Which pre-Battlefield 2 game currently has the largest player base?

Enhanced Interrogator

[H]ard|Gawd
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I'm going to be moving for a year internship in march and won't have my desktop anymore. So my only gaming option will be a laptop with intel HD 4500 integrated graphics. So any Battlefield from the last decade isn't really going to be an option.

So which of the older Battlefields has the most active community?
 
You can give battlefield heroes a shot. Does it have to be BF? CS 1.6 still has tons of players.
 
pre-bf2 heros is not pre bf2 it is post :) though it should run well enough. a ton of steam games should run fine, and well there is uber amount of emulators you can use to play legacy Nintendo, genesis, playstation and such games if it strikes you :)
 
He should play BF:1943.. yea yea it's new not old but still. Then there is BF Play4Free as well.
 
BF2/2142 were great in their own respects, any low end gpu will play these quite well, by low end I mean like a $60 gpu something like say a 7650 or so Radeon or 630 or so Nvidia will be ample for the older BF titles.

Anyways, previous BF games as in games using Refractor engine 1 (BF2 up to Bad Company used Refractor 2 everything since and including Bad Company has used various versions of Frostbite) They all were decent games for their time, and 1942/Vietnam were quite good especially with the top down conversion mods for them including Desert Combat Final/Desert Combat Extended.

Anyways here is a smaller list
http://forum.notebookreview.com/gaming-software-graphics-cards/357712-games-intel-gma-4500mhd-2.html

Though obviously the HD 4500 is anything but a great IGP it certainly should be able to play BF2 era type games even slightly newish games at medium and low settings depending on the resolution you try to run it at, I think the drivers in question and/or the OS will have the biggest factor in if it will play or it will not, BTW what CPU is bundled with that graphics side, cause obviously the cpu will be a major factor in this (should not matter nearly as much for legacy titles, but for slightly higher spec ones it will. Hell I know oblivion will play just fine on things it should not, I had it playing on an Nvidia 6150LE IGP with Athlon 5600+ ran VERY well almost surprisingly for 1440x900)
 
fk BFP4F its crap compared to what BF2 was IMHO looks worse plays worse, at least with BF2 there is TONS of mods that make a great game excellent such as AIX :)
 
Thanks for the suggestions, I guess I can pick up BF2 next time it's on sale and see if it runs ok. But to go back to my original question: do they all have at least a small amount of active players? I just want someplace to go to get my conquest fix. From a quick read it sounds like some think BF Heroes dumbed the formula down too much.

BTW what CPU is bundled with that graphics side

I'm about to upgrade to a 2.2ghz C2D (T7500), with 3G RAM.
 
Well looks like Vietnam isn't available anymore, no telling if any servers still exist. Guess I'll give 1942, 2, and 2142 a try.
 
Vietnam is "newer" then 1942 :)
BF2 still has many folks that play it, though many are for the mods has been awhile since I played it ~ years but many in my clan still server hop in it. 2142 I am not at all sure but BF2 definitely had the better following, seems DICE/EA do not understand folks like good games not the ones with tons of tech and extra crud, hence why BF2 and the ones previous had a major cult following where folks put 100k+ hours into it, and yet the newer ones that there is tons to do in, the average person only puts maybe 50 hours in :p

Which os, XP? if Vista/7-8 use 4gb+ if possible it will help performance and which cpu does it currently have? a C2D is hardly what I would call and upgrade, but trust me I understand more then anyone about pinching pennies and hoping it makes 2 of them :)
 
Which os, XP? if Vista/7-8 use 4gb+ if possible it will help performance and which cpu does it currently have? a C2D is hardly what I would call and upgrade, but trust me I understand more then anyone about pinching pennies and hoping it makes 2 of them :)

Windows 7, currently with 2GB but I'm about to add another 1GB, which I thought would be enough considering I'm not going to play any games that use over 512mb vram.

And my current CPU is a single core 2.2ghz celeron. I just downloaded 1942 since it's F2P now, and at maxed out settings @ 1024x768 I couldn't get a solid 60fps. Very sad, but I imagine when I put in the extra 1GB and the C2D things will be a lot better. Total cost of those two components will be $10.25 by the way, so even if it doesn't get me playing BF2 online I really won't be able to complain.
 
$10.25 for upgrade, well then I wouldn't complain either :p. single core 2.2 Celeron to a core 2 duo 2.2 should help quite a bit(dual core, more cache, better IPC etc) 1024x768 is not a massive resolution no, but maxing out settings when it is cpu limited is not always the best starting point regardless of the resolution or chip one is using, you are igp and Intel at that, and are already forcing the cpu to use a bad resolution so it will not get the most out of what it has (granted it doesn't have enough horsepower to run much of a higher resolution either though it can help)

extra gb of memory should help for sure, just do make sure you stick with dual channel mode as this does help performance. More memory is not always as good as more channels unless you are severely memory bottlenecked, so if you have 2 stick in there already best to get another 2 sticks if you can use them or bigger sticks then what is currently being used at maybe 1066 speed instead of 800 or whatever it is you plan on using (if supported of course)
 
You could try Project Reality for BF2. I think a lot of people still play that.
 
Ah...yeah I've never actually played it, but I've watched Dslyecxi play it and it looked decent.
 
extra gb of memory should help for sure, just do make sure you stick with dual channel mode as this does help performance. More memory is not always as good as more channels unless you are severely memory bottlenecked

Well I have 2 slots (1 currently taken with 2GB), and from what I understand, all modern intel boards can run in flex mode, so I will have 2 of my 3 GB's running in dual channel. 4GB probably would give me better chances with BF2 though, but I'll wait and see where this takes me. I have Aero and all that stuff turned off, and Lubuntu is my primary OS for this thing so all non-Windows exclusive games and software are running on that. That should keep my memory usage in Windows 7 to a minimum.
 
its a toss up, I know myself IF I turn off Aero so basically give me best performance it actually makes my performance worse, not better.

Current Intel based can do flex mode(f I recall this was with Sandy bridge not prior, easiest way to see this is with cpu-z as this will tell what the memory is running in be it single channel, dual channel, asymetric etc) but it is still not as good as running a proper dual channel/triple/quad as the memory controller still needs to populate said memory so it is better to have equal amounts on the various channels (of course at the same speeds and timings) whenever possible in this case if there is 2 slots, get another 2gb stick if you can so you would have 4gb total instead of 3.

and am not sure this directly applies to laptop type boards either?
http://www.intel.com/support/motherboards/desktop/sb/cs-011965.htm#flex
 
Added the CPU and RAM, the most interesting development is that CPU-Z is reporting dual channel-symmetric with one 2GB stick and one 1GB stick. They are the same brand and speed, so maybe that's why they can work in that way.

Changing the processor was easy, and my laptop is certainly useable now. Psychonauts went from unplayable to somewhat playable. Hotline Miami still can't be played in an HD resolution, no biggie though since it still looks trippy and retro at 312p. Joined a 64p match in BF 1942 and didn't dip below 40fps on max settings. Jamestown went from unplayable to playable. However, all of those games besides 1942 are poorly optimized, so they're not good benchmarks. Looking forward to trying BF2 once I see it on sale for $5.

Anybody know if I need to reinstall chipset or graphics drivers now that I've gone from a single to a dual core? Like I wonder if the intel HD drivers oriented to a single core installation when I first got the laptop.
 
glad to hear performance is a good bump and your happy.

As far as I know, no you do not need to install and specific drivers that you went from 1 cpu to the next, the only thing that really matters is if the BIOS properly supports the new cpu installed.
 
I think you may need to do some configuration with windows to get it to properly use your dual core. IIRC if windows is installed with a single core processor the HAL is set so that it will only utilize a single core.
 
Added the CPU and RAM, the most interesting development is that CPU-Z is reporting dual channel-symmetric with one 2GB stick and one 1GB stick. They are the same brand and speed, so maybe that's why they can work in that way.

Changing the processor was easy, and my laptop is certainly useable now. Psychonauts went from unplayable to somewhat playable. Hotline Miami still can't be played in an HD resolution, no biggie though since it still looks trippy and retro at 312p. Joined a 64p match in BF 1942 and didn't dip below 40fps on max settings. Jamestown went from unplayable to playable. However, all of those games besides 1942 are poorly optimized, so they're not good benchmarks. Looking forward to trying BF2 once I see it on sale for $5.

Anybody know if I need to reinstall chipset or graphics drivers now that I've gone from a single to a dual core? Like I wonder if the intel HD drivers oriented to a single core installation when I first got the laptop.

That's not what's going with your memory. You need to understand what multi channel is, and also that you do not need it outside of workstation and server applications. It's not going to increase performance, in fact you are actually going to take a hit for latency with multi channel. For workstation and server applications that need it, well you need it or performance goes to shit. Outside of those situations you get no gains (ie gaming, web browsing, office, facebook, most of what "enthusiasts" actually do, it's a professional level item, outside of that it's just for e-peen and raising the prices of gear you sell to idiots).

Intel has used flex for a while now, and laptops are not desktops. So if you have say a 4gb and an 8gb stick of the same speed, 4gb + 4gb will be usable in dual channel, that other 4gb is restricted to single channel performance. This applies to dual, tripple, and quad.

The reason people scream that it must be the same is they are listening to benchmark fiends. Having non identical sticks of memory will affect your overclocks, just as using the most dense DIMMS possible will hurt them. If you're benchmarking, you want everything to be identical and the lowest possible DIMM density you can get. If you aren't doing this, DIMM density and matching DIMM capacity go out the window, as does just about everything identical. You can just put in the timings for say DDR3 1600 and the memory controller itself will just multi channel to the minimum DIMM density you have, all on it's own.

Again though for gaming it won't matter. Games just aren't power computing at all, they aren't starved for memory bandwidth the way true high end computing is. However on desktops not getting the best overclock possible will screw you, which is why the entire matching DIMM fiasco started. For laptop users or non idiots, it's not worth giving a rats ass about.
 
I think you may need to do some configuration with windows to get it to properly use your dual core. IIRC if windows is installed with a single core processor the HAL is set so that it will only utilize a single core.

Well, task manager shows two cores, and some games are running much faster, so it seems like everything is working as it should. I looked up the HAL thing and most of the results dealt with Windows XP, I'm using 7.
 
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