My cardboard box probably can't play this...

[Rafnel]

But I still want to think it's worth a shot. I'm not going to upgrade, because for a good watt system I need about 100 or so dollars, and then a decent card is 70-100 dollars.

ATi Radeon hd 4200 128mb
AMD Athlon II X4 630 Processor 4 CPUs 2.8ghz
windows 7 64 bit

I don't care if the game is shiny and high res, I just want to be able to play it, I don't care about graphics. I can play oblivion in med settings with 800x600 res and HDR and get 30-60 frames in caves, 20-30 frames in the grasslands, and 30-50 frames in towns.

I want at least 20 frames a second, that's playable and not too choppy. Not like I'm playing a first person shooter where my reflexes have to be as fast as my system. So do you think on lowest settings I can play this game?

[hireath]

ill probably just need a new graphics card to get it looking nice (got 4890)

it's annoying that the graphics in dead island are STUNNING at 1920x1080 highest, with moving detailed foliage and no texture popping with awesome framerate - but i can guarantee that skyrim, like oblivion (and witcher 2), will run like a turd and then i'll feel bad because i have to play on rubbish graphic settings.


dead island engine is godlike.

[Micknator]

Your CPU is OK, it's a quad core and should do the job.

Your graphics card is a whole other story. You say you get not so high FPS (still playable though), maybe it's a good idea to upgrade your card. Don't think you'll have great performance.

[Rafnel]

So even on lowest I won't be able to get 20 frames?

[Micknator]

Originally Posted by Rafnel

So even on lowest I won't be able to get 20 frames?

Perhaps, but 20 frames is pretty low, 30+ frames is more fluid.

[Rafnel]

The only reason I'm asking all this now is to find out whether I should just save my money for skyrim ($60!) or use it to buy other games right now, and I don't want to wait to november to get the exact specs and how far down the lowest settings go.

[MrShooter]

Originally Posted by Rafnel

But I still want to think it's worth a shot. I'm not going to upgrade, because for a good watt system I need about 100 or so dollars, and then a decent card is 70-100 dollars.

ATi Radeon hd 4200 128mb
AMD Athlon II X4 630 Processor 4 CPUs 2.8ghz
windows 7 64 bit

I don't care if the game is shiny and high res, I just want to be able to play it, I don't care about graphics. I can play oblivion in med settings with 800x600 res and HDR and get 30-60 frames in caves, 20-30 frames in the grasslands, and 30-50 frames in towns.

I want at least 20 frames a second, that's playable and not too choppy. Not like I'm playing a first person shooter where my reflexes have to be as fast as my system. So do you think on lowest settings I can play this game?

Judging by how you can still run oblivion with your integrated video card (I remember rinning fallout 3 at 800x600 I'd hazard a guess that you could at the very least run skyrim at low settings. That's the best answer I can give for your question.



In the below wall of text I transform into an annoying pushy salesman:



Even if you can stand playing games with the integrated chip you have now, I really strongly recommend getting something like this G210. This is a $30 graphics card that is a fairly large improvement over the integrated Radeon 4200 you use. The card I linked draws a maximum of 30 watts, so even if you have a really low end power supply there should be no power trouble, certainly not if it can already handle a quad-core athlon.

I've used the less-powerful laptop version of the Geforce 210, and it was capable of running many modern games, particularly source engine and unreal engine 3 games, on medium-high at the low resolution of the laptop screen. For less than the price of a full game I can pretty much guarantee you will get much more enjoyment out of skyrim and all of the other computer games you currently own. Just being able to turn the graphics up a bit more with the game running so much smoother and more fluidly makes more of a difference than you might think, the difference between 20 and 45 fps on the same quality settings is staggering.

If your PC is one of those slim cases with the "low profile" slots like some type of home theater PC, you're going need the unfortunately more expensive low profile G210($43).

Better yet, if you can justify spending $60 on a graphics card if you don't also have to spend money on a power supply, you can get a Radeon 5570 (already low profile, should fit in any pc), which only consumes 40 watts of power under maximum load and can play any game out there, a pretty big upgrade over a 210m and a massive upgrade over the radeon 4200.

None of these cards require extra power connectors and should run as long as your power supply isn't some terrifyingly low wattage firetrap like a 120watt HTPC power supply (I don't even see how that would be possible since your CPU uses up 95watts). As long as your PSU is somewhere in the 200w-300w range it should be fine.

If you want to be able to better justify getting a graphics card upgrade, watch Slickdeals like a hawk. Skyrim has already popped up for $48 +free shipping here, and Deus Ex Human Revolution has shown up on the same website for $38. I've been holding out on preordering skyrim hoping I can get a deal like that. Because Skyrim is a steamworks game, it absolutely does not matter where you purchase it from, even from a different digital distributor, because all you need is the cd key (which you will always get) to permanently assign Skyrim to your steam account, letting you download and play it from steam.