A Friend of Mine ASke the Following Question of Cliffs of Dover .....

[ChiefRedCloud]

....... How would you answer him.


Chief I have lost track of updates of Clodand what others are saying about CloD. On a i7 PC with `12 gigs of ram and a ATI Radeon HD 5870 card, is it possible to fly and enjoy this flight sim yet? You told me once to wait and wait I have. I wanted to flight sim from the first second I saw a YouTube of it but I have waited till the program was 100% corrected. Can you please tell me, is the waiting time over or do I still stand by.

wc/john

Now quite a ways back, around the time I decided to invest in CloD and before I found ATAG, I was not sure whether I wanted to indorse CloD to any of my friends. I still today tell everyone that it is NOT a finished product, but that it is flyable and fun. I would be interested how you might answer my friend.

:inq:

[ATAG_Snapper]

You answered him fine IMHO, Chief.

Assuming he's running Win 7 64-bit (since he has 12 Gigs RAM), his video card is probably the limiting factor to running CoD. Nonetheless, he should be fine at medium settings.

Not everyone would agree, but I usually tell people who ask if they should wait "yes -- WAIT!". Reason: if they are anywhere near keen to fly CoD they would've simply bought it already for the 15Ј (or whatever it costs now). As you correctly told him, the game is far from finished and it's unlikely he'd be happy with it in its current incomplete state. And he'd blame YOU for steering him wrong. Better to hold off until it's fixed by patch or by sequel.

The one who's dead keen will have it installed already and be pestering you for best menu settings, online play tips, etc etc.

[ChiefRedCloud]

The one who's dead keen will have it installed already and be pestering you for best menu settings, online play tips, etc etc.

OH! You mean like me ...... :laugh: And I didn't mention that I know zilch about ATI cards since I use Nvidia ... thanks for your comment :thumbsup:

[ATAG_Snapper]

EXACTLY like you, Chief, and the rest of us. :laugh1

Obviously, I don't know your friend, but he may be interested more in something like Wings of Prey. AFAIK it would run well on his system, the graphics are excellent, there is a strong online community, and you can crank 'n bank fairly early on without oil covering the windscreen and your plane shaking its rivets loose! LOL

[ChiefRedCloud]

How does an ATI HD 5870 compare to a Nvidia 450 or 560? I had an Nvidia 450 and for the most part flew well. I now have a GTX 560 and it runs real well. I use mostly medium settings and am, for the most part, very pleased.

[ATAG_Snapper]

There's others here that can answer far more knowledgeably than me....but a lack of knowledge has never stopped me before! :)

I think, roughly, the 5000 series of ATI (now AMD) cards are similar in performance to the Nvidia 400 series. I was able to run CoD with a Nvidia GTX 285 card on medium settings, except over towns. I upgraded to a 560 Ti and it made a huge improvement in frame rates with features turned up. I now run 2 x 560 Ti cards in SLI. I don't get any real performance improvement in terms of frame rates, but the cards run at about half each of what a single card does (ie 35% - 70%) and the temps of each card is lower than when I run a single card. However, if SLI were working right, then both cards should be working at least 85% or more for even better frame rates, especially over cities.

[[FFCW]Urizen]

The Radeon HD5870 in Average performs on the Level of a Geforce GTX470/GTX560, there are Games were the former performs better and games were the latter performs better. Now considering CloD: Big Problem on Radeon HD5870 is its rather "low" amount of RAM, as most come with only 1 Gig of VRam. I Maxed all Settings (including SSAO) and ran the BlackDeath track. Peek GPU Load were 80%, since i used GPU-Z for this Test, i have no Data on VRAM Usage, but i guess it was beyond 1 Gig. Resolution were 1680x1050. With Settings to Medium and SSAO deactivated, i had a Peek Load of 75%. Judging just by GPU Load, she would do fine, the main Problem is VRAM Usage.

You might wanna lend him your Steamaccount and let him test the Game out, so he can make a decision. As long as he uses Steam in offline mode (except for installing CloD) and SteamGuard is deactivated, you will have no Problems playing online.

[ChiefRedCloud]

Again my thanks to all for your responses