it doesn't really matter that much, since my current computer is still doing quite well~

[ReNo]

I'm waiting for Vista and DX10 - pretty much to the day. Doubt I'm gonna buy top spec stuff, but will probably buy one or two pegs down. I'm very tempted to jump on the Core 2 Duo bandwagon rght now as they seem to blow everything away CPU wise, but making that jump means going from AGP to PCI-E, and that means getting a new GFX card at what is not such a great time to buy one. I'm really banking on Vista and the DX10 cards hitting in January as MS are claiming - I don't wanna be forced to wait another few months on my aging system

[Bic-B@ll]

http://www.zeroproof.com/bicball/wishlist7.htm

gogog

[dissonance]

two gigs of ram helps a lot.

vista doesn't matter that much to me, but i'm waiting to see weather or not i'll be able to use DX10 on a non-vista system.

[Belgarion]

as far as I know, from talking to some people at school, DX10 is a Vista only piece of software.

[MJ]

^ correct.

[Fletch]

I'm staying away from Vista as long as humanly possible. I've disagreed with almsot every design decision I've heard of from them. Seems like you get an undodly resource footprint, ridiculously expensive UI, less ability to turn off features you don't like, and more phoning home to Microsoft every 5 seconds.

I'll pass. I loved Win2K, and it took me a long damn time to move to XP Pro (which I still think has too much bloatware to it). I'm not moving until I have a good reason (of which Microsoft has given me none).

[Zacker]

If you computer currently can run what you need, then I see no need to upgrade at all. Personally I have never had a state of the art pc and yet I have always been able to run everything I wanted.

Are todays card supporting dx10 and are they good enought to run games like Crysis or Unreal 3 powered games?

Nope, but with a good gfx card from 2006 you will still be able to run those games, just in either dx9 mode or emulated dx10.

shall I wait until Vista comes out? (one year of bugs and errors?)

All decent graphic cards today will work fine with Vista. Check Nvidia's list here:

http://www.nvidia.com/page/technology_vista_home.html

[Alf-Life]

Obviously the longer you wait the better.... but, I guess it just depends on which games you're waiting on and think are worth upgrading for