The Official Graphics Card and PC gaming Thread

So it was definitely the cable then?

 

email/call CM and ask them for a set of replacement cables

 

And hope they respond. The only email I ever sent to CM support (also asking for replacement parts) was ignored.

 

LOL reminds me of when I thought one of my HDDs died. Faulty SATA cable XD

 

Yikes!! I go away for a couple days and you guys blaze ahead 3 pages!! I'll get caught up this weekend!

Yeah, I think you're right Sam, sounds more like my style. Plus I made a big mistake buying the Expansion Pack of World in Conflict.

The original starts out with Americans defending Seattle - ok, so far so good - I don't know if I want to really be fighting Russians after COD 1, 2, and 4 being a Russian on the side of the good guys, fighting Nazis, but oh well.

However, the expansion pack, which includes the original, starts out with the expansion pack - I guess that makes sense. The expansion pack is the 6 new soviet campaigns beginning with the soviet push into west berlin (which starts out with a secret squad of soldiers moving into two american anti-aircraft batteries and planting detonation charges.) So first I went through the tutorial in an American boot camp. And then my first assignment was to sneak over the wall and kill Americans. LOL Didn't feel right - I think I'll put the game back for sale on ebay, hahaha.

The exciting news - and I'll fill in more this weekend - I have started playing Left 4 Dead!!! In fact that's where I've been - on another video game binge like when I first discovered Counter Strike, lol.

You've been holding out again - just like on the 30" LCD.

All you guys - holdouts - every last one of you! Hahaha

I don't remember anybody raving about the fact that this game is unbelievably FANTASTIC!!!!!

Rich

 

LOL, I just watched a youtube video of it. Looks like something I might enjoy!

 

We don't rave because it is common knowledge that every game Valve releases KICKS ASS. This is really just more of the same amazing Source Engine we've been seeing since Half Life 2.

That's why we told you to play. The graphics are amazing, the performance is awesome, and it's absolute undiluted fun

Anybody who claims to be a PC gamer yet hasn't played any Valve games should be ashamed. They're the reason I got into PC gaming.

 

I second that motion! Hahaha!

I have my full game play day tomorrow - all day of Left 4 Dead - but I snuck back here for a second. I'll be back this weekend to catch up.

Yeah, Kevin - I don't know if the youtube videos really show the experience, but jump all over that game! I have to admit I was skeptical - being the hardened world war II geek that I am - even having done some of the early L4d play-testing - BUT THEY POLISHED IT UP SOOOO MUCH - these guys are geniuses!

Haha! Very well put, Jeff. I know you told me to get over my bit about "I can't play any games until my new build, boo hoo." haha. Man were you right.

Valve is so good about scaling games for the hardware - at 1920x1200 (full screen) it's a gorgeous experience even though I'm not at native resolution. On the director's commentary they talk about the color correction - and my dell is probably oversaturated to begin with - but the whole way they added film grain and vignetting etc., like you say, amazing graphics!

It is just totally mind-blowing - even on my weak rig!! I didn't notice until I ran the director's commentary - where some of the circling speech boxes disappeared until I got closer - that to make the game work for me - (or maybe they do this for everybody to conserve texture memory) - they take out some of the detail until I get closer - like a fire extinguisher on a wall is not visible until I'm 10 feet away - tricks like that to work with my 512mb vram (but on an agp bus am I getting the full 512mb benefit, as sam has questioned?) and slow processor.

Well, anyway, you were right! I opened up Steam for some reason - oh, yeah - I dragged out the new Sin game looking for something to play after finishing Earned in Blood, played it for a while on Super hardest setting - painfully got past the part about battling the titan mutant in the construction yard - and then found myself facing dozens of those boring exploding sintek soldiers with their stupid gattling guns - ("outflank him" "changing attack vector" "you're mine, cop") it just turned BORING! So I looked for a way to change back to just plain hardest - without that advanced crap like "never help me", and unlike valve games you can't do that mid-game - I would have to start over. That ticked me off!

I almost tossed the DVD out, lol, so I went into Steam to delete the local sin content and There It Was - Left 4 Dead - staring me in the face, and loading. WTF!

Somebody had sent me a guest pass I guess, a long time ago, maybe Miles Estes, my relative - the guy who animated the game - and I must have responded to the link. So I thought, "Okay I'll try it." I played single player for a while and then gave multiplayer a shot for a couple hours. The next day it wouldn' let me play - but I found that all 4.9 gigs were still loaded, so I entered the key Miles had given me, and I was golden. I played the Director's Commentary - it starts out with Gabe Newell, the founder, giving out his email address, and talking about the 10,000 emails he gets everytime they do a new release - and he reads every one! Every commentary was interesting as hell! And then, suddenly, at the first machine gun post in the generator room, I hit the little revolving speech box, and there was Miles explaining the crescendo point! I laughed out loud - the bastard never told me about that! (I called him today to take him to lunch on Friday where I'm going to congratulate the hell out of him) I was so friggin surprised. Hahaha!

He's on the rollup credits at the beginning of Half Life 2, but for some reason I didn't expect him to be giving any commentaries. A while later he gave another one, in front of two zombies who appear, where he talks about all the motion capture that went into the zombie death animations. They had an actor, strapped with sensors up on a stage at the Mo Cap studio, going through about 100 ways of dying!!

He used to tell me about the Mo Cap - I knew they did stuff like that - but they used a lot of other stuff also that I never heard of before - like sharpening the colorful building images to subconsciously coincide with the adrenalin rush of heightened anticipation - the music director that is individually tailored to each player coinciding with that players' stress level (as gauged by the statistics they keep on how many zombies you have killed at that point - how much damage, etc.)

They play-tested the hell out it - refining it - interviewing the friends and family members they sprung it on - changing and enhancing it. Valve may not release a game on time - but to hell with that - they release it when it's ready - and like Jeff says, then it kicks ass!!

So, WORLD - and Kevin - if you have not invested a few pennies in Left 4 Dead - you just have no friggin idea of what you are missing!!! Hahaha!

Rich

 

Duke nukem 3d got me into pc gaming. Once red alert 2: Yuri's Revenge came out, that was the las game I played on the pc, till cod4. The only valve games I got into are l4d and portal. After cod4 I can't really get Into single players again. Portal being the exception.

 

Soo...Valve is like Rockstar right? Just another business producing video games? Heh heh. Remember, im new to the gaming scene LOL!

 

thats right, and IMO i prefer rockstar, the GTA series are a series, IMO only surpassed my God of War (and or the football (FIFA/PES) games)

 

Then you shouldn't go away for so long at a time...

You don't like the russians being on the wrong side of the battle eh? I do have to say Rich, it's been 64 years since 1945....
I've read a lot of relatively scathing reviews of the expansion for WiC, but merely on the side of amount of content, not necessarily the quality of it.

Left 4 Dead is AMAZING, I've probably played a couple of hundred hours of it at least, so far, and I've in total killed 30,000 zombies (You'll notice there's an achievement for killing 53,595 zombies, one more than the achievement in the 360 game Dead Rising, for killing 53,594, the population of the infected town)

Agreed, and then some.

IMO the over-saturation is only really a problem with the Dell 3008, not the 3007, and I've basically cured it with 85/80/82 on the colour settings (RGB)
The film grain is a neat little effect which when not overdone is a good mask to make already good textures look better than they already are.
I have never seen any pop-in of note in Left 4 Dead, so it must be your settings. That said, I max the game out at 2560 even on my HD4830 PC (though without the AA). It struggles a bit when you set lots of zombies on fire with a molotov, but overall is perfectly playable, even though it is rarely fluid.
As far as I know the max AGP aperture is 256MB, which will limit your usable Graphics memory to that much, but don't count me on that.
This said, at 1920x1200 without AA, 256MB probably won't be that limiting, at least not in Left 4 Dead.

Left 4 Dead was free for a day earlier this week, that is why it unlocked for that day without needing a CD key. LOTS of people tried it that day.
Amazingly, despite playing the game as much as I do, I haven't listened the developer's commentary yet, I will at some point.
Sweet, so I get to hear your mate Miles talking?

Omegaman: Valve is like Rockstar as A solid gold throne is to a chair from an expensive department store. The latter is good on the whole, but there's nothing to top the former.
Grand Theft Auto is good, but unexeplary IMO (even if GTA4 is better than usual, San Andreas didn't wow me that much). Max Payne, Manhunt, Midnight Club, all very reputable, but not all Grade A material. I think the best thing to come out of Rockstar is Lemmings
Valve on the other hand, Half Life, Portal, TF2, Left 4 Dead, what's not to like?

 

As stated earlier in this thread. A lot of new games are pretty forgiving on older hardware. Valve champions this quite effectively. Imagine my surprise when I got a game invite from a friend still using a 7600GS XD

There are many different types of game makers. Some just develop the games. Some(like EA) develop their own and also publish for smaller developers. And some, like Valve and Rockstar, develop and publish everything completely in-house.

I'd have to go with Valve on that though. Wider range of hardware and video support, focus on performance as well as graphics, Steam less intrusive than Rockstar Social Club(seriously, WTF. why a content delivery service for only one or 2 games?), DRM free(as long as you pay for the game).

GTA4 was fun on the Xbox 360. I thought it was a pretty good game. But the fact that it performs worse than Crysis and looks crap doing it completely turned me off to the PC version.

BTW Rich(or anyone who cares), if you wanna play some L4D send me a PM and I'll give you my SteamID.

I dunno if it was newer drivers or my reformat or Valve updating it, but my hitching with multi core rendering and my terrible mic problems seem to have cleared up nicely.

 

What they didn't seem to realise with GTA4 is that good textures make a game. The textures in GTA4 are average at best and are very poorly compressed so they EAT video RAM, and as a result can't be anti-aliased. The lighting effects just make it worse, as they are equally poorly implemented. If the game looked exactly as it does now, but was rendered in the same way other games, you could max it out on an 8800GT, I guarantee it. Also, you'd have enough video memory for the graphics card to render the details, rather than rendering most of the post-processing in software, so you wouldn't need a quad core CPU either.

 

personally vice city is in my top 3 games. i guess being a console gamer for most of my life i preferd rockstar to vavle, and im sure it'd be the other way around if i was more of a PC gamer.

speaking of top games what are your top 5?

mien in no order are:

GTA Vice City (PS2)
Shenmue (DC)
COD: MW (PC - multiplayer)
Red Alert 2 (inc Yuris revenge) (PC)
Marvel vs Capcom 2 (PS2)

(man that was a hard list to make, there are so many more i want to add)

 

Half Life 2 Series (PC)
Total War Series (PC)
Call of Duty 2 & 4 (PC)
Legend of Dragoon (PSX)
Conker's Bad Furday/Live and Reloaded (N64/Xbox)

 

Super mario N64
Mario kart N64
Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time N64
GTA IV
Gran Turismo (any of them)

Sonic the hedgehog was also a BIG favorite. The music was quite catchy LOL!

 

Hmm, tricky one (no particular order)

Super Mario 64
Ultimate Doom / Doom II: Hell on Earth
Super Mario Galaxy
Goldeneye 64
Gran Turismo 3: A-Spec

Favourite N64 Game: Super Mario 64 (R/Up: Mario Kart 64)
Favourite PS1 Game: Gran Turismo 2 (R/Up: Micro Machines V3)
Favourite PS2 Game: Gran Turismo 3 A-Spec (R/Up: Pac Man World 2)
Favourite Wii Game: Super Mario Galaxy (R/Up: Wii Sports)
Favourite SNES Game: Super Mario World (R/Up: Pilotwings)
Favourite Mega Drive[Genesis] Game: Puggsy (R/Up: Sonic the Hedgehog I)
Favourite PC Game: Doom 2 (R/Up: RollerCoaster Tycoon Series)

Favourite PC Shooter: Doom 2
Favourite Console Shooter: Red Faction 2
Favourite PC Racer: GRiD
Favourite Console Racer: Gran Turismo Series
Favourite PC Beat-em-up: N/A
Favourite Console Beat-em-up: Super Smash Bros. (N64)
Favourite PC Platformer: Not sure yet
Favourite Console Platformer: Super Mario Galaxy
Favourite PC RTS: Supreme Commander
Favourite Console RTS: Nah, come on, you didn't really expect me to have one did you?

 

No one likes rpg's? At least there's bunch of classics, though I've hardly played any of them lol.

 

In the past, I would say no, on the RPG's. However, Ive become a lot more open minded in the last few years, and am planning on giving a few a shot Like Final Fantasy X for instance. Perhaps even W.O.W.