I have run HistWar Grognards on three PCs which differ principally in their graphics cards. The results may be of interest to anyone still concerned about minimum specs needed for a good play experience. The PC’s are all Pentium 4 2GHz with 1GB system Ram but with the following Nvidia cards with VRAM indicated:
1) GeForce4 Ti 4600 128MB , (system c 2004)
2) GeForce 6500 256MB, ( system c 2006)
3) GeForce 6800 512MB, (system c2008)
Each system was running Windows XP Home Ed SP2 , with graphics resolution 1024x768 pixels 60Hz. All had DirectX9c installed and the most recent card drivers from Nvidia (as of mid 2010). (All were reasonably good cards each of which has run Rome TW and Medieval TW2 at medium resolution).
Results for card No.:
1) The program (Histwar ver 1b and ver 2.21g) will not launch from the HistWar.exe file (this normally takes you to the 3d room where graphic detail, resolution etc are set before launching les grognards). The error message “could not find any compatible Direct3D devices” occurs. The card does pass Direct3d test (run>dxdiag) and is fully functioning. According to some forum discussion this card design does not fully implement DirectX9 it translates the code into DirectX8 to implement, hence the problem. However the Grognards does launch from the LGDN.exe file. The program is fully functioning with the following exception: in the 3d mode (F3) all the animated troop models appear as black shilouettes (i.e the landscape is fully rendered and can be navigated, the troops animate ok , gunsmoke ok, sound ok, but the troop uniforms are not displayed). Surprisingly, when casualties appear their uniforms are rendered properly (perhaps because these figures are not animated). All other views (F2, F4, etc) behave as they are designed to do. So it is possible to play the game if your system has this card but you are forced to use the 2D representation or symbolic 3D rather than the full 3D view to fully control the action.
2) and 3) Both cards run the program and do not give the Direct3D error message. All the uniforms are rendered in the 3D view. The card with 512MB ram gives better frame rates in the animation and allowed simultaneous video capture of in game action but the game did run acceptably on the 256MB card but video play back could be a little laggy.
Obviously more recent systems are likely to have graphics cards with even more RAM so they should be fine....
