Friday 2010-10-15 Dev. update and Discussion

[F19_lacrits]

Originally Posted by speculum jockey

To those of you building new systems for SOW.

Single video card is the best way to go . . . UNLESS!

1. You are going to be playing at some crazy-huge resolution. Say around 2560x1600 or larger would be a good example of this. At these resolutions your single video card is going to be lagging because there is just too much area to cover itself. In an instance like this, having more than one video card would be beneficial.

2. You have More than one monitor. Lots of the extreme simmers like the idea of having three monitors to give them better peripheral vision. This is basically running into problem #1. Lots of area for one card to cover, and the new problem of maybe not having enough places to plug all them in.

In 90% of the other cases (single monitor, reasonable resolution) buying a single video card will be better than going the Multiple/SLI route. If you look at video card development, it usually only takes a year or so for a new card to be able to outperform two of the previous kings in pair. Buying a single card not only results in better performance (if you wait) but also it saves you a lot of money.

Just some food for thought.

It's way too early to predict hardware requirements.. But your guess is as good as any ones
Don't forget that like with many other games you can probably tweak alot of visual settings in SoW. Also you will have the uncertainty how the game will run on CF/SLI/Hydra systems on release.. It might need a few months maturing with driver updates from AMD/Nvidia. So, your average midrange to high end GPU will not hold you back from experiencing the game.. Though it might hold you back from running it with all visual effects turned on and maxed out.. But who knows, I sure don't and Oleg ain't telling at this stage.
Further, getting two new Fermi GF104 GTX460's and running them in SLI provides you more GPU horsepower than getting one GF100 GTX480.

If you want to upgrade for SoW I suggest wait until there are some reviews out and it's at least been flown by a good bunch of the community before deciding how to spend your upgrade money.. It could turn out that CPU and RAM is more important than having the highest end GPU.. Who knows?