Oolite Bulletins

I am running an AMD dual core @2.6, 4GB RAM, with an AMD Radeon HD6900 graphics card on Win7, 64 bit, and have excellent playability including Shader Effects. A friend, who would like to be able to play Oolite has a Gateway GT5620 with an Intel dual core @1.6, 2GB RAM, running Win7 32bit. We have tried two different graphics cards - Nividia GeForce 7300 and an ATI 1300 Pro - both with 256MB & shader effects are greyed out. It is playable, as long as no OXPs are installed, but the frame rate is slow.

I think the 1.6, dual core CPU should be able to handle Oolite, and I know he could benefit from a RAM upgrade. My question is: what is the minimum RAM & graphics card requirements to get a decent frame rate & shader effects. Thanks

I'm not fully sure on the RAM side of things.. (Lots of RAM is mostly helpful if you'll have lots of OXPs, particularly ones with lots of big textures in them. I have roughly 200 OXPs installed and 3GB of RAM. It goes reasonable well with Oolite, but I'd prefer to have at least another GB. Unfortunately, 3 is as much as my laptop can take.)

On the graphics card front, there are two aspects. The first is that ideally you want a card that fully supports at least OpenGL 2.1.2, or better, for full shader effects. (If you have OpenGL 3.0+ capability, you'll be future-proofed for quite some time, with Oolite) The other is the amount of dedicated RAM for graphics. The more the better. 256MB is pretty much the low end of the scale if you have lots of eye-candy OXPs installed.

(Oh, and avoid Intel graphics chips like the plague. I'd estimate that 90% of the graphics problems we get asked about on the OoliteBB relate to Intel graphics. OpenGL is not Intel's strong suit.)

Holmes177 wrote:

I think the 1.6, dual core CPU should be able to handle Oolite

I have a 1.7GHz core2 Duo in my laptop, and I'd rate it as just "adequate". Although I've noticed a fair improvement in game performance since some recent optimisations done in 1.79. It actually runs a lot better now than 1.77.1 does, for me, particularly when making witchjumps.

Holmes177 wrote:

Nividia GeForce 7300 and an ATI 1300 Pro

Based on ATI and Nvidia comparsions your card is more than 10 times faster than these, so when you get 60FPS then your friend maybe get 6FPS only.

I was an Intel HD4000 integrated graphics and now I use a Nvidia GeForce 9500 GT, both are playable with all OXPs and full shaders due to the raw powers are at about halfway between your and your friend's cards. I think these are the minimum. Check this list for cards with similar performance.

I just updated the Nvidia graphics card driver & wow, what an improvement, was able to enable shader effects. Haven't tried any OXPs yet, but I think it will run just fine, if we keep the OXPs reasonable.

Thanks

That's the other thing.. always go for the latest drivers.. only very occasionally will they be problematic, and even then, only until a fix is released.