Kiwi

When I saw the official System Requirements that Bethesda announced, I was not surprised that they were wrong once again. The minimum Geforce video graphics card for Fallout 3 is the 6800; I cannot imagine there having been enough improvement in graphics optimization for a Geforce 6200 to suddenly be usable now. And yet, supposedly the entire Gefore "6 Series" is satisfactory? Sure. Right. I really believe that.

That CPU the OP has *IS* rather poor, but KotOR is old enough that the Celeron's not the problem. The missing video card is what's wrong for him. You shouldn't have had any problem with your Radeon 9800, UNLESS you chose a fairly recent driver for it that conflicted with the game. Many owners of X1000 generation video cards have run into difficulties with KotOR, so you were lucky.

Both KotORs have difficulty with low quality onboard graphics. The minimum is an actual, real, separate circuit board in the video bus slot, and it really takes a lot of tinkering to get anything that much weaker than the minimum to work.

I'm not at all sure that KotOR-I required onboard T&L in the GPU, but this game does, and many onboard video chips, such as those from Intel and SiS, cannot meet that requirement. Only the 3100X and newer Intel chip included it, but getting usable drivers to make those work is usually nigh unto impossible! DirectX 9.0c compatible computer. Operating Systems: Windows 98 SE, Millennium (ME), 2000, and XP. CPU: Pentium III or Athlon class 1 GHz or faster required. Pentium 4 or Athlon XP class 1.6 GHz or faster recommended. Memory: 256 MB RAM required. 512 MB RAM recommended. Graphics Card: 32 MB OpenGL 1.4 compliant AGP or PCX 3D Graphics card with Hardware Transform and Lighting (T&L) Capability required. ATI Radeon 9200 or NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti or better recommended. Sound Card: 100DirectX 9.0c compatible audio device required. CD-ROM: Quad Speed CD-ROM drive required. 16 Speed CD-ROM or DVD-ROM drive recommended. Input Device: Keyboard and mouse required. Well, looking at this next, it does seem that built-in T&L was required for KotOR-I: What are the minimum and recommended system requirements for playing KotOR? MINIMUM SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS: * Windows ME/98 128 MB RAM * Windows XP/2000 256 MB RAM * 1.0 GHz Intel Pentium III or AMD Athlon processor * 4 GB free hard disk space * 32MB OpenGL 1.4 compatible video card with 32-bit color support and Hardware T&L * DirectX 9.0 compatible sound card * DirectX 9.0 (included) * 4X CD-ROM drive * Keyboard, Mouse RECOMMENDED: * 1.6 GHz or faster Intel or AMD processor * 512 MB RAM * NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti, or ATI Radeon 8500 or faster video card. I'm at a loss, after all. It must be your OS. Gotta be.

Many folks burn the SATA drivers to a CD and stream that to a copy of their OS' install/ repair CD. Windows asks for SCSI drivers during its install/ repair install, when it says press F6 to pause for those (and that is when you deal with the SATA drivers). The BIOSes for the earliest MBs that included SATA were still strongly rooted in IDE, as is Windows itself. RAID drivers are entirely different from SATA or SCSI drivers, and is a drive technology used on servers for redundancy/ security. RAID helps a standalone PC that deals with the very largest of files, including sound and video files. It does not improve game performance, and in fact may even be a penalty choice. Given my small PC hardware budget, compounded by the fact that I can't seem to be satisfied with only one or two of them, I don't have the very latest motherboards yet, and cannot speak to the ability to get around the SATA driver impasse without a floppy. I haven't chosen to put any SATA drive into a Primary OS status yet.

It's already been offline for five days without prior warning (since Saturday, or earlier); not even the site's own volunteer staff had prior notice of the closure.

The way I read the two KotOR games' requirements, they were the same. I hardly played KotOR2 at all, but whatever video card I had in the very same old(er) PC used for K-1 seemed to work the very same for me (probably the GF3 Ti-200 I upgraded it to from the prior TNT2 card). For this particular game buyer (OP), something untoward is happening. There are IGPs of all kinds, mostly Intel's, which generally are crap. The only one worse is SiS. Both ATI and nVidia have a couple of onboard graphics chips that blow anything from Intel totally away. The Express200 Chipset uses the silicon that was in their X300 GPU -- not a world-shaker there, but well above either KotOR game's needs. Of all the 2006 IGPs, that was the best of them. For the record, all game playing opinions are very subjective; some undiscriminating folks are happy with what they get for low cost PC investments, even when I consider their results really crappy myself. Trying to run a newer game, such as NWN2 or Oblivion, on an IGP is a bad joke. That is a slide show for real . .

And? Did you see whose thread that was? An official someone? Or perhaps was it MY OWN personal message you saw? I don't work for any of the three companies. I may wish I did, but it doesn't happen to be the fact.

Let's have a LINK to a Chart that either Atari or Obsidian is keeping up to date. The changes have not been reflected on the Wiki site, nor at the SR Test site. Where have you seen the newest data out in the open, not buried in some old tattered message thread?

You would've needed to know two things you omitted. Sawyer should've known what you meant, and didn't try. Before discussing video card, you needed to discuss actual processor CORE Silicon. That's because Core 2 Duo is comparable to P4 CPUs running almost twice as fast. If you have the newest Intel CPU in there, you are well above the 3.0 GHz comparable point. BUT no one can answer the question with certainty, as long as you avoid finding out what video it has (very doubtful you have anything good enough). There are tons of ways to find out. Which brings up the question of WHY both Atari and Obsidian continue to avoid posting any official System Requirements Charts on either of the two web sites?