The Official Graphics Card and PC gaming Thread

I'm using the Creative Fatal1ty headset right now and the sound is just dripping with excellence. All the highs and lows are crisp and pronounced. The guitar is so clear that you can hear the guys fingers on the strings. Same experience with my Logitech speakers. Logitech X-230s. 2 x 6W satellites and a 20W subwoofer. These speakers would seriously surprise you. They can go quite loud with awesome sound quality.

Conversely, my mic works just fine. Mine sees the most use coordinating squad tactic in Battlefield 2. But I'm also using an X-Fi Xtreme Music with all the latest EAX 3.0 support and the like. An Audigy 2 ZS is great if you can find one, and an Audigy SE is still quite a jump up from onboard and can be had for fairly cheap. I'd recommend one. Most problems are due to errors in setup or can be fixed in the options.

And don't ask me on HDDs. I'm about as clueless as you are in that department

 

Rich - the 'dig in' feature is nothing new, it sounds basically identical to the cover feature used in Gears of War and Rainbow Six Vegas. Middle mouse for scope is annoying, non-customisable controls is annoying, bugs are annoying. As far as the graphics go, I've not actually tried BIAHH yet, I'm tempted to say Call of Duty World at War will more likely take the award for best looking WW2 game, as the graphics certainly are no worse than COD4, but World at War not only encounters graphics bugs on the 4870X2, but it's also a very buggy and poorly designed game itself, very disappointing compared to Call of Duty 4.
Funny you should mentio sales of COD4, they hardly sold any, the piracy rate of the game was extraordinary. I bought it, but certainly not initially.
Destructable environments is nice, it's one thing about Crysis that still gets me, but gruesome headshots aren't really a new feature in games.


For what it's worth, I run my microphone through my Realtek too as it has noise cancellation, my SB Live External doesn't...

 

BiA: HH was pretty good. If you liked the first two games, you will like this. Yes, the controls are a bit funky and performance isn't stellar, but not terrible. The actual graphics are quite nice, just like a painting. The cutscenes look amazing and are in-engine. The gameplay is somewhat slow-paced and tactical, while still being quite tense. I also liked Earned in Blood and Road to Hill 30 better though.

I believe HH is on Unreal 3 Engine.

Road to Hill 30 - 8
Earned in Blood - 8.5
Hells Highway - 7.5

 

I'm going to chime in with my 2 cents. I haven't played it in a while but Bia: HH is quite an amazing game if you like to take a break from constantly running and shooting. It takes a bit more strategy but that's what makes it fun.

 

Hey guys, I got a friend who just got a new 4870, using it on an asus striker II, for some reason after it gets past the boot screen, and goes on to windows, nothing shows up. the old nvidia drivers for his old card are uninstalled already, and he installed the new 8.12 ati drivers as well. Can't understand why it still won't work...any ideas??

 

I might suggest you try a program called Driver Sweeper. Just uninstall the drivers, start up in safe mode(usually F8) and run driver sweeper. Check to remove both ATi and Nvidia display drivers. Then install the latest WHQL stable driver for your card. Should work like a charm.

Here's the link:

http://www.guru3d.com/category/driversweeper/

 

Yeah, estuansis, that was a good tip you gave mrk. I finally did the same thing recently, buying something similar called driverclean, which also runs in safe mode.

It sounds like mrk's friend can't get into xp. So he's got to hit f8 like a madman soon after bootup, and try to get to safe mode to run the program. It will remove any trace of any ati or nvidia driver I believe.

I am glad to hear, estuansis and boozer, that you guys played hells highway and got all the way through the game, including the rain.

My p4 is below the game minimum, which is Pentium D, but until I hit the rain I was getting about 20fps with all high settings, which was not too bad. When I hit the rain I actually thought my gfx card broke, because for the first time in my life, I had a black screen, except for the red circle showing the nazi location. I waited and waited - no picture - except for the red circle. The most bizarre thing that ever happened to me. The card could not synch in. I actually thought I had fried my 3850.

Finally I rebooted and played a section of MOH airborne to verify that my card still worked, lol. I even loaded sp3, a listed requirement on the hells highway web site, and dropped all my settings to the floor. So far, so good - I had a picture again. I thought, okay, I'm going to get through this rain - but digging in on the wall - I took my first shot - CRASH to Bios for the 5th time.

Sam, does rain really add so much to the cpu load or is it just the way they programmed the game?

Abuzar, you're right. The pace of these Band of Brothers games is different - you usually have time to get your squads in position, with only a few exceptions where you are under time pressure. Then you look for flanking opportunities. It IS definitely a break from the run and gun - and supposedly more like actual airborne battle. I agree, it's a good changeup.

So estuansis, you too have now played the whole series. I see you also like the middle game the best, although you give the first game, Road to Hill 30, a higher rating than I do. I think the reason for my lower score on that game is because I played both those first two titles fairly recently - say about a year ago when I first heard about the series - and the graphics on Road to Hill 30 had already become kind of outdated by then. I think it's a 2004 title. I was actually not going to buy it after I played the demo. But then I played the demo of Earned in Blood and I was very impressed and decided for sure to buy it, so then it made sense to me to buy Road to Hill 30 and start the series at the beginning, and I'm glad I did it that way.

It was a good game, but Earned in Blood was REALLY good, the best one so far overall - not quite as good graphically as Hells Highway - but no bugs, no problem customizing your controls - and probably a slightly better storyline. No "rushed to meet a deadline" feeling about it at all I would say. But yeah, parts of Hells Highway are like being in a painting, that is VERY true.

Well, Sam, I will be interested in how COD5 turns out, once I get the equipment to play it, since you seem to think that it will be the best WWII title ever, graphically. I hear they have some mean flame throwers in that game. I am bidding on it right now. But I am absolutely shocked to hear you say that piracy ruined the sales of COD4. Do you know that for a fact, or is it from personal experience? I mean, maybe it's just some college geniuses in England who cracked the copy protection, and not everywhere.

Somewhere on the internet there are sites that track sales data on games - I am interested because I always ask Miles how a certain Valve title is selling, and he never knows LOL. Anyway, I gave COD4 a 9.8, ranking it higher than any game I have ever played - and I think the storyline and graphics are absolutely superb. Look at all the money shaff is spending on equipment to become the master of on-line play! If any game was ever worth $50, it was COD4. (I picked it up for $25 on ebay, lol - but that's okay - I provide the secondary market for all the guys who go out and buy the hot titles at launch.)

Rich

 

The only legitimate reason anyone has to buy CoD4 is for the multiplayer. I got the collectors edition when the game came out. I don't think I have any friends who actually bought it though. We're all playing Left 4 Dead together anyway

 

A Striker II that still works? Wow, hats off. That's probably the most unreliable board in the world.
Rich: Rain tends to mainly add to GPU load - the two Call of Duty 4 maps with rain, when Anti-Aliasing is applied, halve and quarter my frame rate respectively, but if the effect is CPU rendered, which isn't uncommon, it will flatten your P4 as such effects usually consume most of a whole core on a Core 2 Quad.
I have Hells Highway installed and will play it soon, keen to see how it fares.
As for COD4, agreed on it being worth 50 dollars (I actually paid £29.99, which now works out to be $39), but for the multiplayer. The SP is fabulous, but a little short...

 

Wow, it wasn't just college guys in England - all of estuansis' friends also were able to pick up cod4 for free - that is friggin amazing. I'm astonished that their copy protection was so easy to crack!! But to play multiplayer, of course then you have to buy the game.

That must be it, Sam - they must have used the cpu to render the rain in Hells Highway. Amazing! I was doing fine until then LOL! I'll be interested in seeing what you think of the game.

 

All single players are cracked with ease, often on the same day of release of a new version. The Multiplayer being so easy to crack is unusual though, and was Activision's downfall. Cracking a singleplayer game isn't easily preventible, but stopping pirate multiplayer is easy and saves a lot of money on sales. COD4 is so popular if it was as hard to crack as Steam games, COD4 would have been one of the best selling PC titles ever instead of one of the worst.

 

on the consoles it was a brillaint seller, and on PS3 and xboxb 360 was the top online game played

and damn deservedly.

on of the best games of all time for me.

after RA2

 

Yeah and to think that's the crap version!

 

Sam, I started to feel really bad for Infinity Ward and Activision until I went to google and did some snooping and found this article from June: COD 4 sales top 10 million copies (I guess total sales were really helped by console sales which might not be so easy to crack.) I know that this is a big number, because I think the original Half Life got to about that number, mostly because of the followup mods like counter strike and day of defeat.

Anyway, the article says that Infinity Ward is pleased with this number. The same article says that COD2 total sales, also by Infinity Ward, have risen only to 2 million copies over all these several years - was that a 2005 game? So given your information about piracy, I wonder what total COD4 sales would be if they had better Steam-like protection? And maybe piracy is what killed COD2 sales - I thought it was a really excellent single player title. I played it a bit multiplayer, and no big deal - not like the quality of COD4 multiplayer. Maybe the mp is what is saving COD4 from a worse showing!!

So I feel a bit better - at least 10 million copies provides plenty of profit and incentive to pay for the development of future KILLER games like this. I don't care if the bad stuff doesn't sell - but when the good stuff doesn't sell - that's the end of the good stuff! LOL

 

I think 8 or 9 of those 10 million copies were Xbox / PS3 versions.

 

Well thank god for the consoles then!! I know that Valve is porting all of its PC games over to the consoles. I just hope that piracy doesn't impact PC title sales to the point where they don't even make the PC version, like on COD3 (which I heard sucked anyway lol.)

 

COD3 did suck, for much the same reason why World at War isn't as good as COD4, because it wasn't an Infinity Ward title.
And no, don't thank anyone for console versions of PC games. Do not want.

 

i gots a question.. i have an HP laptop with Nvidia7600go and I want to upgrade it to a 8800m or if any one has some suggestions i have a centrino duo 2.0ghz 2gb ram... problem is i cant find any video cards for laptops, any one have a website i could look for one ?

 

You can't upgrade laptop video cards. You need to buy a new laptop.

 

That goes for me! Who wants a PC port of a console game like GTA4? Let them start with the PC first like Valve.

Sam, PC piracy may not be quite as bad as one would worry about:

I stumbled onto this other site VGChartz, which tracks sales on all platforms - on the left is the platform icon. Here's the chart which I guess shows sales to date.

Anyway, Call of Duty 4 for ps3 sales shows 3.85 million - I'm going to see if I can find the PC numbers. Notice on this same VG Chartz, that the new COD5 from the same Treyarch team that did the crappy COD3 (but using the COD4 engine - and I read that they promised to try harder this time to refurbish their tattered image lol) has already hit 3.16 million xbox sales.