The Official Graphics Card and PC gaming Thread

Ok!!

Well that's outstanding, Sam. You discovered a secret Photobucket name that is kept under wraps - but now that the secret is out, I'll take advantage of your discovery.

You were able to view the original image because I had used the top Photobucket choice, "Email & IM" rather than the second choice, called "Direct." Using that top choice gave me a link that would, upon using the magnifier twice, open to full-size.

But using that first "Email & IM" choice, I am unable to put that into the Afterdawn IMG brackets, like this:



because as you see, it doesn't produce an image.


I can only paste it in directly, as a non-image Email & IM link, like this: http://s518.photobucket.com/user/harvardguy/media/Armashowcase1-full_zps020a268d.jpg.html. But that was certainly useful, as it allowed you to discover the secret Photobucket name for the resulting full-size image.


Prior to this time I had always used the Direct Photobucket link, option 2, which gives me this:
http://i518.photobucket.com/albums/u343/harvardguy/Armashowcase1-full_zps020a268d.jpg

and I can put that into the afterdawn IMG brackets, like this:



but it won't expand to full size, even in its own new tab or window.

So when you copied the url for the full-size image that was produced by opening the non-image Email & IM link , photobucket had labelled that one http://i518.photobucket.com/albums/u343/harvardguy/Armashowcase1-full_zps020a268d.jpg~original, which is the Direct link name, plus ~original, to tell it what to display.

It IS INDEED a photobucket special name, but not one they offer as an option, and therefore it's been their little secret until now - BUT NOW THE CAT IS OUT OF THE BAG!

(DDP, I don't imagine you have cats in Canada as the frigid weather won't allow it, but they are small furry animals that are distant relatives of tigers, and they like to catch mice - doubtless you have no mice either.)


This little discovery makes it very easy from now on - as I said last time, I will just add the text ~original inside the afterdawn IMG brackets, to the end of the link that I get from their second Direct option, making sure to upload full-size 2560 images.

Like this:




That is very cool that you discovered this Sam, a hidden way to work better with Photobucket, and I only have to upload one set of images, not two.

Yes, exactly - so we see that I can capture Photobucket's "secret" name for the source url to the full-size images, which turns out to be their "Direct" image name, plus ~original.


Now that we have discovered Photobucket's secret, the AfterDawn reader of my future posts has 4 choices. The reader can choose to

#1. not expand the picture at all, and allow afterdawn to display a 700 pixel wide image,
#2. or use the magnifier to enlarge slightly to a 900 pixel wide version, or
#3. open in a new tab or window which yields an image as wide as the browser window
#4. or click the mouse to expand to the full original size.

What I mean by #3, is that I'm currently on my regular desktop, which is a 1600x1200 20" Dell 4:3 monitor (running on a pentium 3 Ghz HT Dell XPS400 - the machine that animated Left 4 Dead, lol - with a Raid 1 mirror 250 gig C drive that recently survived a crash of one of the mirror member drives and kept on chugging - on the other end of the trailer is the gaming rig) and at this moment I have the browser window at about 1400 pixels wide, so that's what the image expands to in a new tab. But the cursor is a magnifier, and if I hit the mouse, the picture then expands to option #4, the full-size 2560 width with bottom and side scroll bars.


For you, Sam, I presume that you have two browser windows open, and to see the full-size image, you probably have the larger browser covering about 70% of your screen diagonal (as 70%x70X would be about half your total screen surface area.)

In fact, Sam, could you capture a 4k screen shot with one browser showing one of my full-size images at 2560x1600, like the image directly above, and your other browser with the Afterdawn post showing the regular image, or maybe the Afterdawn magnified image? That would be interesting. You don't have to capture it full-size, but if that's easiest, that's fine - or you could go for 1920 wide so Jeff could see it full-screen, and I could see it with scroll bars. Actually on second thought, the full-size might be interesting - I could open it on my 30" 2560 monitor and the scroll bars would show me what I'm missing versus having the 4k monitor.

I am guessing your 4k screenshot will look something like this:

For full-size at 1600 pixels wide, open in new tab or window:


which I'm faking on my 1600 wide monitor.

(I added the ~original at the end, so the above should allow full-size, but it isn't a 2560 wide image, only 1600 wide.)

Rich

 

Rich - the image expands as wide as your browser will allow - in order to see a 2560x1600 image attachment as 2560x1600 you need a monitor with at least that resolution (In practice, more unless you're in fullscreen mode) as the aD image expansion tool only does 'fit page' - e.g. on the 1920x1080 display I have at work I'm typing to you from now, it will only expand your 2560x1600 image to around 1850 pixels wide.
When I get home I'll screencap the desktop at 3840x2160 to show you what they look like. I'd intended on doing that yesterday until I ended up working until 10:30pm :S

 

Rich -

Image not expanded:


Your earlier screenshots expanded:


Image expanded in full 3840x2160 window:


Image expanded in window smaller than image size:


As you see - if the window is smaller than the image, it will scale to fit, rather than expanding off the page.

 

Arma 3 is impressive but honestly I am getting a little tired of modern style shooters and all the stereotypes that follow them. The genre is mind-numbingly over-saturated and getting very stale. The learning curve in Arma 3 is thankfully much better than Arma 2's so I might still be giving it a try sometime soon, but maybe not. Very few of that style of game really strike my fancy anymore. Battlefield Bad Company 2 remains a steady favorite, only due to its genius game balance and map design. Most other shooters quickly devolve into a twitch-fest with a HUGE skill gap. Even Arma is becoming twitchy due to the Day Z mod's popularity.

WW2 games are making a small comeback in the form of War Thunder, World of Tanks, Men of War and a few others. Not ashamed to admit that I never EVER got tired of WW2 games. The genre also wasn't as overpopulated as the Modern Military shooter genre. It got close, but mercifully died out before it reached the heights we're seeing today. Call of Duty and its hundreds of clones.

I will note that Arma has a very old legacy in PC gaming, and is worthy of recognition. It's too bad that some of the older games have lost the large majority of their online community. Even some not so old games like BFBC2 are starting to depopulate. Too bad that the newer alternatives hardly ever compare. Thankfully my beloved and all-time hallowed Battlefield 2 is still alive and strong due to its massive modding community and dedicated clans. Though even that, too, is starting to lose its playerbase. There are tons of populated servers, but hardly ever any full ones anymore.

 

Personally I think they're both very over-saturated. We could really do with some new genres.

 

Agreed, but at least the newer WW2 games are something other than shooters. RTS, simulators, MMOs, etc. The problem lately isn't necessarily as much with the genres as it is with the decreasing quality and stale design.

I continue to hold Crysis in high regard because in 2007 it was a massive leap for game technology, design, art direction, etc. Sadly, instead of ushering in an era of bleeding edge games, it was smack dab in middle of the Call of Duty craze. I had massively high hopes that Crysis would start an upward trend, but I was sorely disappointed.

Gameplay innovation has essentially stagnated since Half Life 2 set the bar back in 2004, and very few games have matched 2007's Crysis in graphics even now. Right now we are gearing up for either a gaming industry crash, or a second renaissance in quality and design. There have been a few bright spots, but the large majority of today's games are copy/paste shovelware.

 

You guys gonna jump on board with GTA V in June? I can't wait myself

 

I will be all over it. I wonder how good the port will be. Hopefully it's better than GTA4.

 

I do recall some bugs at first, but after the second install, I don't recall any problems. Though that was with a much more powerful system, than the first install.

 

GTA4 is probably one of the most poorly done ports I've ever played. It has no earthly reason to run as poorly as it does. Even with my current hardware it's not great.

Resident Evil 4 HD and Metal Gear Rising Revengeance are both examples of lazily done ports that are far superior to GTA4. Both are arguably better looking than GTA4 with vastly better performance and AA is actually practical to use.

Also, just got Resident Evil 4 HD on Steam. Basically the Gamecube version was the original and it was meant to be Gamecube only. Well the PS2 version came out and added a bunch of extra features but had extremely muddy graphics in comparison with piss poor resolution and N64 quality textures. The PS2 version was the basis for the first PC port, and the port was also extremely bad, worse than GTA4. No mouse or KB support whatsoever. Required a joypad, and this was before 360 controllers became so universal.

The Wii version came out and mixed the great Gamecube graphics with the PS2 features, but requires owning a Wii, lol. Then the PS3 version came out on PSN as an HD texture pack over the Wii version. The PS3 version is the one that got ported to PC the second time, so it was finally a good base for porting. It works great on both KB+mouse and 360 pad.

Textures are generally poor as they originate from a 2004 Gamecube game, but the HD pack re-filters most of them for better sharpness, and fully re-textures most of the characters. Many textures are quite terrible though, which is funny considering the game was said to have great graphics way back when. AA and AF help to further enhance the image quality, and reduce that impact. Truly the definitive iteration of Resident Evil 4.

 

Well, given the money they've earned already, selling GTA V for the other devices... there really is no excuse to skimp on the PC Port But I guess we'll see what happens. The initial release will no doubt be imperfect. But I hope it's at least enjoyable. I know AMD Graphics owners had troubles with GTA IV, but I see you have a GTX 760. And a 6 core processor. A great deal more powerful, than the GTX 260, and Phenom 965 I use to run But I suppose on a per core basis, the 965 had slightly more potential?

 

On a per-core basis, Thubans are faster than Denebs because they have a better Integrated Memory Controller. So ideally, this 1100T would have the edge over a 965 at the same speeds, not counting the two extra cores.

The video card should be more than enough if it's a halfway decent port.

 

The GTA4 port was frankly appalling. I agree with Jeff that it's one of the worst there's been, except for perhaps the early Ubisoft ports of 360 titles like Rainbow Six Vegas and, worse still, Splinter Cell: Double Agent.

The game took 2GB of video memory to run at beyond medium settings, even on a 1680x1050 screen. Back when GTA4's PC version came out, 2GB video cards were very rare indeed. It ate texture memory, it ate system memory, the CPU requirements were quite high, the disk space usage was enormous, and it looked really quite shameful given all that. Very flat and bland looking environment, better than the console version, but not hugely so. The rockstar social club and games for windows live shernanigans just made things worse.

The game is undeniably quite good, but the PC port really did nothing positive for the franchise's image. I sincerely hope the PC version of 5 is better, particularly since GFWL is dead and buried, and console porting has matured. I'm not going to assume it will be flawless though.

 

Hi Guys.

I spent a few hours tonight trying to organize some of my screenshots for a helicopter post about Arma 3.

Arma 3 has a campaign, which is terrific, and it has 14 showcases. I have about 100 hours in a showcase called combined arms, which is mainly infantry, in addition to the 100 hours or more that I have in the earlier infantry showcase, about which I have posted for the last couple of years.

I'm going to do a long post about the combined arms, which is a very interesting infantry showcase - and damned hard to complete. I am playing regular, not expert by any means, but that showcase still eluded success before I added extra save points, and also figured out how to keep more of my platoon alive to help me with the counter-attack.

You don't have to play this multiplayer at all. I'm not.


AWESOME HELICOPTER ACTION
I just pulled about 3 all-nighters in the gunship showcase about helicopters, and I am not normally a fly-boy. I couldn't beat the arma 2 helicopter school even after staying up all night - it was just a little too hard for me - and add to that I didn't have my new steel-series mouse and saitek keyboard.

But I guess they have improved the helicopter controls, and added something called hover, so that when you lose control, you hit hover, and it will maintain your altitude but bring your velocity to zero. You can nudge up to 35 km/hr in hover mode, for example if you're doing like I am, and staying within 2-4 meters of the ground, trying to remain below radar. (You can see the radar sites light up when your altitude gets too high. If all else fails you can fire flares, but you have only a limited amount of those.)

I beat the gunship showcase, then I went back and did some more stuff, and came in the front this time, and discovered a tank that I never had to encounter before, because he didn't become aware of my presence until I had eliminated the last artillery launcher, since I sneaked in the back way the first time. But sneaking in the back way was a process that took a couple of painstaking hours, and several save points just in case, until I started encountering the active launchers, and realized nobody was around protecting them. Then in repeat play, after killing the third and last launcher, something very dangerous was firing at me, but I had an auto-save point to fall back on every time I was killed - the only thing that worked was a full-on high-speed retreat to the new goal, rescuing a squad on top of a mountain.

Now I don't want to do the long slow back approach, and so I came in the front, and now I know what was hunting me before. I call it a tank, but it's really an armored car, with a type of grenade launcher ammo - explosive rounds that can bring me down in the air going 70 km/hour. So I have a save point - a user save - stored in a numbered folder, and this is what I would call a boss battle - me versus the tank. The game play has infinite repeatability - slightly different each time - as I get in position - a different position each time depending on how hot I come in - switch to hover - drop near the ground, and try to get ready for his most likely entrance. If I come in too hot, it takes too long to slow me to a stop, I climb too high in the process, and he will likely be able to kill me without having to drive close to find me. If I come in too slow, he is in position before I am, and he will kill me.

If everything works out, as it does maybe one out of five times, this happens:

This is a full-size image - open in a new tab for up to 2560x1600.


And here is the same blessed event with the normal gun scope magnifier:

This is a full-size image - open in a new tab for up to 2560x1600.


I know those photos are dark - this is just a teaser post. I have lightened a bunch of them up for a more thorough post in a day or two.

Look at my hud, upper right. I am using skyfire missiles - a group of missiles each time that saturate a small area. I only have 2 left as you can see. But I have about 6-8 individual missiles left for eliminating the artillery launchers, and they can also be destroyed with 30mm cannon fire, except that I still don't quite know how to aim the cannon.

There is a gunner with me, but he might be dead by now - there seems to no longer be any automatic fire like before.

By the way, Sam, thanks for showing me how the full 2560x1600 looks on your 4k monitor. That was quite interesting. There sure was a lot of space left around the image on your screen.

Jeff, after all your space flying stuff, I keep telling myself, "What am I doing in this helicopter - this is tailor-made for Jeff." Of course, you Kevin - you figured out how to get into a helicopter in GTA4, so it's a natural for you too.

There is 500 hours of content in this game, without any multiplayer at all. It's that awesome, and that challenging. I completed the drone showcase - another award winner. I'm going back to that again, to try to play it a different way - very fun!

Rich

 

The E3 footage for Far Cry 4 has me pretty excited. If it brings as many improvements as Far Cry 3 did from Far Cry 2, we could have a game of the year on our hands. The new environment is refreshing and the new villain/antagonist is interesting as well

The only question is performance. I still can't perfectly max Far Cry 3 on this rig. Nearly but not quite. Always a minor setting or two has to be tweaked. So FarCry 4 will either be less demanding due to the different environment or optimizations in the engine, or simply more demanding because that's what graphics improvements require by default... We'll see. Maybe it'll be time for a second card as GTX760s have dropped a bit in price now. (Certainly not opposed at all to a second card). My CPU manages to escape being a bottleneck for this single card, but two cards might be pushing it. I suppose it can't hurt.

 

Wow, Jeff, glad to hear that there is something good coming.

I would love to see you with another one of those fabulous 4 gig cards! I know that I still am crazy about my pair of 3 gig HIS 7950s, so I know a pair of those bad boys that you have would take you anywhere you would want to go. Yes, your cpu might become a bit of a bottleneck, but that's only because you insist on 60 fps. LOL

Thanks for the heads-up on Far Cry 4. I was wondering what was coming out soon - it seems like other than Arma 3 which I am addicted to, like Kevin with Angry Birds (and nudity) there hasn't been much happening. Unlike you, I am not a space fan, so Future Warfare doesn't have me too excited regarding COD, although I will for sure get it.

I was just looking back on Medal of Honor Warfighter, and the bad rating and terrible sales results Danger Close got on that game, causing EA to basically drop the franchise. Maybe it was all the rain and dismal weather that the campaign was developed in - I watched some youtube videos yesterday, trying to remember the campaign, and it seemed depressing and repetitive.

I have the game, and I did play it, and yes - it was ho hum.

On multiplayer, I was never too fond of it, but recently, sort of accidentally (I have never been a sniper guy) I ramped up to the greatest gun I have ever had - the repeating sniper - giving me a full-session 5 to 1 KTD ratio for the first time in my entire life, lol.

Not only do you have the repeating sniper, but you get a machine pistol to run around with, and funny enough, it eats up guys who venture nearby when you don't have time to get into sniper mode. Anyway, I had only one 5-hour session with that loadout, and it was super fun, and like I say, my all-time highest KTD ratio ever (normally if I even get close to 1 to 1 I am quite happy) but I haven't been back on multiplayer for the last 6 months - just been messing with Arma 3 single player.

I for sure will get Far Cry 4. On the 9450 bottleneck, I probably won't be able to max it. Regarding Far Cry 3, I had pretty good results maxing it - but with AA at 4x instead of 8x. However I proved to myself that while 4x was drastically better than 2x, 8x was only a very tiny improvement over 4x. So I was quite happy at 4x. I achieved about 40 fps - but out in the crocodile river on the wave runner, sometimes it dropped to 32. There was one core that was pushing 96% that was holding me back.

But the waverunner action was silky smooth, and sometimes my gaming session consisted simply of riding the waverunner for several hours - absolutely no shooting at all! The graphics were so sublime, and the wave runner action so cool! I might even, one day, get a real wave runner, just because of that game.

By the way, getting a waverunner to spawn on that river was tricky, as normally there isn't one. There is a wave runner race at one end of the river, but if you leave the race, you only have about 3 minutes before they end it, and that's the end of the your riding session. But I finally figured out how to fool the game into giving me a waverunner, and once I got it I parked it near a safe-house, and I created a save that I could always go back to. I even re-activated all the enemies, so now I can jump on that wave runner and do some shooting and boat evading - getting some wild riding action in while dodging bullets! Hahahahaha.

Here's the crocodile river - click for full-size and check out those mean teeth!!

By the way, I never did my Crocodile River posting - these crocs are man-eaters - I have maybe 50 screenshots of some dramatic croc take-downs on goats and guys. The croc killings occur on-screen in about a half-second! These guys are easy to kill if you come up behind them, but walk down by the river near the floating white lilies, and the next thing you know, you're respawning! ​

Nothing good yet on overclocking the i7
Hardware-wise, I still have the Lian Li midtower case with the EVGA x58 i7 930 chip, 12 gigs of ram, and I put one of my fast 1 TB WD drives in it, but I never got back to trying to achieve a decent overclock, and I have put that mid-tower away in the garage attic for now. I would have been glad to have hit an overclock that caused over-heating - because then I know I could have put the TRUE on it, and even thrown the whole thing into the vastly-air-cooled spedo case which is loaded with 140mm fans. But in my former overclocking attempts, per several forums and web sites, all I was able to achieve were unstable clocks that caused blue screens. But my methodology was probably flawed - I was trying to work with a low memory multiple to keep from overclocking the memory, which is rated around 1100, since with the standard multiple, to get a really good overclock I need to get 1400-1600 out of it.

So if I ever went back and tried it, I would run with the standard memory multiple, and just see how far I could push that memory. A cpu upgrade of 30% more power than what I have now would be great - I'm getting about 32 fps in Arma 3 at ultra graphics settings, and it hardly ever lags, but 40 would be better of course. My 7950 cards are only stressed about 60% on that game - but the cpus are pushing 90% load and are the bottleneck.

I think if you're going to really get a good overclock on a 930, you have to have high-speed memory. So maybe this memory just won't let me overclock the thing that far, and maybe I ended up unlucky in the binning of this particular chip.

I Think Brand New CPU is Best Bet
Anyway, as I say, for now the Lian Li is in the attic, and I'm heading in the direction of saving up some money for the latest generation of i7 or i5, with fast memory, maybe 8 gigs would be enough ram, and a good solid motherboard. And at that point in time I might do as blazothorn suggested, and actually take off the integrated heat spreader, removing the poor paste that Intel deliberately puts on to make overclocking a little harder, and see if I can achieve over 4 ghz on air with the TRUE - which should give me 70-100% more cpu power than my 3.343 ghz 9450.

Sam got me kind of excited with his 4k 8 megapixel monitor, and he says it doesn't stress the cpu any more than my present 4.3 megapixel, that it's the graphics cards that have to carry the load. I guess ultimately I will follow Sam's lead, but that might be 3 years from now. That's how long it took me to get the 30" monitor after Sam kept posting about it. Maybe by then we'll see more support of eye-finity and of course Sam will have worked out most of the kinks for the rest of us by then. Haha.

GUNSHIP SHOWCASE POST IS STILL COMING
Oh - by the way - before I noticed Jeff's post, I jumped on tonight to make a start on my helicopter gunship showcase post that I promised to do 6 weeks ago in post 8895 above. I figure, from experience, that it will take me about 6 hours to put a really well-illustrated post together, so I'm going to do it in pieces, picking out the best screenshots, and saving to a word doc. I should have it ready by next week!

In the gunship showcase, this is the enemy. I climbed in one at the Nato exhibition.


I found the AMV-7 Marshall amphibious vehicle "tank" that I have been dueling with, when I went to the in-game Nato exhibition, and I have a lot of good shots of it from the outside, and from the inside in the gunner position, targeting a wrecked helicopter (in the live-fire part of the exhibition) just like the one I'm flying in the gunship showcase. You can't get into one of these tanks shooting at the wrecked vehicles, but there are a bunch of them parked over in their part of the exhibit area, and you can climb in and target the wrecked vehicles, and shoot to your heart's content!

Rich

UPDATE: wow, I thought I was in the wrong place - totally different AfterDawn look. But the images expand to full size with one left click, then back down with another - that's pretty good - you don't have to right-click and open in New Tab. Wow, looks different!!

 

Very unsure about the new forum layout. I guess it's a bit more traditional for a forum now. Avatars and the like. Many other forums I frequent are laid out in this style. I would like them to consider using the older color scheme though. Rather used to that after so many years. Has become something of a watermark for AD pages.

The new font is certainly more readable and easier on the eyes. The new message box is also superior, with a much greater array of tools. These details have not gone unappreciated. The new user control panel is also a VAST improvement. Overall I think AD's latest rounds of updates is very much so for the better. It was using hilariously outdated code up until the last few years.

Also, just noticed the blog entry link in my signature leads to the old version of the site for reference.

Just got Wolfenstein The New order. So far living up to the hype quite adequately. A bit bland and repetitive, but overall a top-notch quality game that leaves little to complain about. idTech4 Engine shows drastic improvements from the disaster that was RAGE. Wolfenstein is seriously good looking and performs well to boot. Easily maxed on my rig with zero tweaking. It seems they've finally sorted their texture streaming BS. There are additionally some settings that make me think my 4GB of video memory is not a wasted investment.

Rich, as far as CPUs, I don't think a new board and CPU can hurt. A friend of mine just upgraded from an OC'd Phenom II X6 to a stock i7 4770K Haswell and is quite pleased with his gains. It's safe to say my OC'd 1100T stomps your 920 at stock. So a more modern i7 that's not only faster per-GHz but also at a much higher stock clock should be a pretty awesome boost in power. And my Phenom II is currently faster than your 9450 would likely be if OC'd. Now if you could get say 4GHz on the 920, that would be more than adequate, but it seems that's not happening for you.

High speed memory is essential for FSB OC'ing because of how much headroom it gives you to raise clocks. It sounds like you have a decent grasp of what you are doing. The rest is trial and error. Also, most people just try to keep their memory as close to stock as possible. I don't OC my memory at all if I can help it. So if that's what is holding you back don't let it. But I think your issue has more to do with simply being limited by the memory speed altogether.

Maybe it would be cheaper to simply get some higher speed memory for now? If you do decide on a better board and CPU, you'll want higher speed memory for it anyway. 1600 and higher is good for AMDs while Intels really like 1866 and higher.

 

You should post your thoughts here @Estuansis, @Ketola is interested in any and all feedback! Also, the my.afterdawn.com site is offline now so your sig link won't work anymore.

 

Here's a freak if I've ever seen one!
Titan Z