I upgraded video card but the recommended video settings didn't change really. - Games

I'm posting this here because it only applies to valve games. I fairly recently upgraded my video card from an ATI Radeon X850 to a Saphire ATI Radeon 5670 HD. The problem being the fact that my valve game's recommended settings didn't change much... some of the recommendations even slightly went downward! For instance... Team Fortress 2's recommended settings had something like high model detail, medium textures, 4x AA, and anisotropic 8x (or something like that). But now, the recommended settings for that game is high model detail, high textures, No AA, and Trilinear filtering. Any reason why valve games would do this? Why the downgrade in AA and filtering? I tried googleing this but nothing came up. My current specs is: 2GBs of RAM, Windows XP professional, AMD Athlon 64 X2 dual core processor 4400+, and an ATI Radeon 5670 HD 1024MB. Seriously, it is recommended that I run Batman Arkham Asylum and Bioshock on max settings but not Team Fortress 2 or Left 4 Dead?

Just change the settings to high. You don't have to use the recommended, it's usually wrong for me on Valve games.

[QUOTE=Dippeggs;24853599]Just change the settings to high. You don't have to use the recommended, it's usually wrong for me on Valve games.[/QUOTE] Really? I wasn't really sure... thanks for the answer though.

While Valve games are generally not entirely accurate on their recommended specs, you shouldn't be following TF2s especially. It's unoptimized, for one, but mainly because it works on each machine differently, it seems. You should be relatively fine playing on all high in TF2, and especially L4D, but if you get lag in combat you should play around with the settings some.

General rule of thumb is to never follow the recommended settings in the first place, few games are accurate. But your card is slightly weaker than mine (i got the 5770), but you should be able to run any source games on max, including tf2.

Thanks, I wasn't really sure of all this but now I know.

Well you could've just tried, your computer won't melt if you try going above.

Just check your fps with net_graph 1 in console (while playing of course), as long as it's above 60 you can turn up the settings as far as you can.

The required options are always extremely inaccurate, just do what Clavus says.

I have 5770 :smug:

Good lord, that was a huge jump. The only time the settings were ever accurate for me was before I had my own PC, and I had to use dad's old shitty Advent PC to game on which had a Radeon x600. And the [b]only[/b] reason that the recommended settings were accurate was because it could never run anything above 'low' :v:

It's funny how I got a quad core and a 5850 and half-life2 suggested me all medium :P Recommended settings are stupid, always.

Did the same thing when I upgraded to a GTX 460, Source just doesn't really seems to care what it recommends, most stuff was recommended medium for me. Admittedly I should probably knock the texture quality down due to me not having the 1GB model.

The recommended video settings aren't dynamic. /thread

Yes, those recommendations are just utter bullshit most of the time. On my laptop with its X200M (shared memory!), 1GB RAM and a 1.8 GHz dual core, it suggests I run with everything at high. I mean really now.

[QUOTE=zavist;25062475]Yes, those recommendations are just utter bullshit most of the time. On my laptop with its X200M (shared memory!), 1GB RAM and a 1.8 GHz dual core, it suggests I run with everything at high. I mean really now.[/QUOTE] That's because they aren't dynamic.