The Official Graphics Card and PC gaming Thread

Advent rising is old news. I tried it a while back. It was okay. Gameplay was a bit repetitive, but it played good and looked good.

Mass Effect on the PC is incredible.

 

There are many similarities in the Story between Advent Rising and Mass Effect. Don't ask me what because it's just a feeling I have lol.

Seriously though, it seems like I am the only one that enjoyed Advent Rising. It's my favorite game of all time haha.

 

My favorite game of all time goes to Final Fantasy 7. I love a good console RPG. FF7 is the best of the ones on PS1, and FFX was the best on PS2(both made me cry). lol

 

The only Final Fantasy I ever played was on the SNES. I guess I have been missing out, but I just got kinda into RPGs. I used to hate them, but I liked Oblivion, and I LOVE MASS EFFECT!!!!

lol

Seriously, Mass Effect is a great game. I love all the dialogue(for some reason Firefox thinks I have spelt this wrong; it also thinks spelt is not correct) options. Weird.

 

Oblivion is actually pretty nice with a GeForce 8 series card. I play 1650 x 1080 with 4xAA and 8xAF. I used tweakguides.com to go through the settings and adjust it for my 2GB of RAM and dual core CPU. That seems to smooth it out considerably. It looks nice and plays well. In the wilderness it drops down to 35FPS but it usually hangs around 50FPS.

 

Hmm, I never liked it on the PC. I played it with a 7600GT so performance wasn't the BEST, but I just preferred controls on the 360.

 

Using tweakguides.com I got it quite playable on the 7600GT with a few settings disabled(self shadows, ext. shadows, shadow filtering.) 1024 x 768 All sliders at about 65% and HDR on. I got 35-45 FPS outdoors and in the 50s in towns. It didn't look too bad. About the same as Xbox360 with a bit more fade in.

 

Hmm, I have looked through tweakguides, but it always looked like so much work, and I'm a lazy bastard.

So how is that case holding up for you? I had one of the LEDs die on startup on one of the Raidmaxes, but that was isolated.

 

It's been holding up just fine. It's plenty sturdy and of good quality.

 

Estuansis: Now you see why I've kept a PC with an X2 4200+ and an X1900XT? Sadly because of yet another failed Asus board I think that PC needs to move to socket AM2 or 775 soon, because 939 replacements are tricky to find for reasonable cash on ebay, but the X1900XT is staying put. It's a 'compatibility machine' lol.
As for performance in vegas, thanks for the tip - for the moment though I'm back to using a single card, so maybe next time.
I played mass effect on the 360 for all of a couple of minutes - the rest of the time watched someone else play it and it looked pretty dull and repetitive, can't say how good it looked because we use a CRT TV - in any case though, when I saw HD Xbox graphics for myself again on tuesday, I realised why I moan so much about PC graphics - if I sat more than a foot away from the screen, it wouldn't seem so bad!
I never played Oblivion much because I couldn't believe how bad it looked as soon as I set foot outside. I couldn't really be bothered to go through the tweak guides to make the game not have graphical quality more suited to the original Operation Flashpoint...
Abuzar: faulty LEDs is a problem that plagues NZXT on a regular basis, I wouldn't put Raidmax down for that.

 

You don't normally expect much from a company that produces such poor PSUs but this is a decent case and certainly a bit more aggressive looking than the Thermaltake Armor. I liked the Armor but I really don't need 10 CD drive bays and 6 hard drive bays. lol

Take it socket AM2 to keep the theme of the setup. I'd get a 5000+ BE and OC it to 3.2GHz. That'd be a sweet machine

 

their new toughpower PSUs have been doing great. esp for the price.

 

The toughpowers have been good since release - that is of course because they are actually the same as the Corsair TX, minus the inferior fan configuration.

Estuansis: To be fair again, NZXT's PSUs aren't all that great. I'm seeing less and less difference between the companies.

 

I was talking about Raidmax. Their PSUs are horrible. But my 750W TT Toughpower was really nice and came in a combo deal with the Armor

I see a lot of difference between companies. Very few offer really nice PSUs. Corsair, OCZ, Zalman, Gigabyte, those are good companies with solid products all the way through their lines.

Other companies(as you know) produce piss poor PSUs that they shouldn't be allowed to sell. Deer, Raidmax, Coolmax, Ultra, Kingwin, Xion, Sigma are some of those terrible brands. I've seen all of those cause problems in builds time and time again.

I generally avoid any PSU that comes pre-installed in a case.

 

Estuansis, you had a Armor too! Man great minds think alike lol.

 

I loved the cooling and layout, but it was way too big, lol.


Sammorris. Have you spent much time with Oblivion lately? I recommend Qarl's Texture Pack III Redimized version. It's a huge jump up from stock graphics. That and the LOD texture replacement mods, the LOD normalmap replacement mod, and better water mod. With all those installed, Oblivion looks way better and almost photorealistic at times

 

I know you were - and I'm telling you NZXT are in the same boat - nice cases, not so nice PSUs.
I made a list a long while back of PSU brands you should avoid, and I think there were about 50 of them. Shame that never got stickied really.

As for oblivion, as I said before, I could never really be bothered to fiddle with the game to get it looking respectable, so I left it, and this was over a year ago. I might resurrect it one day when I get a more powerful graphics card, but until then I'm happy playing games like Age of Conan instead.

 

i know this isnt a great GPU but i dont game or anything, YET...how does this fair?



http://service.futuremark.com/home.action;jsessionid=7FF2501D8C35EAA8E0A059545A4CF750

 

Ehh, it's not that great. I'm guessing medium-high settings at 1280x1024.

WAIT, that was 3Dmark05? Well then I dont know.

 

5387 in 3dmark06 would be considered a reasonable score - suitable for relatively recent games but will struggle to run top end stuff at all respectably. That score in 05 though not sure, i've not used 05 for a long time.