The Official Graphics Card and PC gaming Thread

Yeah, no question Shokz, it's awesome!

So let me just ask you: After we finally get to see what happens in Episode 3, whenever that day gets here - and I think you're right - not this year - do you think they'll eventually do a Half Life 3?

They have a professional science fiction writer - I think they have the same guy they brought in 12 years ago to do the original Half Life. He's a writer - he's got ideas - he could just keep going, right?

Maybe they'll poll the fan base and see what everybody wants.

Me, I'll tell you what I want. I'd like to see them do World War II, hahaha.

Well, they already sort of did it in Day of Defeat. But of course that's just Multi-player, and it started out like Counter Strike, a community Half Life mod.

I'd like to see what Valve would do, starting from scratch, with a total Valve single player World War II shooter. But I'm probably the only one. LOL

Rich

 

I'm really excited to play Red Faction Guerrilla. The entire thing is supposed to be physics based. I.E. All buildings need to be designed realistically because they actually support themselves. Not like Crysis where they are solid objects until you blow them apart. I mean, you knock out a single support and it could cause a chain reaction bringing the whole building crashing to the ground. They actually needed to build a framework for every building to hold them up. This intrigues me to no end

I know it sounds like a gimmick but I, for one, am interested to see just how detailed they've made it. Also, it's an excellent candidate for Nvidia PhysX support. If they needed a game to sell that feature, Red Faction is going to be it.

 

Ok, you know what...Left4Dead just closed itself again. The 2 times that its shutdown today, both were accompanied by a "Steam Pop-up." I find that VERY curious. The popup, seems to be "Steam News." If anyone knows of a way to shut this off, just for the sake of tracking down the friggin problem, please let me know

 

Played the new Red Faction demo on PS3 - it's pretty good, and it seems the physics is very well done - you can crash into a building in an armoured vehicle and watch the wall implode where you hit it and the windows shatter ^.^

 

What again? No thanks. IMO the sooner game developers get off that overgrazed field the better.

Jeff: I was always impressed with the Geomod of Red Faction 2, and eagerly await the new title. With any luck the physics will be put to more significant use. Trouble is, with real destructive environments, you have to put some limits down or you break the game...

 

Buildings in the red faction demo did seem to collapse somewhat realistically and I had the most fun just destroying stuff. The major drawback to the game imo is that the enemies appear to respawn infinitely. In one area where I was taking my time knocking down this little building another wave of ~4-5 guys would show up every couple minutes and after a while it started to get annoying. I don't know about others but after killing some one I don't like having to fight their clone two minutes later.

 

Does anyone not find this the least bit curious?

 

I do, but I've never had it and unfortunately have no idea how to go about solving it... Sorry :S

 

Same

Sounds specific to your PC...

 

Its running now for over an hour! I get this kind of flitchy flashy artifacting, but otherwise its seems to be fine today. Most unusual.

 

Artifacting? Sure it's not a graphics fault crashing the game? The steam popups will often appear after you close a game sometimes, whether you closed it or the game crashed.

 

Im gonna see about updating the drivers today, and see if that helps. But I find it interesting that its suddenly better than it was yesterday...

 

Kevin, close all your background stuff. Sam, could that possibly be part of his problem?

Anyway, it can't hurt to close them all. To help you with that, there's a free program that most people have - Jeff mentioned it to me once, called EndItAll. Just google it. I got the tip from punkbusters.

I was having trouble getting kicked by punkbusters in cod4 mp, and so I started digging into it a bit and seeing what help punkbusters could give me, and they said "Don't use windows task manager to close processes, because many times that results in free threads that consume more resources than if you had left the process running."

They said "Get EndItAll, and close your processes that way."

So now, I start up EndItAll, tell it to kill everything, wait about 30 seconds (it has a count-down timer on the bottom of the window) close it, and then open it again, again tell it to kill everything, which takes only a few seconds as it finally kills off ccc and mom - the two catalyst processes - and one more thing called prism which I forget what that is - and then I am left with about 8 processes that it can't kill - spooler, windows logon, svhost, a few more.

Then I restart ati tray tools, and then I start Steam. Steam always opens up a second window called updates. I look at that, close it, and then I start Left 4 Dead.

I suggest try that and see how your Left 4 Dead runs.

Rich

 

Perhaps, but since the days of single core processors, there has been no need to close background programs to run games or any other demanding application other than to squeeze a few more 3dmarks. With your P4 I could understand it, but with a Quad core it makes no sense.
I wouldn't really worry about Punkbuster Rich, it's a ridiculously unreliable and buggy program, if you experience problems with servers that use it, it's best to just move to ones that don't.

 

Try using Driver Cleaner Pro it gets rid of all the crap left behind from old versions of drivers. It fixed some trouble I was having with my AGP GeForce 6200 years ago. The instructions for it need reading though because you need to mess about in Safe mode.

 

Hey, I second Keith's comment about Driver cleaner - works great. I use that each time I install a new driver. You have to do in safe mode to make sure no drivers load - but it's not hard.

Hmmmm. Good point Sam. Yeah, I'm still on the p4 of course - I FINALLY just got paid for that deal I closed two months ago. But since Left 4 Dead runs pretty well, the urgency of the new build has tapered off a bit. The spedo sits in its box, and Crysis, GTA4, San Andreas, Warhead, Far Cry2, and COD5 sit in their box, lol.

In the next few days I'll pick up one more 640gig seagate to mate with the other I already have for Raid 0 (I thought I already had two but no) so that I'm not the last one out of the safe house every time.

Raid 0 access time is a bit longer, I think I heard you say, Sam, but data transfer is twice as fast, right? For Raid 0 you DO have to have two identical drives, right?

 

Not necessarily, it's just beneficial that you have two drives the same size, else the array will be double the size of the smaller one and you lose space.

 

Oh, I get it. Thanks.

 

Hmmm, that sucks. I have the most up to date drivers. Unless there is an unofficial release ready. And the 185.85 driver was the first and only driver installed on the Left 4 dead machine (Windows 7). It seems to be running ok today. Its had a few errors where the screen would freeze, and the sound would begin repeating itself. Im sure we've all experienced this LOL! But other than that, and the sky flashing a bit, no spontaneous shutdowns. Just seems to be better today

 

Yeah, Kevin, but did you see what Keith said about Driver Cleaner - it's a $10-20 program or something like that. I held off getting it for years and finally got it about 6 months ago when I was having lots of driver issues. In safe mode, it will get rid of every ati and nvidia related file - any and all that are laying around - then you can re-install your graphics drivers.