I think you have no problem what so ever to run the game. You are way above the recommanded settings. Some people have been playing the game with full details on, in qo24X768 with a PIII 450, 128 megs ram and a TNT 2 card, you'll do just fine.

As for drivers, it's always a good idea to have the latest drivers, although I'd just tell you to try the game with your current drivers and if you have issues, try to check the latest drivers. A good place for Ati owner is www.rage3d.com .

You should excpect to run FL with all it's glory

The game was run a P2-450 with 128MB and a TNT2-32MB card
So your system is a serious over kill
There are system requirments posted at the FAQ

From what i understand, the game now requires DX9 (AFAIK)

But since your a fellow ATI user, no worries mate, ATI latest 3.1 drivers are rock solid. Tested on UT2 (demo), Vietcong (Demo) & GTA3. I still would like to see if it does anything in MOHAA, but i have very little time left.

I Have a 9700pro BTW, great card

I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the darkness at Tan Hauser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time like tears in rain. Time to die.

Dont worry, You'll be able to play FL in all its glory

There's my PC specs plastered everwhere ;P hehe

Anyways, Freelancer actually requires you to have DirectX 9 installed. A small improvement in DX9 is actually used in Freelancer so you need it. Freelancer will ask if you want to install DX9 when you install the game.

- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Well Eb, your computer is becoming famous amoung the freelancer community. Hope you don't feel about about *it* being more famous than you

Thanks for the replies. Glad to know my system's up to the task.

I've been quietly watching FL's progress (and sometimes lack thereof) since it was first shown at E3 last century. I'm sure I'll be just as addicted to it as I was to Privateer.

D. Carolan

I'd recommend sticking with the default Directx install of 8.2 that comes with FL. At least, I heard its 8.2. I had SERIOUS problems with DX 9.0 on other games. And as DX 9.0 is uninstallable, had quite a fun time picking its peices out of my system and getting back to 8.1. I'd wait a few months until they do some more tweaking on 9.0.

Well, I guess my computer doesn't want me to post in this thread because it just restarted itself out of the blue the minute I clicked on "Post Reply".

Anyways, sticking with DirectX 8 is probably a good idea, especially if you're on a low end system. My performance in Direct3D based applications has suffered a bit after installing DirectX 9 and there are no applications that actually require this currently to my knowledge besides 3DMark 2003.

If the game is released with dx9, you'll need dx9 to play it. End of story. There'll be some kind of software call to a specific funciton of dx9 that other dx versions won't have. You don't however need hardware that supports all the possible functions in dx9.

As far as I can tell, FL is equivalent to dx7 in terms of hardware requirements (T&L - which can be emulated by the CPU). Dx8.1 brought pixel shaders, dx9 brought more shader functions for flexibility. All releases also bring new software optimisations that better use the previous technologies, hence dx9 will improve a game running on a dx 7 lvl graphics card, especially if the game takes advantage of them.

I also thought that previous versions of dx were uninstallable? Or maybe it just wasn't a good idea to uninstall them.

Hope this helps, I'm not the most knowledgable person so some of the details could well be wrong, but oh well

Kalniel

I have read the game is released with DirectX 9. The most recent demo players have stated the game wants to install DirectX 9. I have directX 9 and have not seen any problems with any of the games I have tried to play yet. Even old Diablo2 runs fine with it. The only problem I had was with 3DMark 2001. I had to load the latest patch for 3D Mark2001 to get it to run with DirectX 9.

Some Microsoft guy admitted that the current build of DX9 is actually the Release Candidate 1, which still has a lot of problems. So do yourself a favor and wait until at least DX9.1 is out.

Ali_bubba I would just like to comment telling you that there is a program you could.ve downloade called Directx uninstaller from guru3d.com It removes dX9 for you.

kalniel - they are technically uninstallable but there are some user-created DirectX uninstaller programs out there. I can't recommend their use though, I nearly had to format my computer after using one once, lots of problems afterwards.

The uninstaller I used has since been discontinued and the only one I can find is here if you absolutely must use it ( note this site is in German, turned it up in a Google search but I could figure out where to download it even though I don't read German ).

What kind of problems are you guys having with Direct X 9? I have played 4 or 5 games with Direct X 9 installed and have not had a noticable problem with any of them. Is this a cautious approach based on results of the prolems that DirectX 8 had when it was first introduced or a real concern based on personal experences with DirectX 9? If the game requires DirectX 9..you had better get use to the fact it is going to install it to run and get any hardware, software conflicts corrected now , not when the game is released.