If you were wondering about system performance

[Kevin]

Tom's just released some benchmarking of the beta.

Boils down to low settings and lower resolutions play just fine on graphics cards going back 2 or 3 generations. Completely maxed out settings are playable on cards in the 6670 performance range. CPU load is light even some old dual core processors were just fine.

[Treesh]

I've got an AMD Athlon 64 x 2 dual core processor 5200+, 3.31GB of RAM (since I'm still on XP), and an nVidia GeForce GTS 450 for my machine and the only slowdown I saw was when playing with witch doctors especially, playing with the full party all on screen at the same time (minor slowdown, but still completely playable) and when the NPC would break the blockages on the stairs in the two points in the beta (massive drain on the machine for some reason). Single player though, completely smooth sailing with this old setup, with the exception of the breaking thing. I was really surprised at how well my machine handled it.

[FireIceTalon]

My graphics card is quite outdated, I'm using a ATI Radeon HD 3650. Guess I have to use lowest settings?

[Mavfin]

My graphics card is quite outdated, I'm using a ATI Radeon HD 3650. Guess I have to use lowest settings?

I'm using a 3 year old 512 MB ATI Radeon 4870, and I had graphics all the way up. Not sure how old the 3650 is for comparison.

[Kevin]

My graphics card is quite outdated, I'm using a ATI Radeon HD 3650. Guess I have to use lowest settings?

I'm using a 3 year old 512 MB ATI Radeon 4870, and I had graphics all the way up. Not sure how old the 3650 is for comparison.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/gami...107-7.html

Has a nice listing of GPU "Tiers". The 4870 is actually a couple Tiers above a 6670 even if it is a few generations older. The ATI numbers are generation (the 3,4,5,6,7), then it's I don't know what they call it I consider it the tier within the model 9 is top of the line for that gen so an 8 is up there, then you go to what I consider model (90, 70, 50). Usually the 70's have more memory than the 50's. So older Tiers can be better than new ones. Of course ATI does marketing games with it at times. The 6770 is pretty much just a rebranded 5770 for example.

But to answer RedRadical's question the HD3650 is a few Tiers above the G210 and one tier below the HD 6450 which were the two slowest cards tested. So it should be alright at low graphics setting on it but you may need to drop to 1280x1024 resolution.

[FireIceTalon]

I tried playing on the highest settings on the Beta, and while I was able to play, I experienced quite heavy lag (especially in the pillar area just before Leoric, where all those skeletons spawn). I guess I will try a medium setting to start and see how that works. My screen is 1200x900 but I dont recall this being an option on the Beta.

[Lissa]

My graphics card is quite outdated, I'm using a ATI Radeon HD 3650. Guess I have to use lowest settings?

I'm using a 3 year old 512 MB ATI Radeon 4870, and I had graphics all the way up. Not sure how old the 3650 is for comparison.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/gami...107-7.html

Has a nice listing of GPU "Tiers". The 4870 is actually a couple Tiers above a 6670 even if it is a few generations older. The ATI numbers are generation (the 3,4,5,6,7), then it's I don't know what they call it I consider it the tier within the model 9 is top of the line for that gen so an 8 is up there, then you go to what I consider model (90, 70, 50). Usually the 70's have more memory than the 50's. So older Tiers can be better than new ones. Of course ATI does marketing games with it at times. The 6770 is pretty much just a rebranded 5770 for example.

But to answer RedRadical's question the HD3650 is a few Tiers above the G210 and one tier below the HD 6450 which were the two slowest cards tested. So it should be alright at low graphics setting on it but you may need to drop to 1280x1024 resolution.

ATI's scheme is the following:

First number is generation since the 1xxx series came out (early 2000s). 7 is the present generation (7xxx)

Second number if effective tier within the currect generation. So 9 is the top tier and it goes down from there. So top of current top tier of the recent generation would be 79xx.

Third number if relative strenght within the tier (multiple of 10, but 60 and 80 are not used). 70 is the top here (unless you buy a dual GPU card which then is a 90). So, highest strength of the top tier for the present generation is 7970 (until the dual GPU card comes out which will be 7990).

So a 4870 up against a 3650 is a huge jump in power. The 4870 is two tiers above a 4650 which would in turn be a generation newer than the 3650.

Now, to get around this, you have crossfire (using two card in conjunction which requires two PCI-E slots on the motherboard and a bridge connection between the cards). Then you can typically buy two lesser value cards and have them run as well or better than a single card in the same generation (sometimes newer generation). As I recall, crossfire was new to the 4xxx series and wasn't around with the 3xxx series (but I could be misremembering).

So, you can get more bang for your buck if you can crossfire (or SLI if you go with NVidia), but you will require a large PSU to handle the situation (typically a single card draws anywhere from 150W to 300W depending on the card) so you're PSU needs to be able to handle that along with everything else in the case (typically you're looking around a 650W to 700W PSU if you want to crossfire/SLI at the minimum so you have some head room).

[Kevin]

ATI's scheme is the following:

Which is pretty much what I said. Though I can see where I wasn't clear. The Tiers I refer to are from the link to Tom's site. Those tiers are based on the extensive benchmarking of the cards. I also used tier when talking about the ATI nomenclature. I can see where that could get confusing, but I was consistent within each paragraph.

The 4870 benchmarks a couple of "Tom tiers" above a 6670 (which performs around the same level as a 4830, and 5670) even though it is 2 ATI generations older. The "ATI Tier 6" cards (so 46xx, 56xx, 76xx) are generally pretty average for that ATI generation and often out performed by an older generation "ATI Tier 7" or "8" card (and of the course the 9 cards which as you mention are dual GPU on single board designs). I mostly mentioned that because while Mav's card is 3 years old it's still a fairly solid card that offers real world performance that is relatively close or better than some of the cards that are only one generation behind current.

So again my final paragraph stands. Based on the benchmarking data and the "Tom's Tiers" the HD 3650 is lumped one "Tom Tier" below the below the 6450 which was used in the original link for the D3 bench marking. It's also several "Tom Tiers" above the G210 that was also in the original link. So RedRadical can get a good idea of where his card would have performed in those benchmarks.

You of course can look at the big GPU charts if you want to really gauge if the "Tom tiers" are out of whack or to get more granularity, but as I mentioned the "Tom tiers" are pretty decently defined on that page.

[DeeBye]

I'm surprised that this has not been brought up yet, but video card performance is HEAVILY dependent on screen resolution. Saying that your <insert video card here> runs the beta just fine means nothing if you don't say what your screen resolution is.

I ran the beta with a AMD 4890 1GB @ 1920x1080, and my gameplay was a bit choppy on high details, but pretty smooth at medium details.

[Mavfin]

I'm surprised that this has not been brought up yet, but video card performance is HEAVILY dependent on screen resolution. Saying that your <insert video card here> runs the beta just fine means nothing if you don't say what your screen resolution is.

I ran the beta with a AMD 4890 1GB @ 1920x1080, and my gameplay was a bit choppy on high details, but pretty smooth at medium details.

I was using the 4870 512 MB DDR5 on 1920x1080, high settings, smoothly. Got an i7 (Xeon) 2.67 GHz driving it on a 1333 or 1666 MHz board/bus. It runs Rift on high graphics, too.

[Treesh]

I'm surprised that this has not been brought up yet, but video card performance is HEAVILY dependent on screen resolution. Saying that your <insert video card here> runs the beta just fine means nothing if you don't say what your screen resolution is.

I ran the beta with a AMD 4890 1GB @ 1920x1080, and my gameplay was a bit choppy on high details, but pretty smooth at medium details.

Oh, good point. I dropped mine down from 1440x900 to (I think) 1280x800. I could still run it ok at the higher resolution (the native resolution of my main monitor), but it was a LOT smoother once I bumped it down one.