Maybe, but here's the bug feedback forum for the BETA: [forums.ea.com]

DigiMish

@DigiMish: I don't think the first wave of beta has started yet, or at least not to the pubic. I got an e-mail through beta stating they are doing a closed, Internal only beta with employees of all parts of EA as well as friends and family, but I don't think they started letting people into the Multilayer beta yet, course, I could be wrong. Happens a lot :D

ireidt

@Jyuu: I've read that EA is not using the same SAGE engine that they used for RTS games starting from Generals to C&C3.

DigiMish

EA has stated that the system specs will be similar to C&C3, so no big dealio.

I'm equally excited for the RA3 BETA test that will start soon (the first wave has already started).

DigiMish

@Amazon_Chris:
Ah, EA's version of digital distribution. Gotcha. Sorry for the NFS Carbon though :(

SpishackCola

Of course it's low. If you thought that the requirements would be high, you must be ignorant of the fact that the game uses an upgraded Generals engine that's years old.

Jyuu

@Captiosus: And let's not forget "find the compression artifact in a 20MP photo" in Photoshop! It's like Where's Waldo on pixel steroids!

Datheron

@Datheron: Yah.. I was being self-sarcastic, really. Doesn't come across well in text.

MrBionic

On another note, I can't believe that they had a hard time porting a game with system requirements like that to the PS3. I guess RAM must have been an issue since the required graphics cards have a minimum of 128 megs, and you can shift RAM over to the system on the 360.

Shin-san

@J3EBS: The game isn't exactly Crysis. The 32-bit mode of XP x64 actually does a really good job, and I wouldn't be surprised if Vista x64 is the same. I don't get that significant of a frame rate decrease on 32-bit games

Shin-san

Shit, I need a keyboard AND a mouse? Now what do I do?

Sight

@Datheron: NO game needs that much RAM

Aww, but advanced AutoCAD could be a game.

What's that? My geek is showing?
AGAIN? Damnit!

Captiosus

@Dorphat the Insomniac: @Kuciwalker: Do you guys even know what you're talking about? "64-bits" is just expanding the memory space addressable by software; it lets you use >4GB's of RAM, and that's it.

NO game needs that much RAM, and those that do eat up memory for textures prefer the faster GPU onboard RAM to general system RAM anyway.

Datheron

@MrBionic: That's b/c video games are mainly GPU-bound, Photoshop is mostly RAM and CPU-bound.

Datheron

@SpishackCola: With EA link, you can download the game straight from EA. I did that with NFS Carbon, and it was the worst thing I'd ever done.

Amazon_Chris

Thats very tame specs. I approve.

NeoXY

it doesn't matter cause I got a PS3 and I'm safe ....
...
...
...Ooh wait...

ffmusicdj

@MrBionic: Technical error on my part. My bad.

I've just never had a system with sub 3.5 run Aero Glass, but I forgot that the WEI doesn't matter for it either. Rather there's a list of other specs it looks at (DX9c, Hardware Pixel Shader 2.0, 32 bit color, WDDM capable vid card, 64MB vid ram).

Captiosus

wtf is red alert?

dipsetboy17

DVD Drive - 8 SPEED

Fuck.

Slaughtertron9000

@Kuciwalker:
You mean the present?
Emulation can suck it.
A curse and blessing.

Dorphat the Insomniac

i dont think that my laptop with pentium M 1.7 ghz, ati x600 can run this... the specs its so high for a RTS

eilegz

Come on, please build a 64-bit binary for those of us living in the future :(

Kuciwalker

My comp will own this game

Invert-Blu

I'm in the beta via Fileplanet. I played one match, it's pretty fun. I can see myself playing that game with friends vs bots, but I can't play that game competitively I dont think. My cup of tea is Supreme Commander and Company of Heroes.

As for the performance of the game, it ran great on my 8800GT at 1680x1050.

khronos27

wow, 32-bit.
I hope they're just saying that.
I'm disappointed.

Dorphat the Insomniac

My 3 year old system can run this game no problem. WHERE THE FUCK IS MY BETA KEY AND CLIENT WESTWOOD/EA?!

Atheist Jew

Pft.. no prob =D!

Katorok

No 64-bit support? No fucking 64-bit? This IS 2000 and fucking 8, is it not? I don't even want to play this game. But what the hell is this crap?

J3EBS

@Captiosus: Hrrmm... my laptop has a Windows Exp. index of 3.0, and it runs Aero Glass just fine...

It doesn't, however, run 3D games fine.

MrBionic

YES. Thank you.

nolanvoid

*Crosses fingers for mac version*

A guy can dream, right?

enchantedduck

* Memory - XP/Vista: 1 GB

Let me fix that for them:

Memory - XP/Vista: 1GB/4GB.

1GB is barely enough to run Vista with a 3.5 Windows Experience Index (the barest minimum to run Aero Glass). I wouldn't even try to run a game on a Vista system with only 1GB. Not even on Home Basic that has no Aero Glass because it still eats much, much more RAM at idle than XP.

For the record, I'm a Vista fan (one of a very few, I'm sure, and not to be confused with "fanboi" as I still recommend XP over Vista to 99% of the people I work for) despite its shortcomings, but seeing places say 1GB of RAM on Vista is "enough" makes me cringe.

Captiosus

The beta started three days ago. Even in the rough form the game is phenomenal. It runs like a dream too!

PatMan33

what is EA Link, and why does it need an extra 6GB for itself?

SpishackCola

@CCCombobreaker: I know it. I don't mind frame rate drops. I've learned to deal with it with FEAR and Battle for Middle Earth.

Amazon_Chris

Well, that's easy. I can pull that off pretty decently.

Not significantly better than the min specs, but at least I won't be forced to play at 640x480.

Arsenicberyllium

@FP_slomo788:

Have you seen videos or screenshots? RA3 looks amazing.

geez people just dont get PC gaming. These are most likely the minimum specs. The bare minimum to run the game. With those specs it will probably look shitty. With the optimal hardware it will look amazing.

CCCombobreaker

@FP_slomo788: No, game looks gorgeous. Means they're doing an excellent job of scaling the graphics.

Luke Plunkett

Grandma wasn't lying when she said her computer could run Red Alert 3.

Oggy

@Amazon_Chris:

Yeah no shit... One thing people dont seem to get is that most factory desktops and laptops* can RUN all the games. Its just that they'll look really shitty and you might have some slight frame rate issues at certain points.

*laptop chipsets arent always supported. C&C3 was not offically tested on laptops and does not support a lot of laptop chipsets.

CCCombobreaker

My current system is overkill for that... $1k well spent :)

Pezdispenser

Does that mean the game will look shitty?

FP_slomo788

No problem at all. Maybe I should get this = )

Hrist

MOUSE?!?!?! What the hell is that?

deathscent

Those are very reasonable system specs...

TOCATL

Shoot.. I only have a Radeon X1200. *sigh*.

(honestly, I can barely play Diablo II. hehe... but I can run 30 photos in Photoshop CS3 simultaneously without a problem. Go figure.)

MrBionic

at least a dual or quad core is really cutting out a lot of the marketplace, but, it is coming to the 360, so that makes up for it, man i miss playing c&c over lan

gstatty

@AcidCrownie: On further review of the "Video Card" segment, I realize that it says "6800" instead of the previously-thought/hallucinated "8800." I might have a chance.

AcidCrownie

Those do look pretty tame. But I'm stuck on this laptop I had to buy for school, so I lose in the end.

AcidCrownie

Wow. Even my severely outdated laptop can run that.

Amazon_Chris

Sweet. I /just/ put together a new rig. It totally eats these reqs, so I should be good for..ohhh....2 months.... --__--

Parsifal

This is old. The beta test kicked off a few days ago, I did tip you guys as to its launch but my email must have been lost amid the torrent of tips you receive every day.

AlbenoEpiX

@Datheron:
Do you really know?
A native instruction set?
Bigger registers?

Dorphat the Insomniac

Er, where has this insane assumption that using XP x64 or Vista x64 causes 32-bit programs to run slower come from? You DO know that the x86-64 CPU has NATIVE 32-bit support? It can toggle between 32-bit and 64-bit execution modes in a near instant.

@Datheron: Actually, do YOU know what you are talking about? Yes, it increases the virtual memory limit. It also, well, allows you to run 64-bit programs, which are most of the time faster than 32-bit programs (x86-64 doubles the number of registers and whatnot.) And yes, many games are now requiring that much virtual memory if you want to run them on the highest settings. Supreme Commander had a big problem with this when it was first released. They had to completely re-write their memory allocator and other stuff to try to bring the memory limit down on large maps. And I hope that in the future you don't bother buying video cards with over 1GB of RAM on them. Video card RAM pulls directly from your 4GB of virtual memory ON TOP of what the system pulls. If you SLI two 1GB video cards, you will probably only have around 1.5GB of addressable memory left.

Nalin

@Nalin: I should be more clear - I was referring to running games in 64-bit, in which added addressable memory is all that 64-bit computing is actually going to give you. Yes, I understand that 64-bit apps - if they're compiled for 64-bit processors, in practice mostly for open source Linux apps - will take advantage of the added registers. Also note that games do not exactly put stress on CPU cycles.

As for eating up that entire 3GB of usable virtual memory space under Windows - you can certainly do that if you allocate memory on whim without freeing it, and I can do that in 10 lines of code. Realistically, I'm rather glad that there's a soft limit in place, if anything so that PC developers don't continually rely on bigger processors, more memory, and more GPU power.

Datheron

@Datheron: Except people demand better graphics, better physics, larger levels, more interaction, more detail, etc, from their video games.

If the application wasn't compiled with the /LARGEADDRESSAWARE linker option (and many games aren't), it will be limited to 2GB of virtual memory, not around 3GB. As games start storing more models, larger levels, bigger textures, etc. in memory, it quickly gets eaten up. Supreme Commander was one of the more high-profile incidences where the limitations of the 32-bit architecture was felt. If you played it on the largest map with 8 AI players, it would crash within 5 minutes. Even with all their efforts to reduce memory usage (and linking with /LARGEADDRESSAWARE), you can still crash.

Many games are starting to hit this limit as they increase things like the size of the world and the quality and amount of models. Flight Simulator X and X-Plane have started to run into these problems. The only way around it is to completely purge the data from memory; however, that causes another problem as you are now using a lot of file I/O to constantly stream data back into the game, and file I/O is very slow.

Now, I am fully aware that your opinions don't agree with mine. That is fine. My point in all of this is to make people aware that this can't go on forever. Games are already hitting the limits. This is just like ipv4 and ipv6. Widespread use of NAT is trying to prolong the use of ipv4, but we all know it can't last forever; the transition is inevitable. We are starting to hit this limit with 32-bit computing. Consumers want bigger, better games, and eventually we will run out of tricks and have to make the jump to 64-bit.

Nalin

Awesome!! Here I was afraid that RA3 would use DX10. But thank god its only 9c.

Burn1n9m4n

Ah Red Alert 3. I'm having so much fun with the BETA. :3

Overcow

Quad Core? Check
Lightning Fast RAM? Check
Ridiculously oversize Graphics card? Check
That's how I render, G.

Mattz

Excellent stuff! Apart from my slightly underpowered CPU (2.13ghz Core Duo, Vista), I can do that easy.

Now so long as Starcraft 2 & Diablo 3 have the same sort of specs, my PC gaming will be well taken care of for the next few years...

freakout

I played RA2 for a long time online and I really hope RA3 will give the same sort of satisfaction when driving my tanks into the enemy base and slowly ripping the place apart. :P

Zikus

@deathscent: I laughed. Doesn't happen so often these days, so give yourself a big pat on the back.

Even these mild stats make my four-year old "gaming laptop" look puny (mostly the video card, a puny Mobility Radeon 9600).

But I'm plotting to build a proper desktop, which, though currently made of nothing but imagination and powered only by moonbeams, will *pwn* this game when it comes into existence. That's right, *pwn* it.

erlik

check, check, check, and check :p

I'll be set til D3 comes out

Aex

@Shin-san: I imagine it's not the system requirements that are the problem with the PS3 port. The PS3's cell processors are an entirely different beast to program than your standard x86 chip is. That being said, perhaps the requirement of multi-core is a good sign - meaning developers are starting to be more aware of multi-threading and that EA has the PS3 and it's cell processors in mind.

Antioch18

oh well, i ran cnc3 all max @ 1920x1200 and looks like this wont be a problem.

SamStride

Multi core only? Darn that blows my decrepit rig's chances of having fun with this.

Fwiffo

@Fwiffo: @Antioch18: You've read it wrong, a multi-core processor isn't required. There are 3 categories, separated by semicolons in one and slashes in the other. Multiple cores are only one supported option, a Pentium 4 or an Athlon above 2000 is OK too.

erlik