Meeting System Requirements?

[Speropolis 1]

So I just bought the game only to find out that I can't run it on my older laptop. Looking at buying a friend's Dell XPS M1330. Does anyone know if the Nvidia Geforce 8900M GS video card and an Intel Core 2 Duo will work for the game? On the back of the package it says these are the System Requirements:

OS: Windows Vista SP1

Video Card: Nvidia GeForce 6600 GT/ATI X1600 or better, 256 MB RAM

Processor: Intel Pentium IV 2.5Ghz or AMD equivalent, Laptop: Centrino 2 or better

However, I have no clue what is better than these listed above. None of it makes sense to me. I'm assuming as numbers go up, the better they are? I'm just not sure if the product I might be buying will work for the game or not.

Thanks

[joshphillips999 0]

Well before I fully explain, there are two sets of requirements to play this game. The first is the minimum requirements and the second is the recommended requirements. If you meet the minimum, you will be able to play the game. If you meet the recommended, you will be able to play the game at good grapical qualities.

The minimum graphical requirement to run the game is, as you said; a 6600GT/ATI x1600 or higher. If you have cards similar to this, you'll probably only be able to play the game at very low graphical quality (There are 4 qualities; very low, low, medium and high). The recommended graphical requirement is an 8800/ATI 3850, or higher (which admittedly, is a LOT faster than the minimum requirements).

The 8900M has similar performance to an 8800GTS, which pretty much meets the requirement to run the game. You should be able to run it atleast on medium graphics (which to be honest isn't very much worse than high), with full AA (8x). However, I'm not sure how it would run on high, may lag a bit with high graphics and full AA (anti-aliasing). You might be able to do 2x or 4x on high, though.

Not entirely sure where you would come, but you definately meet the minimum requirement and definately will be able to run the game on one of the better graphical qualities (medium or high).

About 4x as fast a 6600GT, trust me. Go for it, I'd say. 

[billmallon 0]

to joshphillips999: in your reply to this post you mentioned the term 'anti-aliasing'. I have seen this term before but I don't really understand what it means and what its effect is on game play. Can you help with a very simple explanation that a dummy like me can understand ? thanks.

[Speropolis 1]

thanks joshphillips999.

[joshphillips999 0]

Originally posted by: billmallon

to joshphillips999: in your reply to this post you mentioned the term 'anti-aliasing'. I have seen this term before but I don't really understand what it means and what its effect is on game play. Can you help with a very simple explanation that a dummy like me can understand ? thanks.quote>

Well, you know when your playing on a game, and you change your position. On objects, without anti-aliasing, they may have rough edges and textures, much like this:

If you click the zoom button, you can see on roads and buildings that they have rough textures which frankly look horrible. The rough textures also appear to in different directions depending on the perspective at which you are looking at the game.

Anti-aliasing removes the rough textures to make it smoother, the higher multiplier you have of AA (anti-aliasing), the more effective it will be. They usually go up in 2's (ie 2x AA, 4x AA etc.). The highest amount of anti-aliasing on cities xl is 8x, and that pretty much rids the game of the vast majority of rough textures.

This is an example of a screenshot with lots of AA:

Although it is not perfect, it gets rid of all the horrible-ness you see in the first picture, and its not so bad really. Remember, both pictures aren't actually at ground level either; usually it would look a lot better than both of them.

However, this comes at a cost. It requires a lot of graphics power to use anti-aliasing, and from no AA to full AA, could make your frame rate of the game (how fast the game is playing, whether it is lagging or not) decrease by a lot, because it takes a lot more power and time to do it. however, if you have a good graphics card, this will not be a problem. Anything around a GTS 250 or higher should be able to have high graphics AND 8x AA, for a long time.

Hope this was a good explanation; if you need any further explanation just ask

[billmallon 0]

thank you joshphillips999 for the explanation. from your previous reply about graphics cards, I realize that my laptop is about  half way between the 'required' and 'recommended' ratings so I'm probably going to have to upgrade to be able to appreciate the game graphics. I'm reluctant to invest in something now with a faint hope that MC will actually release CitiesXL 2011 and it may need more than 'power' than the current game. Do you think that should be a legitimate reason to wait to pruchase something now ? again, thank you for the reply.

[Xidillon 0]

Im not so sure AA matters. My game keeps kicking off my AA settings every time I hit accept. I hope something gets done about these graphics for 2011. SLI support would be nice as well as support for new gen hardware. If the game was made to better use more system resources it would be much more pleasurable to play and a lot of us feel this way. Keeping it playable on older hardware is a must as it makes it available to more people. If you can get your hands on an 8800/gts240 or 9800gtx/gts250 you should be golden. but if you have a larger resolution you may want to look further, say anything over 1280x1024. Dont know about ATI cards. Im really not impressed with them.