igp that will run Forged Alliance

[Elma]

Looking for a cheap solution so i can play against my son

 

[SlightlyGrilled]

What do you have already, have you got a computer at all?, or are you building one from scratch.
Supreme Commander can only use 1 core, but requires a large amount of processing power, therefore a Haswell i3 would be the best option for playing this game, in terms of GPU nothing super powerful is required, hell I could even run it on a AMD HD 5750; So you might even be able to run it off the integrated graphics in the i3 (HD4400).

Also due to the way this game was made, it runs at the speed of the slowest computer in multiplayer, so if your son's computer is not that fast, there is no need for you to get a faster computer.

And another thing, due to the age of the game the multiplayer server where shut down a few years ago, however a person in the community built a replacement server, it has a strong following and has expanded upon the base game quite a lot, even adding a new race!
It's called forge alliance forever or FAF: http://www.faforever.com/

But back to the point, if you want to play this game you need a Intel processor that's dual core (as it only uses 1 core), RAM wise its a 32bit game so it can only use about 3.5 gig of RAM so you could mange on 4GB of system RAM, Graphics Card wise, I'm not so sure, and I will check on the weekend, but anything of mid range should run this more than fine at max settings.

So to sum up, if you could post what you have at the moment(if you need a full computer or just upgrading one you have) and what your sons computer is, I should be able to help more.

Any other questions just ask.

 

[Kei]

An amd APU should be more than up to the task of running this with most if not all the eye candy on. It ran very well on my old phenom II and i can't really tell the difference now i've moved to an intel i7. I've also played it on my old core 2 duo laptop using a nvidia geforce go 7600 but that is 8 years old now so it's no surprise that it runs a bit slow.

 

[Elma]

i already have a gaming pc but was looking to buy a cheap mobo bundle to upgrade my sons pc . when i first played it years ago(2007) it was on an amd x4200 and i switch to an intel e6600 for better performance .so i guess anything you buy now must be better ?

 

[dazzerd]

What do you have already, have you got a computer at all?, or are you building one from scratch.
Supreme Commander can only use 1 core, but requires a large amount of processing power, therefore a Haswell i3 would be the best option for playing this game, in terms of GPU nothing super powerful is required, hell I could even run it on a AMD HD 5750; So you might even be able to run it off the integrated graphics in the i3 (HD4400).

Also due to the way this game was made, it runs at the speed of the slowest computer in multiplayer, so if your son's computer is not that fast, there is no need for you to get a faster computer.

And another thing, due to the age of the game the multiplayer server where shut down a few years ago, however a person in the community built a replacement server, it has a strong following and has expanded upon the base game quite a lot, even adding a new race!
It's called forge alliance forever or FAF: http://www.faforever.com/

But back to the point, if you want to play this game you need a Intel processor that's dual core (as it only uses 1 core), RAM wise its a 32bit game so it can only use about 3.5 gig of RAM so you could mange on 4GB of system RAM, Graphics Card wise, I'm not so sure, and I will check on the weekend, but anything of mid range should run this more than fine at max settings.

So to sum up, if you could post what you have at the moment(if you need a full computer or just upgrading one you have) and what your sons computer is, I should be able to help more.

Any other questions just ask.

Supreme Commander is multicore and will chew as many up as you have. You can even download an enhancer which will also make better use of as many cores as you have. See the wiki.

 

[SlightlyGrilled]

Supreme Commander is multicore and will chew as many up as you have. You can even download an enhancer which will also make better use of as many cores as you have. See the wiki.

This is partly true, however it's not as multi-threaded as you think, (You can prove this your self by running it on a 3 or more core CPU, it will not use it all up), this is true for me. I believe the game is split in to 2 main threads Sim and Render, these threads cannot to my knowledge be split. Now Sim is the problem here, this is the thread that simulates the whole game and this is single threaded, when this thread slows down, the whole game slows down.

This is why single threaded performance is so important for this game, it is indeed multi-threaded, but only in that some jobs are split, i.e. audio, render and sim, but these jobs themselves are not multi-threaded.

On to the enhancer you speak of, I believe you are talking about core maximizer ( http://forums.gaspowered.com/viewtopic.php?t=15556 ) this program helps, but it does actually slow the game down, what it does help with is the frame rate, so all your units will be moving slower, but the game will have a higher frame rate. This is mentioned in the 3rd paragraph by the author of the mod. It is also mentioned here ( http://www.faforever.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=2827 ), in fact this whole thread talks about how multi-threaded supreme commander really is.



To answer you Elma, I think as Kei said any modern CPU would be powerful enough for this game, but this game can still bring the most powerful cpu's to their knees, this however takes a large amount of units, so my recommendation would be to a ivy-brige or haswell Pentium dual core, and some motherboard to go with it, this way it still remains cheap, and should have the benefit of Intels high single threaded performance. But the i3's are not much more in cost, ~£20 more, however I'm not sure about motherboards.
http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=CP-498-IN&groupid=701&catid=6&subcat=567
OR
http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=CP-492-IN&groupid=701&catid=6&subcat=567

And a side note you can see your speed your running the game at in game by hitting the ' key on your keyboard, and typing in "ren_shownetworkstats" without quotes , this will display your sim speed the game runs at 0, this is normal speed. but the game can run up to +10, and down to -10 it slows down as the game goes on, running this in a game tell you which player is causing the slow down, as the game runs at the lowest speed of all the players.

Oh and one more extra side thing, i found this thread may be of interest, it seems this game is also bottle-necked by the speed of your ram, this person show it very nicely: http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1709516

But as you say anything modern will run this game, they all just run it at different speeds when the going gets tough, this game will still bring a 5ghz i74770K to its knees.