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OK guys, I'm sure I will be wasting the joules required to type this, and I (we) do want to help, but when you ask the already noobish question "Will my PC [with specs attached] run this game", 99% of you so far has not specified a monitor resolution, which is EVEN MORE IMPORTANT THAN CPU OR RAM!

The amount of pixels you are trying to push counts a lot more than CPU or RAM in most cases. CPU only needs to be fast enough NOT to bottleneck the GPU so long it can process basic processes fast enough, and unless you are running less than 4GB of RAM, it is irrelevant how much or what type you have for any recent rig (LGA1366/1155). The bottleneck for most of you will be the GPU, and how limiting it will be is dependent on the resolution.

You're already demonstrating laziness or poor research skills by asking the question, and you don't even bother to provide the right information, so why should we help you indulge your technological insecurities?

I've even seen people using 32bit OS with 6-12GB of RAM. If you're just here to gloat about your superb rig which inner workings you don't even grasp the basics of, you are doing yourself a huge disservice as no one will ever take you seriously again.

Thanks beaucoup!
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TigerLord: OK guys, I'm sure I will be wasting the joules required to type this, and I (we) do want to help, but when you ask the already noobish question "Will my PC [with specs attached] run this game", 99% of you so far has not specified a monitor resolution, which is EVEN MORE IMPORTANT THAN CPU OR RAM!

The amount of pixels you are trying to push counts a lot more than CPU or RAM in most cases. CPU only needs to be fast enough NOT to bottleneck the GPU so long it can process basic processes fast enough, and unless you are running less than 4GB of RAM, it is irrelevant how much or what type you have for any recent rig (LGA1366/1155). The bottleneck for most of you will be the GPU, and how limiting it will be is dependent on the resolution.

You're already demonstrating laziness or poor research skills by asking the question, and you don't even bother to provide the right information, so why should we help you indulge your technological insecurities?

I've even seen people using 32bit OS with 6-12GB of RAM. If you're just here to gloat about your superb rig which inner workings you don't even grasp the basics of, you are doing yourself a huge disservice as no one will ever take you seriously again.

Thanks beaucoup!
While your observations concerning the screen resolution and RAM are important, I have to disagree with your argument.

GPUs do not just push pixels. Only the output processors are involved in pixel pushing. The shader and texture processors have to do work that is dependent on the quality of textures the game is using, and their work doesn't depend on screen resolution.

A marginal GPU is going to give marginal results at any resolution, and possibly fail at high resolution. That's the real lesson to draw from your observation on screen resolution.

CPUs do not just feed the GPU. In a large mostly open world, the CPU has a lot of work to do just culling objects that shouldn't even be presented to the GPU. It also has to load textures from disk in the background, and this drives the requirement for multiple cores.

The developers stated minimum requirements for good reason, and the importance of those should not be belittled simply because you think other factors are more important.
Post edited May 16, 2011 by cjrgreen
Belittling minimum settings? That's what you got from my post? How the hell did you manage that?

The point of my post is that without resolution the specs are totally meaningless. Most people who post "can I run it" threads usually have a medium to high end rig, but feel insecure, and sometimes, very low-end rigs and are just clueless. In both circumstance, a simple Google search would have let them know fast enough, and should they needed more explanation, we would have been happy to help.

The CPU is very rarely the issue with anything other than RTS, as most gaming rigs have duo and even quad core cpus, and that is ample for multi-thread processes. Clock speed counts too, but compared to a GPU's raw power requirements versus CPU and even RAM, it's negligible.

So even if a guy has a 980x OC'd to 5.4GHZ, 12GB of DDR3 in triple channel and a GTX580 1.5GB, if he games at 1920x1080 or 2560x1600, his very expensive CPU and RAM will do absolutely nothing, has pushing those ultra textures at so many pixels will exhaust the VRAM super quickly. He certainly won't be running the game maxed.

So yes, it goes without saying that the quantity of pixels you push is not as important as what those pixels are supposed to be. If you're idling on desktop in Windows 7, you're still pushing the same amount of pixels as if you were running Crysis in full screen, but it's pretty obvious the demands on the hardware aren't the same. That's just common sense.
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TigerLord: Belittling minimum settings? That's what you got from my post? How the hell did you manage that?

The point of my post is that without resolution the specs are totally meaningless. Most people who post "can I run it" threads usually have a medium to high end rig, but feel insecure, and sometimes, very low-end rigs and are just clueless. In both circumstance, a simple Google search would have let them know fast enough, and should they needed more explanation, we would have been happy to help.

The CPU is very rarely the issue with anything other than RTS, as most gaming rigs have duo and even quad core cpus, and that is ample for multi-thread processes. Clock speed counts too, but compared to a GPU's raw power requirements versus CPU and even RAM, it's negligible.

So even if a guy has a 980x OC'd to 5.4GHZ, 12GB of DDR3 in triple channel and a GTX580 1.5GB, if he games at 1920x1080 or 2560x1600, his very expensive CPU and RAM will do absolutely nothing, has pushing those ultra textures at so many pixels will exhaust the VRAM super quickly. He certainly won't be running the game maxed.

So yes, it goes without saying that the quantity of pixels you push is not as important as what those pixels are supposed to be. If you're idling on desktop in Windows 7, you're still pushing the same amount of pixels as if you were running Crysis in full screen, but it's pretty obvious the demands on the hardware aren't the same. That's just common sense.
Since none of this is actually true about real-time 3-D programming, I fear this argument will go nowhere.

Most of the work has to be done before the game world is projected down to screen resolution. This work is going to depend on the world model, texture quality, and the eye candy that is enabled, not on screen resolution. It is going to depend on the CPU's ability to determine what to place in the world and where, and how these interact, and on the GPU's ability to compute shading and textures, before and mostly independent of screen resolution.

Reducing screen resolution will make a marginal system able to play the game on better settings to some degree, but that is all.
Post edited May 16, 2011 by cjrgreen
How is the System Requirements Lab site incompetent? What is your evidence?

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nycplayboy78: ALL

Please check this website out to see if you PC meets the minimum requirements to run The Witcher 2 or any other game for that matter:

http://www.systemrequirementslab.com/cyri/analysis.aspx
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cjrgreen: PLEASE DON'T.

That site is incompetent. It hasn't the faintest idea what dedicated VRAM is, and it mixes up Intel processors.
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salleco: How about me?

Intel Q9400
4 GB ram
GTS 250
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cjrgreen: You should be fine. One reviewer pushed the game all the way to Ultra settings on a quad core and GTS 250, but his frame rate wasn't too good. I'd expect it would play comfortably on High.
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nycplayboy78: How is the System Requirements Lab site incompetent? What is your evidence?
Well, the last poster I had to step in and reassure who was given incompetent advice was told his 2.8 GHz Wolfdale E6300 was a 1.86 GHz Conroe E6300 that couldn't play the game.

Another was upset when his 256MB GPU was detected as 515MB because the site can't tell the difference between dedicated VRAM required by the game spec and shared VRAM that the game doesn't care about.

Anybody else who has spent any time giving tech advice on forums will tell you the same damn thing. Avoid that site, period, and never advise anybody to use it.
Post edited May 17, 2011 by cjrgreen
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Grunthex: Can someone tell me where my graphics card falls with respect to minimum/recommended? I'm not worried about not playing, but these days you need a degree to tell what your graphics card is capable of.

It's a GTX 260, with 896M video ram.

Other than that my system splits the minimum/recommended
(Phenom X3 720 @2.8 GHz / 8 GB RAM)
GTX 260 is the recommended card, and a fine one at that.
For Information: I have Witcher 2 running on my single core. It's a little sluggish but it's playable.

Athlon 64 4000+ (San Diego Core) 2.4 GHTZ
EVGA Nvidia 8800GT 512MB (650 Core Factory Overclock)
Windows XP32
4MB Ram (3MB Operating w/XP tweak)

Playing at 1920x1080 Resolution. I have begun tweaking slightly. I overclocked my 8800 core to 690 which helped reduced reduce sluggishness. Obviously graphics are running at the low end but still look fine.

AMD did a great job with the old Athlon 4000+ :-)