BravesMG

I was planning on buying Command and Conquer: Generals on Wed., but I rarely play PC games and my video card isn't capable. I need a good RTS game to kill a LOT of time so I went looking at Warcraft III. Technically, I have the necessary specs, but only an 8 MB video card. Amazon lists the requirements for Warcraft being (among others) an 8 MB card, but preferrably a 32 MB card. How much of a difference will this make, and do you guys think it would be worth it? I know next to nothing about PC gaming so I'm literally flying blind with most of this stuff, so any help is appreciated. Thanks.

Edit: I had another thread in the PC/DVD Rom forum that I deleted since I thought this might get better responses for the actual gameplay given the requirements.

Groucho

I don't know for sure how well it would run, but probably not great. A video card like that could be a bottleneck on an otherwise acceptable system. You can get a 32mb card quite cheap, so you could easily upgrade if needed.

trigun

It will probably be hard to get an answer to this as I doubt if there's anybody here who has attempted to run WC3 with a video card with only 8 MB. A card with only 8 megs of RAM is probably also lacking in any real 3D power.

You're best bet is to upgrade your PC's video card (and processor and memory if need be) to play the newest games, or stick with the older 2D games like Age Of Empires II.

KingSmoth

I couldn't get it to run on a gHz TBird with a Voodoo3 2K or a TNT 16MB card. It wouldn't run well until I got a GeForce 32MB DDR card. In other words, I doubt it will run on an 8MB at all.

flux=rad

I ran the War3 beta on a Viper 550 16 mb card, a pretty old card. With all of the options down as low as possible, it ran fine on an Athlon 700. Keep in mind that this was the beta, the retail should be tuned a bit more. By the time the retail came out, I had a better video card, so I never tested it with the full version.

Personally, I think that an 8 MB video card would run War3 okay with all of the options turned off (shadows and all that stuff plus all the details at lowest). As long as you have a decent processor and RAM, I think it will run. May not look very nice, or run as fast as possible, but I bet it'd be playable.

I agree with everyone else, though--and upgrade would be ideal. I'm sure you can get a Geforce2 32mb card for under $50 (this card would run war3 great as well as almost any other current PC game).

ClarkKentKY

I tried running the demo on my ATI rage pro turbo 8MB card a few months ago. All i could see were choppy black blocks. But don't take my word for it.

(i'm long overdue for an upgrade)

RoQuEr

I played WC3 for a few months with a TNT2 card that I think has 16MB. Single player and 1v1 games were fine. More than that and battles were unmanagable because refresh rate is too low.

mytzplyx

CHOPPY AS HELL

Joshic

I played WC3 on a 450Mhz + 128MB RAM PC with a Diamond Viper V770D (TNT2 + 32MB). It ran at a very playable speed - but ONLY if I set EVERY graphics and sound setting to the very minium and the resolution to 640x480.

I seriously doubt the game would run at all on a 8MB video card.

Noonan

I've actually played it on a comp with an 8mg card. It was a laptop, so there was no way to upgrade it. I had to play it at 800x600, with all specs set to medium. I also had to remove shadows. It honestly didn't look all that bad, but not nearly as good as it can.