Ok, you guys are going to think i'm nuts...but i now own the X1900 XTX. Returned the X1600 after it did not yield much better performance than the X850XT on either this game or Oblivion.
i've only been tinkering with the X1900 for about an hour now ( for some reason it messed with my sound when i installed it, so took me a while to figure it out ), but man, what an unbelievable difference this card makes with Oblivion...just incredible...both video and responsiveness. But this is not an Oblivion forum....
so then i loaded up ROL...and i finally figured out why i wrongly felt i hated the graphics and consequently, felt disappointed by the demo. The problem is the very first battle in the campaign just does not look good with shadows turned on. period. Even with the X1900 this was the case. BUT!!! after getting past that first screen, the graphics were not so bad when maxed out. The best thing though that the x1900 bought me, was RESPONSIVENESS. Before, there seemed to be a lot of lag when i selected units and moved them. That is pretty much gone. There still seems to be an odd disconnect between sound and the clicks, but that may be because the sound just doesn't seem to fit certain action. Graphics now look good, but i wouldn't say great. That's ok, good is good enough because with games like these, playability is what i care about first. Besides, i stepped way back a bit and remembered that when i moved from WC2 to WC3, i hated the cartoon like graphichs of WC3...but yet i grew to love it and it became on of the all time best games in my opinion. I hope that ROL will be the same...
So overall now, i think i need to play a bit more before making a finaly judgement. A quick run through so far and i like what i'm seeing as far as playability...lots of WC3 type controls and functions. Little things that i complained about to the BFME crew during their beta tests were not missed in ROL...that attention to detail tells me these guys really studied how to make a good RTS...
[This message has been edited by dimension (edited 06-06-2006 @ 11:40 PM).]