Thief III System Specifications

[zingbat]

Then its a cpu upgrade for me. I think that a 2 Ghz cpu should be enough.

[DriftRoot]

I know there's a place where people will be posting the results of running the game on their varied system, but my question at this point is what really bad things will happen if we try to play on an "inferior" system. The only thing I'm lacking is the whiz-bang graphics card, mine is a GeForce MX series (whiz-bang at the time *sigh*). I've got 256ddr, though that's easily fixed if need be.

I'm winding down with some of my other computer pursuits at the moment and if I can't shift over to T3 I'm going to have nothing to do to fill that void.

[Sluggonics]

Hmmm... I've got enough memory, and a Radeon 9700 Pro, but my processor is only a P4 1.3. Guess I'll give it a try, at least. I really don't want to get it for the Xbox-- the only thing I ever use the console for are sports games.

[Briareos H]

DriftRoot,
I don't think it will run with your GeForce MX, as the MX and GO series don't handle Pixel Shading, which is needed for TDS.

[Azal]

What I'm going through now is hunting down good heat pipes to dramatically reduce my PC's noise.

Having a computer with a lot of grunt is great when you're about to play T3, but the standard fan farm needed to keep things cool seriously interferes with the games most central feature - it's amazing sound.

I've piped my video card with a Zalman heat pipe cooler and am currently looking for a decent heat pipe cooler for my CPU. With the two of them combined, I'll be able to reduce my fan farm to one "noiseless" 80mm case fan and one PSU fan.

I'm not about to mess around with water cooling quite yet but I think going from six fans roaring away to having only one noisy fan should make a more complete thieving experience.


It's the second best solution to getting a Zalman noiseless case which are stupidly expensive and only come with a 350W PSU.

[chano]

I wonder if the game will run on a PIII @ 700MHz, 160MB of pc 100 and a Radeon 8500, and Win. 98. Deus Ex II did, I had to play it at 800 X 600 but I could turn all the details up and still maintain my PFS at about 20 or so. Surprised the hell out of me, I thought the game was just going to sit there and laugh at my old cpu, but it worked fine. Then I tried the game on my Athlon 1700 + with a 1G of ram and a Radeon 9800 pro, but the performance wasn’t what I was expecting, I could run the game at higher resolutions though, but still I didn’t get the 60+ fps that I thought I was going to get. Then I tired that game on the 1700 machine but with the radeon 8500, the performance was just a little better than what I got with the 700 machine. Does anyone know what’s going on? How come the 700 machine handles the game so well even though it’s about 700MHz below the minimum system requirements? Will thief III work the same way?

[john9818a]

Laptops tend to fudge a bit on things like memory and power management, compressed keyboards DO NOT really work the same as a standard 104 key keyboard does, most laptop LCD screens are slow to refresh and cause 'ghosting' of images and sluggish framerate, and the combo CD/DVD drives that some of them use cannot read certain discs...just to name the main problems.

If you have a hot-rod laptop that plays other 'advanced' games (especially newsish FPS type games) then you will likely be fine. But...no, we never test on laptops due to the above listed reasons.

I tried playing Thief II on a Compaq laptop I had a few years ago. Even though it was a P4 it ran hot (even hotter than the heat problem Compaqs had) and the shadows were barely noticeable. It was nearly impossible to see in the daytime anyway.

[john9818a]

I wonder if the game will run on a PIII @ 700MHz, 160MB of pc 100 and a Radeon 8500, and Win. 98. Deus Ex II did, I had to play it at 800 X 600 but I could turn all the details up and still maintain my PFS at about 20 or so. Surprised the hell out of me, I thought the game was just going to sit there and laugh at my old cpu, but it worked fine. Then I tried the game on my Athlon 1700 + with a 1G of ram and a Radeon 9800 pro, but the performance wasn’t what I was expecting, I could run the game at higher resolutions though, but still I didn’t get the 60+ fps that I thought I was going to get. Then I tired that game on the 1700 machine but with the radeon 8500, the performance was just a little better than what I got with the 700 machine. Does anyone know what’s going on? How come the 700 machine handles the game so well even though it’s about 700MHz below the minimum system requirements? Will thief III work the same way?

The game was leaning mostly on the GPU. That is what was said about Thief III. I've got a Pentium Celeron 1.2GHz and I'll at least try it before I buy a P4 and motherboard.

[Mr. K.]

Yep, John. Anyways, the demo shouldn't take too long to arrive, if you can wait for it. And if you absolutely have to have the game as soon as it hits the store, i guess that if you could run DX:IW, you'll be able to do T3.

[Mazzo]

I have actually thought about at least giving it a try on my Duron 800 MHz/ATI 8500 setup. The worst it can do is crash...then I'll know that an upgrade is inevitable.

[Lord Garrett]

*does the happy dance* i got my FX 5600 todayyyyy, YAYYYYY

KOTOR has shading now and its more colorful, weeee!!

BRING ON THIEF, BABY!

[Glenn Italiano]

This is my upgrade plan I sorted out today

P4 3.0Ghz CPU
GigaByte 8IPE1000 Pro 2 MotherBoard (Is overclockable on the FSB speed)
512 mb PC-3200 ddr (Will get maybe 1 or 2 gig later on)
Geforce 4 FX5700 256mb vivo (Better than my poxy Geforce 2 MX 32mb card

Total upgrade price is $1050 which is cheap for me

[DriftRoot]

I know about the pixel shading problem, my question is what will this mean for my game play aspirations? Is my computer (or rather, my vid card) flatly going to refuse to run TDS or is it going to try but only give me weird neon colors or something?

I cannot afford a new graphics card right now!! This is sooo unfair!

[S_Hole]

it won't even start up
you could perhaps get a tweak program to lie to thief that your card does support shaders
the effects might be psychedelic
but most likely you would just get a black screen

[Lord Garrett]

ok, i'm able to run at 800x600 with slightly adjusted shadow detail. i need more RAM for my system, then it should run better

P4 1.8Ghz
256MB RAM
GeForce FX 5600 256MB

oh, good news for FX 5200 owners, it runs well as long as you at least have 512MB of RAM in your system

[Scarlet]

My graphics card isn't on the supported or the unsupported list - does anyone know where I can find out if it will be compatible with Theif 3? My system [just!] meets the other requirements and I've pre-ordered the game from a non-returnable source, so I'll need to cancel it if it's not going to work. I've had a look through this thread and can't see my card mentioned.

It's an NVIDIA GeForce2 MX 400, if that's any help.

[Fafhrd]

It won't run on Windows 98 at all. Gives me the "T3MAIN.EXE appears to be corrupt, please reinstall and try again" and "Failed to start T3MAIN.EXE [error: 0x0000000b]" messages.

[masterthief3]

It won't run on Windows 98 at all. Gives me the "T3MAIN.EXE appears to be corrupt, please reinstall and try again" and "Failed to start T3MAIN.EXE [error: 0x0000000b]" messages.

NOOOOOOOOOO!
*Bangs head on wall* NO NO NO *OW* NO NO NO *OW!.

*crawls into shadow and begins sucking his thumb*

[S_Hole]

NVIDIA GeForce2 MX 400

it will NOT work
100% sure
thief3 requires pixel shaders, and gf2 line of cards did not have any
it was The New Thing for the gf3 line of cards
which should come at a Very cheap price today

[DriftRoot]

Drat, and I'm not about to stick something in my computer that has a good chance of making it even more ill than it already is.

Ok, now to find some naive gamer-wanna-be that will think my GeForce4 MX 420 is kewl and buy it off me for as much as I spent on it ...

At this rate I'm going to need a new monitor, too, this one's pushing four years old.

HEY! If the gf3 line has pixel shader than why the heck doesn't my gf4 have it?! It must be more than just this factor that is causing my card to be unsupported. According to IS, the entire MX line is not going to work with TDS.

[masterthief3]

*removes his thumb and crawls out from the shadow*

Oh well... guess dual booting can't hurt...

*Runs off with a smile on his face...*

[cheese_thief]

HEY! If the gf3 line has pixel shader than why the heck doesn't my gf4 have it?! It must be more than just this factor that is causing my card to be unsupported. According to IS, the entire MX line is not going to work with TDS.

Because the name is a snare to get stupid people to buy it?

"OMG! Look! It's a GeForce 4!"
"Yes, Billy, you can have it."
"YAy, now we just need PcPeople to put it in!"

GF4 MX is based on the NV14 chipset, more commonly called, the Geforce 2. A GeForce 2 is a DirectX 7 card and is not capable of handling programmable pixel sharders, such as pixel shader 1.1.

[stevo]

HEY! If the gf3 line has pixel shader than why the heck doesn't my gf4 have it?! It must be more than just this factor that is causing my card to be unsupported. According to IS, the entire MX line is not going to work with TDS.

The reason your card is unsupported is precisely because it doesn't support pixel shaders, which TDS requires. In fact, none of the MX series of cards have support for pixel shaders, and that is why none of them will work with TDS.

Damn, cheese_thief beat me to it!

[Wynne]

My system:
2.7ghz processor
504MB of RAM
GeForce FX 5200

I'm running at:
800 by 600
Lowest Shadow Detail
Bloom On
Expert Difficulty

To anyone who's been telling me "I'll eat my hat if Thief will be playable with that card!" well... I've got some barbecue sauce for that hat right now, because Brodieman was right. Works quite nicely; I was trying to be safe for a while, but I'm actually considering bumping the resolution up a bit and seeing how it runs then. All I can say for now is that I haven't had problems in mission one--not even in the towering outer mansion area.