Specs for playing?

on the website its says

* Windows® XP/2000/ME/98
* Intel Pentium® III 1GHz or equivalent
* 512 MB RAM
* CD-ROM Drive
* 500 MB Available HDD Space
* ATI Radeon 9000 or GeForce 4 Ti Series Video Card with 64MB of VRAM
* 16-bit Sound Card
* Internet connection
* Keyboard and mouse

as the recommended. My question is if you have all those but you only have a 32mb video card. How much of a diffrence do you notice in graphics? Im asking for one of my friends that will be playing this on his laptop so upgrading really isnt a option. Anyone have any screenshots from a 32mb videocard?

some people here are using lappies with various results

as they say your results may vwry

what are the actual specs on his laptop? if everything is minimum and the onboard graphics chip only has 32 mb vram, (which most likely is shared with the regular ram on laptops), he is not gonna be a happy monkey. some laptops have a bios setting that lets you increase the video memory. there are also programs out there that might help you out. but it really depends on the specs..

i remember playing the e3e with a p3 933 that had 256 megs of ram and a g4mx420 pci with 64 megs of vram. i got about 8fps..

he has all the max specs BUT the video card. its only 32mb

i dont think there are "max" specs..
if the onboard vid chip is crappy, i doubt the laptop would be much better..

max was the wrong word, its the recommended specs.

You can get away with running the game with a subpar video card, the biggest thing that's going to be affected by it is the atmospheric effects. Before I got a new computer, I was never able to see any of the oft-touted 'glow technology' .. things like the Boss auras wouldn't appear for me, and some of the more advanced textures (Water, for example) looked a little drab (especially compared to how they look under a good video card, very nice reflections, etc.) I would extrapolate that it would end up running at around 20~ FPS .. it's low, but serviceable. However, I would expect to run into some slowdown if you're maneuvering around more complex terrain.
On the bright side, a good, even just a decent video card, doesn't cost all that much nowadays, and it is a worthwhile investment.

Y'know what I think would be cool? (And let me know if you all agree enough for me to post this in the "Suggestions" thread...)

I would like to see a program, freeware maybe, that one could download and run, and if the program works, then you can run Guild Wars. That's all it need do. Sure, the programmers could have fun and make a little video demo-ing the game or something, nothing major, but testing your system to see if the game will work would be the point, or "raison d'être" as snooty hoy-faloy types might say.

Dave III, Snooty Hoy-Faloy Type.

if you run the client, you get an idea of how well the game runs on your computer.
you could alwasy try to download various benchmarks online as well. but i would also like to see an official guildwars benchmark

You can download and run the GW client. If you see the main-menu scene, it's highly probable that you can play the game .

That's what I figured. (And it works for me. ^_^) I just thought it might be a good idea. Kind of a "shake down" program or something. ^_^

Dave III

the problem though with that is he is using a laptop. so its not just a simple snap in to place type of upgrade. you pretty much have ot send it back to the manufacture to get it upgraded and that costs more money.

Being that the universe isn't equally fair when it comes to allowing all persons to have access to broadband, I'm using dial up. My question is simply, how well, or how poor, does the game play using dial up? If anyone has played it through dial up please give me some info. I really want to try the game but if it's crappy on dial up then I really would rather not spend money for a game I won't be able to play.

for the beta you will spend a ton of time downloading what will be on the retail game discs
after the downloading of a place you will go in and out rapidly even with dial up

designed to be a good experience on average dial up connection as most is on your hard drive

NOTE

i am going by what GW says along with comments of dial up playere

Thanks L. After having spent nearly a full 24 hours downloading the stuff for everquest and their ungodly collection of expansions, 13hours downloading FFXI data, and 7 or 8 hours downloading stuff for WoW, I'm more or less used to that part, but as long as the ingame experience isn't hindered by my being on dial up then this game is as good as bought when it hits the shelves.

the actual gameplay does not require much bandwith at all -- arenanet designed the game with this concept first. the only problems with dialup are loading screens and such, especially if you have never experienced that content before and need to download files from servers. it is not as bad as other mmorpgs because you do not download full blown patches; you only download the data that you need immediately, ie if a texture changed in a mission you are playing.
i have also heard of some complaining about bandwith issues when using 3rd party voicechat programs, but most folks seem to manage fine and it is completely optional anyhow..