PopularTechnology.net are reporting on the recent Battlefield 2 graphics card controversy. It appears that the game will not run on an Nvidia Geforce 4 or lower, despite the fact that the card has enough mustard to run the game. EA has said they have no plans to release a fix for users of these lower end cards.As a PC Gamer you expect to upgrade, you expect that at some point your hardware will not run the latest games acceptably. Battlefield 2 does not even give you that option. It attempts to make all non DirectX 9 compatible video cards obsolete. Which means all GeForce 4 and older video cards will not run Battlefield 2. You cannot even start up the menu. Neither Electronic Arts nor the game's developer DICE have any plans to fix this. Even though the GeForce 4 line of video cards has enough horsepower to render the game it is not compatible with Pixel Shader 1.4. Emulation to Pixel Shader 1.3 would easily make the game playable on these cards but redundant texture checks make this difficult to implement.
EA's response to questioning was:We've been talking to Benjamin Smith on the development team about this. There are no plans to implement GeForce 4 support in a patch. The engine was not built to run acceptably (performance or appearance-wise) on the GeForce 4 series of cards.
Despite the fact that the game will run on a lower end card, a Radeon 8500 will render the game and at a slower pace than the Geforce 4, the only difference being that it supports Pixel Shader 1.4. Kind of a kick in the ass for all you Geforce 4 owners, in my opinion they still pack a small punch.PopularTechnology.net
Related:
Battlefield 2 demo, mirrors and torrent
Official website
Dice
EA Games
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