The Official Graphics Card and PC gaming Thread

Mmmm, there was a Hardees near me in Minnesota. They do make good stuff. Similar to Carls Jr.

 

Carls Jr. is literally a regional name for Hardees. Same food.

 

Ahh, I wondered about that!

 

Nothing like an In-N-Out Burger though. My California son treats me to them when we go out there for a visit, every year or 2.

 

Back from Santa Maria and astounded at all those corporations up there in frigid Canada. What about IgloosRUs, LLC?

Yeah, I heard that In-N-Out is some kind of great, but I had a Rocket burger last week - my LA brother had a Groupon - something with a giant burger and bacon - now THAT was pretty awesome. (The juke box was a nickel a song - the manager said they all worked, but alas we didn't have any nickels.)

Now it's tax time.

I got a note back from my animator close relative, which made me look up turtle rock and blizzard. The former head of turtlerock, Mike Booth, is over at Blizzard putting something together, while his former employees are in the re-incarnated Turtle Rock putting the finishing touches on Evolve. Here is a very interesting interview for anybody who likes CounterStrike, or Left 4 Dead, or Valve, or Gabe Newell.

http://www.gameinformer.com/b/featu...r-death-the-story-of-turtle-rock-studios.aspx

Rich

 

I would love to go to one of those burger houses, that fit a name like "Heart Attack Burger" LOL! I guarantee i'm one of those few, that can put away a beast of a burger

 

Hah, now I know who the ads are targeted to:



EAT LIKE YOU MEAN IT!!

Kevin is here to tell you "Tomb raider nude has nothin on THIS burger!!!"

 

Rich, you're a funny guy

 

hey guys whats the best gpu or multi gpu setup for six 17" monitors? single gpu or thought about running 3 nvidia cards separate without sli its not for gaming more server monitoring applications or music production... could even use old cards tbh dx9 or something not bothered about gaming or hd or any of that stuff at all.

edit: something that still runs flash videos tho lol and forgot to mention i have a core 2 quad q9550 and striker 2 extreme with 8 gb ddr3 and two open pci-e slots one of them been filled with a gtx 260

 

Have you considered using fewer, larger monitors? Running 6 displays is not impossible, but it is a bit of a faff, depending on what interfaces the monitors support.

 

To be honest i thought about using three larger monitors but, the thing is because of the amount of remote desktop sessions i will have open, it would be come a pain swapping and changing also will have CCTV applications running as well the system has quite a large scope to handle.

Thought about may be running three GTX 260s or something but power and heat would be an issue i am looking for something not to power hungry, and something i could keep cool with having to go mad with fans ect.

All the monitors have DVI and VGA.

 

Jeff, I finally got around to really looking closely at your post:

hahahaha - when you have the memory, why not flaunt it! Sure, Jeff, now that you have that big ol card, make that puppy Large Address Aware. You have the room now, so there's no reason a game has to squeeze you into a little box!

It's probably just me, but I found that hilarious, and at the same time, I have to congratulate you again for making sure you got a REALLY GOOD CARD this time!

:-O

Wow! That is some crazy stuff. I thought the god rays and all were great - hearing through windows, stuff like that. But actually adding waterfalls, islands - well I guess, why not. That's fantastic!!

I liked that last bit - you were having trouble enjoying the game, because you were distracted by the incredibly beautiful modded landscape - good job!! It goes without saying that you have to have a seriously strong graphic card to support all the mods, right?

Did you say THOUSANDS of mods!! My god!


======================= HARD DRIVE TESTING ============================================


I have been seriously distracted lately by the fact that my Raid mirror failed on my everyday desktop - the one I'm typing on right now. The Raid of course did not completely fail - a member disk failed after 2 1/2 years - but the volume kept on going. However, that caused me to do a lot of checking and testing on the failed drive. I had just bought a new product called SpinRite for $89 that recovered a bad drive on a friend's laptop, but the Raid failed before I got around to running the software on those two disks. Anyway, the bad drive cleaned itself up perfectly - speedfan rates it at 97% serviceability up from 0% - and it is back in the Raid mirror. I'll keep a good eye on it nonetheless, since I already bought its replacement.

The idea of spinrite, from what I see, is to run it on every disk at least once a year. It takes hours to run, in some cases days, but it exercises a disk very thoroughly, flipping all the bits, flipping them back, recovering any area that it has trouble reading. I have replaced windows surface scan with this product. But while I was at it, another product caught my eye, HD Sentinel, and I have been in email touch with the author, Janos - I forgot his last name - and today as a result of a link he gave me, I picked up a 5 computer license on the pro version for half price at $31.25. It's going to take me a month to get fully familiar with everything it does, but it possibly might replace the dos utility, spinrite. I'll have to see.

Janos is Hungarian, and is pretty good with English, I'll give him that - but beyond that - there were a lot of things I read on the web site in regard to SMART, and how the product uses and goes beyond smart, which gave me a strong feeling that the author was very very sharp in the area of disk analysis and hard-to-read sectors. So one hex value for power on hours count seemed wrong to me, and I wrote him about that, and he responded - the particular disk was counting twice a minute - he said some count every second, lol.


======================= END HARD DRIVE TESTING ============================================


On another note, I did manage to fit in a little gameplay - the DLC of Bioshock Infinite - I finished episode 2.

That was a great one, as it tied together the original Bioshock Rapture world, with the world of Bioshock Infinite - Columbia in the clouds.

First - episode one was pretty flashy - going back to Rapture.



And some of the wonderful characters were there again, like this loony guy:




But guess what - episode 2 starts out in neither Rapture nor Columbia, but here:




Can anybody guess where we are?




And since that is our picture the guy just painted, who are we playing as - take a wild guess....





Yeah, that's us holding the blue bird up above - WHO ARE WE - last chance.





I should have said, "next to last chance." Now when you're holding a weapon, you get to look at some pretty nice painted fingernails. Go girl go!

The weapon is cool - it's a stealth crossbow with a non-lethal knockout syringe. But you have to use it very sparingly, because you only have 4 syringes - but sometimes you get the syringe back when you rob the sleeping body.

But the best thing to do is creep up behind somebody and hit them with the rail-clinging metal hook - that's non-lethal too. You don't really have to kill anybody in this last episode unless you want to.

And one more thing - if you add the upgrades to a special peeping tom vapor, you can turn invisible - and not use any eve while you're doing it. Like this:





That really makes it easy if they are coming toward you. Let them get right nearby then club them.

Okay, anything else I say will be a spoiler. I highly recommend the season pass with the two episodes and battle in the clouds - a lot of game play for $40. But if not, the episodes alone are only $15, and well worth it.

Rich

 

Yes I did my research and took recommendations from everyone seriously. The GTX760 just happened to be in a sweet spot for all of my needs and hasn't disappointed in the least. I can run any new game with absolute confidence. Even Metro Last Light with its awesome Advanced PhysX is no match for this card. It's a real performance monster, and has the advantage of not being architecturally neutered like other mid-range cards are. Obviously there is better out there, but nothing requires it of me yet. ALL of my hardware is well above adequate for my uses, and continues to keep me very happy. War Thunder, by far my most frequently played game lately, runs flawlessly, and it's no lightweight when cranked. The 6850s would drop to single digits.

Video memory was the main culprit for many of my woes. 1Gb was really a waste of the 6850s' power. When Crossfire was working and video memory wasn't an issue, they were hands down faster than the HD6970 and even faster than the HD7870. If they were 2GB cards I might still be using them.

The original game was no lightweight. When it came out, literally no PC could max it playably. Oblivion was the Crysis of its time. Even the mighty X1950XTX struggled with it. It wasn't until the GeForce 8800s and HD3870 that it was truly realistic to max it. Even now, it still stutters and dips on my PC with all the mods applied.

It doesn't help that the modding community for Oblivion is very old. Many didn't realize just how bad the custom textures would be for video memory at the time. There were many projects to reduce the memory usage of the major texture mods while retaining the awesome quality. Skyrim modders had a much better understanding, and most Skyrim texture mods recommend using the 2K textures vs the 4K textures. Even my 4GB card stutters with 4K textures. Not much overall visual difference, huge performance difference. Anyway the 2K textures are still far better than the stock game.

It's a painstaking process putting all the right stuff together, but it's well worth it in the end. The difference in quality from start to finish is drastic, jarring even. It's just such a spectacular transformation, it needs to be seen to be believed! Skyrim is already quite decent looking, but Oblivion really needed the help, and wow what a change!

 

You, Jeff, are without doubt a graphics quality connoisseur!

And another thing I like about you is that you have turned me onto some really good games - to name a few: the Operation Flashpoint series, the two Metro games, the Assassins Creed Series of which I have played 3 and 4 - great games- in fact most of the really good games that I have played over the last few years that I wouldn't have known about if you hadn't reviewed them.


=============== ARMA III =============
So I wanted to bring you and everybody else up to date on Arma III if you haven't been following the developments over there.

Have you tried it lately? They were hacked a while back, and I informed them that their controls got messed up, and the scuba showcase was not usable. But they fixed it, and I finally did the scuba showcase.

Check out this turtle in the scuba showcase.


I spent a little time shooting some fish and admiring the beautiful coral on the bottom. It's pretty good - maybe not quite as polished as Far Cry 3, but still - for Arma - it's looking good.

Getting up close and personal with some sealife.


They wrote me back "thanks for the feedback." Then they tightened up security and fixed most everything, and the field manual that is always available at Pause, helps explain a bunch of stuff.

Besides infantry, and scuba, they have more showcases. I have a huge amount of hours into the infantry showcase, maybe 40-50 hours, about 10 of those hours over the last few days in order to get familiar with the game again, because I have been away from it for almost a year.

There was an autosave when they started scanning the hills for the mortar team observers, and as I was almost out of bullets, I discovered only about 20 yards away one dead enemy with a machine gun.

Look at the gun I've got now!


So I had a great time running around with the machine gun, and whenever I got killed I just reloaded the last autosave.

What do you think - is this mortar spotter going down?


What about this one - do you think I'll miss?



Okay, those mortar spotters were too easy - fixated on their spotting jobs, and I only had to get behind them and work forward. After the artillery started falling, I often stayed behind to see how many more enemies I could take down.

Here's one way way down there - see him?


You should have said goodbye when you had the chance, he's dead now.


Other times I just ran around with my near-empty gun, but my full load of 11 grenades in the launcher. I kept terrorizing this one enemy who had a red square around him - the spotters had seen him in the bushes on the other side of the village. Occasionally he killed me, but most of the time he was my bi*ch!

There's the flash - was I close? Close only counts in horseshoes AND GRENADES!!!


Damn, we'll have to let the smoke clear away - I better reload.


Oh lovely, that's a sight for sore eyes - enemy prone and not going to get up again!



HELICOPTER IS PRETTY COOL!!
I had also done the vehicle short showcase, then just last night, before launching about 6 hours into the campaign, I completed the helicopter showcase in about 3 or 4 hours.



It was tricky, but I took advantage of the X key toggle for hover mode, which essentially stops your forward velocity, and just sits you there at your same altitude. That is super great for landing. If you need to nudge 15 feet forward, just nose forward with W, and the hover will quickly rock you back to flat, but you will have gained a few feet so you can land without hitting a truck, etc. You press Z to lower your altitude, and you can spin around with the lean keys, setting yourself up for a perfect landing.


That automatic hover mode also helped me get in position for taking out a hill of mortars, and also for slowing down and getting in position to take out a couple of enemy trucks advancing on a friendly base. My problem was that as soon as I nudged forward with W, I was instantly going too fast - way faster than I wanted to go. So the hover mode sometimes was my quick fix to come to a stop, then start out again much slower this time.

Kevin, with all your Grand Theft Auto IV helicopter practice, you should give Arma III a try. Not to mention great shooting!!

But I admit, I was pretty clumsy at first. There were a few times when I asked myself "Why can't I get this stupid thing to turn?" but gradually I realized that I was going 150 km/hr and the wind would not let the tail come around - obviously you can't rotate around until you are going much slower. But you CAN press the A and D side pedals, and lean the copter to the side and turn like a plane - it was tricky but my BF2 helicopter practice started to kick in and it helped out a lot. I only crashed about a dozen times. LOL


ARMA 3 SINGLE PLAYER CAMPAIGN
Another great thing about Arma III, now they have a single player campaign!!

It starts out with some of the local news flashes about Nato's problems with the islands



Then you start playing, and some of the scenery is gorgeous.



Now don't tick off the locals by running into any of their goats!

The campaign is pretty good - I'm about 1/3 the way through it. What I'm hoping that we'll see eventually, is people taking the sandbox of the two islands, and modding their own campaigns, just like Day-z that became a big game in its own right for Arma 2.

You meet some new buddies in the ram-shackle base the Nato survivors put together


Some of them are more adept than others - do you think this guy will ever fix that flat?

But Sam, you may not want to play Arma 3, notice the Brit-bashing conversation they're having.


Okay, that conversation might be hard to read. Just for Sam, the guys are sayin:

Mitchell: "If it's their goddamn problem, where the hell are they?"
Conway: "The Brits are broke man. Everyone knows it."
Conway: "They can't even afford to defend their pointless little islands anymore."

Hahahahahahahahaha

(That's okay, Sam, we know what they're really saying is that, after getting ourselves into two wars we couldn't afford, we Yanks ARE BROKE, and trying to go for peace these days - "fine, let Putin have Crimea, who really cares about it anyway?"

But of course, Brit bashing is more fun. The only thing that beats Brit-bashing is Canuck-bashing. "Go Finians! If you guys didn't get drunk all the time we'd have had State #51 by now!")

Rich

 

Actually, I don't get to play GTA IV as much as I like. Not NEARLY as much as I'd like :'(

 

What you really meant to say was "After I bought GTAV I never looked back - now I'm flying jet planes!"

Or maybe you meant to say, "Angry Birds!" "Angry Birds!" "Angry Birds!"

How's work going these days? Did you ever complete your perpetual motion machine? I'm just waiting for you to hit the big bucks with that, so I can figure out a way to get a piece of it. Except that physics taught me that it is impossible - damn, I knew it, college WAS a waste!

 

There's a flaw in the compact version, that I wanted to build. The overall technology is sound, but making it fit in a suitcase is proving problematic at the moment LOL! I'm sure I can figure it out. Just need a little more time. Work is ok. Not sure if or when I'm gonna advance. I was recently offered a full-time position driving. I chickened out LOL!

Yes.. angry birds has been one of my favored games lately. I'm about to step back a ways from facebook though. Consumes too much time.

Gta V for PC is estimated for June 13th I believe.

 

I've recently decided to pick up Dead Space again, after Origin giving it away for free. Pretty sure I already own it on Steam, but it reminded me about the title, and I never did finish it. It runs flawlessly at 3840x2160 given its age, and looks pretty spectacular given the circumstances. Would that I were able to run more games like this - I've had to drop the detail level on Battlefield 4 again as a fairly recent patch removed support for crossfire (again!). Looking at the last six titles to be benchmarked by GameGPU, not one of them supports dual graphics. I'm beginning to think that I may be better off settling for a single card next gen - still though, not convinced on an R9 290X. The GTX780Ti's 3GB memory has been breached by some titles at 3840x2160 (I believe Titanfall manages an impressive 3.9GB at 3840x2160), so I'm not sure on that either. I refuse to pay three weeks' salary for a Titan Black, so I might be waiting a while :S

If AMD can come up with a die-shrink of the 290X in a timely fashion, with a corresponding moderate performance advantage, that sits around a 200W TDP with a sensible stock cooler, I'd be all over it. Trouble is, the hardware shortage created by coin mining is likely to have pushed back a new generation quite considerably. I'd almost be tempted to buy a single 290X to try it out despite the noise and questionable performance consistency, but my friend who also owns a UP3214Q has had so many bugs with his monitor that I just haven't had, I wonder if it's a sensible move. A 290X may only be 1/5 the price of the monitor itself, but for the moment, I don't really have many graphical reliability issues. Eyefinity is still in my mind a poorly developed technology, but I don't see any tileless 2160p displays on the horizon yet.

"4K" still has early-adopteritis all over, but the moments you get to experience content that does run smooth (such as, e.g. Dead Space, or the demo video of the new Sony camera that takes 4K videos), the experience is sufficiently breathtaking that, couple with working with 150 lines of a spreadsheet on-screen at once, or multitasking with 6 PDFs open with no need to task switch, it's still worth it. Just

 

second hand they around £200 quid but most likely mined the crap out off