The Official Graphics Card and PC gaming Thread

I'll be honest Rich, I never played it much, especially not compared to Midtown Madness 2 and other racing games, but it was quite amusing for the short while I played it.
I seem to recall that even back when I played it, it was a bit old for my PC and not properly supported.

 

Finding a 3D passive (FPR) 120hz+ monitor/HDTV, for less than $600 is rather difficult. The monitors get rather expensive in the 27" range. And if I'm gonna spend $400, I might as well spend another $100 and get a 40 - 42" screen. I just can't seem to find a 37" screen at an agreeable price. 42" seems to be the most common HDTV in the smaller range. I'd rather a 37", because I've already had one on my desk. It worked perfectly. I go any larger, and I'll have to remove stuff from my desk :S The 27's only have 60hz. I'd really rather keep it within 120hz or more, for fluidity in games as well

Newegg doesn't seem to separate the different 3D technologies into categories. Though they seem to in their respective listings. "Film-type patterned retarder"

What would you do in my situation?

 

Your silence is deafening

Seriously though. Have any of you guys experimented or seen Active (Shutter) 3D? Did it cause you headaches? Because apparently the trade off, is higher resolution for Active, but less eye strain for passive. Maybe I should wait til the technology matures more? :S

HDMI 1.4B. Will my GTX 570 support 120Hz over HDMI? Probably provided an Nvidia driver update eh?

 

The 3D I have seen and used is with the active eyewear, but the effect was excellent, only causing minor eye strain after extended gameplay sessions. Maybe 4-5 hours staring directly at it, and examining the effect in fine detail. Didn't hurt that the glasses used were fairly expensive and comfortable to wear, fitting over my corrective eyewear. Have never had the chance to see it built into the display.

 

Haha, I guess that answers my question - could it take out a bomber. Blowing off the wing or tail would usually slow the thing down a bit I presume.

When you talk about the two types of ammunition, did they ever combine them - as in one round of one type, followed by another round of the other type. If not, when did they load the fragmentation shells, and when did they load the armor piercing incendiaries?

Yes, I remember the German 88s from Band of Brothers - which one was it where you had to accompany a tank column down into a small valley, hiding the lead tank behind some trees so the 88 on the far hill couldn't destroy it, before you had a chance to leave the tank column and take out the 88 crew with your fire and assault teams. There was also that 88 in the last one, Hells Highway, on the other side of the river. The colonel was yelling "Get over there and take out that gun!" and so you had to go through town and work around it, until you could fire a bazooka at its sides.

Hmmm. As I mentioned I had Monster Truck Madness playing on pretty old equipment, W98 - you might have been on XP by then. I had the steering wheel, brakes, accelerator, 3 sets on our 3-cpu LAN - everything worked really well. Now that we're talking about it, I remember the music - it was great! And some of the stuff had an announcer yelling "Well, he's road kill now!" That's one I remember.

That's all that Fernie and I and a cousin of his did for almost his entire 10th birthday party - play that game. Fernie became quite addicted to video games after that, finally getting an xbox even after I upgraded him to a 2 ghz XP machine (I had it at my house after getting a 3.2 ghz replacement for the office print server - and I was on counter strike too much - I gave it to him to try to cut down on my personal gaming time, lol) which allowed him to play most of the newer games on his tv without a major hardware investment.

Well, for my part, I have to attribute that to my total ignorance - as in, what the hell are you talking about, Kevin? Let's get back to something I can understand, like nudity!

What the hell? They already have 3d games!! Hmmm. Some of these games are scary enough without the zombie's claws coming right through the screen at me! What games would that be and how was it?

EDIT:
Hey, I re-read my post, and that announcer yelling "Well he's road kill now" reminded me of the DLC for RAGE - the scorcher episode. Wow was that terrific.

For you guys who enjoyed Rage, the DLC is fantastic, and includes a re-visit to Mutant Bash TV with all-newly-redesigned beautiful sets. You even end up with a girl-friend whom you can visit at the end. She never gets naked, Kevin, sorry to say, but she does have some suggestive dialog, such as "Uhhhh, when are you going to show me your ..... gun, your BFG." Yeah, she actually says that. She says different stuff every time you leave and come back to "the trophy room" - your private love shack in town.

But I still prefer Ginny standing outside the tailor shop. Don't any of you guys try to get anything going with her - Ginny is mine!

Rich

 

3D nudity! LOL! Rich, I ended up buying a camera instead. The Canon 70D. I'll be content for quite some time Neweggs loss. The one and only cheap 3D monitor that enticed me, was out of stock. So, I elected to buy the camera. On ebay! Plus, I needed to give the loaner camera back to my friend. He said he wasn't using it, but I felt uncomfortable using a high dollar camera, that wasn't mine

 

I hear you - what if you had broken the thing - trying to capture some ... uh ... nudity. (see my edit bottom of last page)

 

You're a funny guy Rich LOL!

 

Just about every type of aircraft ammunition used during the war had ammo types alternating on the belts. Usually something like "HE Frag->HE Frag->AP Incendiary Tracer". So as you used up the ammo, it would be alternating between shell types constantly. Most ammo belts have some sort of tracer among the other types of rounds.

Killzone 3 on the PS3 was somewhat of a technological showcase for 3D when it came out. The actual 3D effect is just stunning, and the graphics push the PS3 to its stretching point, which enhances the 3D effect greatly. Not only are the objects popping out at you very convincingly, they are quite high fidelity as well. They took advantage of every little technique available to make it as visually impressive as possible. It is a very good looking game, even compared to many current PC titles.

The PS3 always had the advantage of superior graphics over the Xbox 360 as far as brand exclusives were concerned. The Xbox 360 held the edge on cross-platform titles due to its more conventional hardware.

In my opinion Killzone 2 and 3 are some of the finest shooters to ever grace a console. Both games push the PS3 to its absolute limits in terms of technology, and the gameplay and story are fantastic. Always felt that non PS3 owners were missing out there.

 

Rich, I believe in Brothers in Arms(I think that's the game you mean, as Band of Brothers was a TV series) you could take out the crews with small arms fire, as they were relatively unprotected. You could then blow the guns up with with explosives or use a thermite charge to disable the firing mechanism.

 

Well, yes, you're right - it's a big cannon - but I recall that the bazooka team targeted it from the sides, and I think there was a nice explosion as they blew up the gun.

Yeah, Jeff, you're right, Brothers in Arms, Hells Highway. I presume a bazooka would damage it enough from the side to bust up the mechanism, or maybe ruin the cannon barrel? I recall that I signaled the bazooka team to take the gun out when we got around to the side. We may have killed the crew by then, but if not they died in the blast. I guess supposedly we were blowing up some of the ammo in the process. What do you guys think?

That is interesting. I understand the need for tracers, but I didn't know they would mix up rounds like armor piercing incendiary, followed by fragmentation. Sounds like quite a weapon, indeed. I remember, maybe on hulu, that a couple of years back I watched some rare color world war 2 footage - the series was Word War II in Color - including when they sent a film crew on a bombing run from England over Germany. They sent them with the very best crew they had - and after that the crew did not fly any more missions - they just trained other flight crews. So you could hear the guys talking to the belly gunner and tail gunner about the German pilots coming from the lower rear - "There's one trying to swing around behind us - okay you got him." And this was real - I was stunned.

I have had just one experience with tracer rounds on the M16. When I did the night firing range in Basic Training to complete my expert badge, we had tracer rounds mixed in with the regular ammo, so we could make sure we were sighting high enough to allow for the fall of gravity. I think we were prone, but firing more by watching our tracers than by looking through the iron gun sights.

I remember standing way off to the side, completely off the firing range of course, and watching those tracers shoot across - I suppose they were going a thousand miles an hour - Jeff, you'll know exactly how fast M16 rounds travel - but the half second or so that they took to go across was easy to follow - not as super fast as one might think.

Let's see, 1000 miles an hour is 1466 feet per second (using the old rule of thumb 60 miles an hour is 88 feet per second) so 1/2 second is 730 feet. Maybe we were firing 200 yards, but it seems to me that it was a 100 yard firing range. Either the range was longer, or the bullets were moving slower, but I don't think they crossed that range any faster than half a second - like I'm pretty sure it wasn't a quarter second - nothing that quick.

What do you think Jeff? Also, when you go out with your AK or other rifles, do you guys ever do night firing with tracer rounds?

Rich

 

Rich, tracer rounds are expensive and hard to get. We usually use Full Metal Jacket.

Well I've been back to modding Oblivion. Every time I do it from a fresh install, I clean up the process and refine the result a little more. Just tonight the weather and lighting and the angle I was standing to the sun really made it look gorgeous. Real testament to the engine's capacity for graphical fidelity, and to the work of all the mod authors who have high expectations of what their games should look like.

The first mod any Oblivion player should do is to install all of the unofficial patches. They drastically improve the performance, stability, seamlessness, and function of the game. Whether you intend to run "modded"or not, they are essential to having a fun a smooth gaming experience. The next step I took was to make the game Large Address Aware, effectively increasing its memory limit from 2GB to 3GB, freeing up some breathing space and helping immensely with hitching and loading. After that, I have nearly every single object and surface in the game re-textured, every single plant and tree remodeled and retextured, a complex weather and lighting mod that removes global lighting and makes every light emitting object a light source, and more. Especially a mod which makes all windows transparent to the outside world and allows you to hear outside weather effects from indoors. A revolutionary step in detail and capability for the game. The water is also replaced with a custom water texture and shader, turning it from relatively primitive video game soup into seriously decent looking water.

I also have custom shaders enabled through the Oblivion Graphics Extender. Currently they are GodRays, Color Grading, and DLAA which is a very subtle type of FXAA that helps immensely. I am unable to use traditional AA without glitches thanks to the custom shaders, but the DLAA more than makes up for it. The entire image is drastically cleaner and everything flows together much more smoothly. The high res textures are simply too sharp, and can be very jarring to look at compared to others. This TRANSFORMS IT ALL. The GodRays are also quite well done, much akin to Crysis. They spread and disperse the light, giving everything a natural hue depending on lighting conditions. Mixing this with the real light sources mod is AMAZING.

On top of all the graphics effects, I installed a mod compilation called Unique Landscapes which simply takes some of the more sparsely detailed areas of the game, and gives them that artist's touch. Small waterfalls, islands in the rivers with trees, scary forest areas with gnarled trees, extra detail in ruins, expanded farmland, etc. Nothing that would be out of place in the game. I adhere to that one rule very strictly. Preserve the original assets and art style. No goofy looking BS, no crazy spell effects, and absolutely no changes to the gameplay, just more detail. Oblivion is downright ugly without mods, and seriously and genuinely impressive with them. This is why I mod.

As a finishing touch, I have Ambient Occlusion set to Quality in the Nvidia control panel. None of the custom SSAO effects are satisfactory, while the cheap Nvidia effect is subtle enough not to be annoying while having the lowest performance impact. This is a nice addition, and ties everything together that little bit more. Gives the image much more depth.

The following screens were shot today and are 1080p downscaled to 1600 x 900, just right click and view. Was just exploring some ruins, and the sky became overcast, creating this very dynamic, dappled lighting effect. Really caught my eye. This is all done leveraging effects that the engine is already capable of, but the developers chose not to use or couldn't due to performance constraints. A lot of these effects are already being used in unmodded Skyrim though not to this level without yet more mods.

At the top of the hill looking into the sun. Hence the massive lighting difference.









I am seriously having problems enjoying the game currently as I can't stop scrutinizing the virtual world around my character in high detail. This is seriously impressive. Well beyond anything I ever thought possible at the beginning of my modding adventures.

Here's a very similar area but without mods. To give some sort of contrast for what's been changed. Keep in mind weather conditions affect a lot. Still, the unmodded game is super ugly in motion.

 

Sorry for the double but just wanted to add, Skyrim will be receiving a similar treatment very shortly. I already have the majority of the mods figured out for it, and am currently figuring out the best installation order. It's also a long process of play testing and other stuff before I decide what mods are quality or what can be improved upon.

The goal here is to improve the Gamebryo games to their maximum potential until I can't find anything to improve upon. 99% of what I add to the games is higher res textures, bug fixes, graphical/atmospheric enhancements, fixing broken/unfinished game mechanics etc. I have gone through nearly every single mod on the Skyrim and Oblivion Nexus by hand(some thousands of different mods) and picked only the very best, most bug free, and most seamless to the existing world.

I did have a nearly 100% complete Oblivion save on a very bloated and buggy modded install. It was deleted due to bad luck, so I have decided to re-mod both Oblivion and Skyrim and start fresh with as much polish as possible. I will eventually start my 100% final playthroughs of both games. The nature of the games' save systems means manipulating mods and then saving creates lots of glitches and bloat, so the only proper way to accomplish what I want to do is get my mods perfected, then start a true new game meant for the long haul.

Also, as you can see from the framerates in the screenshots, all of this hardware is still necessary to run a game from 2005. A mixture of the mods and the original game running badly. Skyrim never drops quite as low as Oblivion. Both games can be gotten to a near-Crysis level of visual artistry.

While being the game that largely drew in the casual crowd to Elder Scrolls, Skyrim also gains some major advantages from its popularity. Particularly the much more active modding community, and better tested and supported mods. There are several compilations of the best mods, and compilations of compilations, allowing you to streamline rebuilding the game world.

 

Wow!!

I have a 4.5 hour drive ahead of me tomorrow morning - going up to Santa Maria to visit my brother and his little girl - I missed her 10th birthday last month. Then I'll be back in a few days and work on my corporate taxes, harvard guy inc., a California corporation (tax advantages) requiring taxes to be filed by 3/15, lol.

(DDP, I seriously doubt that they have such a thing as corporations up there in Canada - [the concept is that people share group ownership of a company] - since given the frigid conditions, it's more likely that while people might have group ownership of an igloo, regarding anything else it's probably "Every man for himself!" .... but maybe I'm wrong.)

THEN when I get back, I will take an hour or two and fully digest your two posts, Jeff, and that will probably be the final straw that hooks me into getting Skyrim.

So - back at you guys in about a week!

Rich

 

And Canadian Tire, Tim Hourtons, and Bombardier aren't worth mentioning? Why I remember when the only fast-food burger and fries you could purchase in 1970, Toronto, was Harvey's because there were no Burger King's or McDonald's "pink slime, to be found."

 

Can't remember if there was an A&W, but it would seem to me that if they served burger and fries in T.O back then, I would remember it. Dairy Queen however was in Quebec City in 1971 and so was Kentucky Fried Chicken. I was doing a gig at Le Boites a Musique, in Quebec City, which was called Le Temple and I remember them both.

 

For the record I only ever go to Hardees if I want a fast food burger. Seems to be higher quality than any other choice, tastes better, but is proportionately more expensive. Amazing burgers though.