About two weeks ago I received five IBM Lenovo ThinkCentre S50 Desktop PC Pentium 4 3.2GHz 1GB RAM 40GB HDD Windows 7 Home Premium 32bit computers (copied and pasted from the site). I also have five Acer FT200HQLbmjj Black 20" 2 x HDMI Touchscreen Monitor; 10-pt Capacitive Touch 100000000:1 Built-in Speakers.
I have family and friends who play a game called Artemis. I have a server, a bit of a powerhouse, that does all the 3D stuff and uses HDMI plugging into a 65" plasma television for the video. I'll explain why this is important in a moment.
The server is not an issue. It uses the same executable program as the clients. The executable looks to see if the minimum DirectX 9.0 with Shaders 2.0 is installed regardless of whether it will be used. The server, again does all the hard graphics work.
Because the clients use the same executable as the server, the program is looking for a compatible Direct3D device despite that they essentially display information or 2D representations of something. I even have these running using 3D Analyze. The problem is that the clients are using an integrated Intel Extreme Graphics 2 card with an 82865G chip. It doesn't support shaders.
The motherboard supports PCI only, has two slots actually, and a 200W power supply.
This is where the question comes in: Thinking outside the box without having to replace five computers, what do you recommend? I am already looking into graphics cards but I don't want to spend $300 to $500 in cards only to find they won't work for one reason or another. They don't have to do much more than the minimum and the computers are dedicated solely to the game. If need be, I can take the DVD and floppy drives out to save power.
Thanks in advance and hopefully you will have that "eureka" moment. :)
I have family and friends who play a game called Artemis. I have a server, a bit of a powerhouse, that does all the 3D stuff and uses HDMI plugging into a 65" plasma television for the video. I'll explain why this is important in a moment.
The server is not an issue. It uses the same executable program as the clients. The executable looks to see if the minimum DirectX 9.0 with Shaders 2.0 is installed regardless of whether it will be used. The server, again does all the hard graphics work.
Because the clients use the same executable as the server, the program is looking for a compatible Direct3D device despite that they essentially display information or 2D representations of something. I even have these running using 3D Analyze. The problem is that the clients are using an integrated Intel Extreme Graphics 2 card with an 82865G chip. It doesn't support shaders.
The motherboard supports PCI only, has two slots actually, and a 200W power supply.
This is where the question comes in: Thinking outside the box without having to replace five computers, what do you recommend? I am already looking into graphics cards but I don't want to spend $300 to $500 in cards only to find they won't work for one reason or another. They don't have to do much more than the minimum and the computers are dedicated solely to the game. If need be, I can take the DVD and floppy drives out to save power.
Thanks in advance and hopefully you will have that "eureka" moment. :)