The Official Graphics Card and PC gaming Thread

Second GTX970 G1 here in good shape. Everything seems to function correctly and my testing shows SLI is indeed on and working. Even with the sound card sandwiched between both cards, temperatures on both are consistently excellent. Testing to follow in the coming days...

Update, Both Far Cry 3 and 4 vastly improved.

Far Cry 3 absolutely maxed 8xMSAA, average 50-70FPS

Far Cry 4 absolutely maxed Nvidia settings 2xTXAA, average 50-70FPS

Far Cry 4 " " 4xMSAA, average 45-60FPS

Scaling I can't say for sure because I've never done detailed benchmarks, but the improvement is vast. 2xTXAA is my go to on Far Cry 4 as it is comparable to 4xMSAA and is an actual AA technique with only a subtle amount of post processing. No nasty blurring. The performance is better than stock MSAA and the effect is extremely close.

 

Wow, that is excellent Jeff.

On your testing, those framerates on Far Cry 3 are truly impressive, as I was only able to get low 30s while riding around on the wave-runner, with both 7950s at about 85% I recall - I decided that I was held back by cpu - all cores around 90-95% - but the first core was the highest as I recall.

Anyway, I had to drop to 4xMSAA, rather than 8x. I did some comparison studies that I have never posted, showing a big graphics quality gain in 4xMSAA, but hardly anything more in going to 8xMSAA.

I may be slightly confused, as I recall there were two post-processing options which I also compared, by focusing on the trucks at the airport. One was HSOA, is that right, and the other was something else. I had what I felt was the best one - I think it was HSOA.

Anyway, I am a little confused by your performance numbers, in that you seem to indicate that Far Cry 4 is more demanding, whereas I found that for some reason, I was never able to get crossfire to activate on Far Cry 4, but I ran the whole game in the 30s on fps, and I was pretty highly maxed on ultra - but maybe again not max AA.

So in my experience, Far Cry 3 was more demanding - but AGAIN - this is on the crocodile river, blasting around with my wave runner. Here is a picture where I am not moving, just to show the water reflective qualities.


Normally I am blasting around, but at times I wanted to capture the gorgeous graphics.​

I believe that Far Cry 3 provided more reflective water, which was more demanding of cpu and graphic resources. It was on the water that my fps rate dropped to low 30s, and even further, to high 20s if I enabled 8xAA, which is why I did the study to indicate that 4xAA was good enough - virtually the equal of 8x - not quite, but very close.

On the other hand, I believe that Far Cry 4 toned-down the water reflections to be able to support the game on more platforms. They built an awesome game - I have many screens of the Shangri-la segments - the flying - the tournament fighting - but for me the graphic joy of the wave-runner was inexplicably absent. Perhaps it is true that water in different climates has varying reflective qualities - that there could be natural organisms in the water, or even the temperature of the water, that could reduce the reflective qualities. Or maybe it was just the developer's choice to do that.



Here is the lake on Far Cry 4 - the reflections are very toned-down - lovely, but not as "flamboyant" as Far Cry 3.​

Any comments?



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Jeff, I just completed a monstrous boss fight - one of the most challenging of my career as a professional gamer

and I want to prepare you for Origins.

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BATMAN - FIGHTING TIPS!

THE HORRENDOUS DEATHSTROKE BATTLE​

Jeff, I don't know if you have started on your Batman series of PC games - you mentioned that you had the 3 of them, Arkham Origins, Asylum, and City.

I started on Origins, and after playing Asylum on normal, and enduring some grueling boss fights, I played City on Easy, and had only one difficult sort-of boss fight - not really a boss fight just a fight with a heavy, AND a titan, plus a bunch of goons.

So I started Origins, and I went back to normal.

About 6 hours into the game, I encountered the worst boss-fight of all time. Every YouTube video, every forum post, talks about this being the only drawback to an otherwise good game - they made this fight too hard - the first of the assassin boss fights - the fight with Deathstroke. Google it. Watch it.

It took me 2 hours the first night, where I made a little headway, and occasionally got to the third segment of the fight but without much health left.

It took me 4 hours last night - I started at 10:00, had a little to eat in the middle, played until 2:00, and suddenly beat it.

I was getting much better at the first two segments - I was mastering those segments actually. But the swordplay was killing me. In fact, I had pretty much made up my mind that I was never going to beat it. I had a follow-up strategy. I never realized how close I had been getting.


THE PC PORT IS HARDER THAN CONSOLE


By the end, I had totally mastered the first two parts of the fight. But my final strategy on number 3 - when I finally applied the discipline to stick with it - it worked. To my immense shock - he said the fateful words, and threw the last flash-bang, and attacked me like a demon.

YOU LOSE, I WIN, Mr. Deathstroke idiot!


I am not kidding when I say shock. I was totally stunned, no pun intended, when he threw that flash-bang. I now realize that I must have gotten very close to that time maybe a dozen times before, but I ran out of life before I could get him sufficiently enraged.

I was very much on the verge of quitting, and restarting the game - maybe also on normal - but this time doing a Burnell Tower cheat that allows you to accumulate 120,000 xp points at the beginning of the game and buy all the upgrades that are not locked.

I thought I might have to do this to extend my life, because I had not bought every melee armor upgrade - opting instead for some batarang upgrades, and dive-bombing flying upgrades. But the Deathstroke fight is all about melee battle armor. I think I had bought one upgrade for 25% - but unlocked are 3 upgrades to 75%. (Actually, now that I think about it, I could have upgraded without the Burnell cheat, by concentrating on all the melee body armor, if I had known about this fight.)


HORRENDOUS DEATH-STROKE BATTLE

So I want to give you some general fighting tips - and I want to start with the Deathstroke battle. What I am going to give you is specific to PC. I watched several console videos - and then one PC video. There is a fundamental difference on PC, as it applies to the third part of the battle, the final part where you have stripped him of his mask, and then of his stick, and he is left with his sword, and he is more dangerous than ever.

There are some critical "counter" indications that are missing in the slow-motion parts of the final sword battle. You are at the mercy of the game at this point, more so than ever, because the slow motion affects your timing. He does a very fast whirl, and slices you, drawing significant health.

You cannot let yourself be drawn into that kind of close-pitched battle, on PC, for the final segment.

(On console it's okay - they give you the hint - on PC they don't give you the hint and it's devastating.)


Read this, and then watch the youtubes, read the forums, and then come back to this - this is better than anything that I came across on the internet.

And by the way - do not get frustrated that no matter what you do, he loses no health. He dies in three areas where you beat the crap out of him, taking one-third of his life each time. Otherwise you will not be able to hurt him. Don't let that frustrate you. On none of the other boss battles, have I run into that so far - but that is how Montreal Warner Bros. decided to do it - read on.

Battle Segment 1
He has the pole. He constantly taunts you - "You have skills but you lack experience." "Did you really think that would work?" "Your reluctance to kill will defeat you." On and on - you just want to punch him in the mouth and get him to SHUT UP!

You will read that you must play defense. You will read that you must play offense.

Let me tell you: I did defensive - totally defensive - hitting counter as soon as I saw the little exclamation marks all over his head indicating that he was going to attack. I got bored of that. So I attacked, and was soon defeated - occasionally as I said finally making it to the third round, but usually with very little health.

So one time I said, "what the heck - they say 'be patient.' I can be patient, right?"

So I did Total Defense. For 8 minutes. I timed it. I played like that for 8 minutes - it was the most boring eight minutes of my life. I had to listen to blabber-mouth taunt me the whole time.

Sit there right now in your chair, Jeff, and don't do anything for 8 minutes. No, don't do that. You will hate me. LOL.

By the time I beat the game, I could get through segment 1 in one minute. I didn't time it - but I think I got him mad enough in one minute - maybe it was two minutes.

I say, "mad enough" because that is what you are doing. You have to make him angry enough to attack you - to throw the flash-bang - otherwise you will not get to pound him silly. The flash-bang is followed by him leaping 15 feet up into the air and landing in front of you, and furiously hitting you from side to side on your shoulders, close action, Bruce Lee king fu style, while you mash the counter key. In fact, as soon as the screen went bright white, I just started mashing counter - you will not take any damage.

The flash-bang is preceded by him saying

"SO YOU ARE NOT A PUSHOVER AFTER ALL."

If you hear him say this, DON'T ATTACK HIM ANY FURTHER, BUT BY ALL MEANS DO A COUNTER IF HE ATTACKS YOU.

I bring this up, because in some of the 4 hours of play before I wised up, I would keep on pressing the attack. How can he flashbang if you are beating on him? He can't. So give the opponent some space, and when he says "You are not a pushover after all" back off a bit, but be ready to counter if it turns out to have been false. In 90% of the cases, you will be rewarded by a flash-bang.

Again, that means you have beat the first segment. After counter counter counter counter - Batman finally head-butts him - you then mash attack attack attack, and you beat him silly, watching his health decrease, then you knock off his mask. He has two-thirds health left. And he is pissed.


THAT'S WHAT HAPPENS, AND HERE IS HOW TO GET THERE IN ONE MINUTE.


Use your grapple hook by learning to double-tap the 2 key - that will turn the tide.

In fact, as soon as you are on the floor with him, ready to fight, when it is me, I start hitting the 2 key. He is trash-talking "A VIGILANTE, HUH?" "A WASTE OF YOUR TALENT, BUT IT DOESN'T MATTER NOW." "IT WILL BE WORTH THE ENTIRE 50,000,000 TO KILL YOU."

Suddenly the game gives me control, and suddenly the 2 key quick hurls the bat-claw, and he is sucked toward you, and then you attack him, and usually that means a body slam on the floor. WHACK! Wow, is he pissed!


Remember that move. Double-tap 2 key, grapple him, attack him resulting in body slam. He gets very upset.


Now in the first segment, you then press the attack, go after him, beat him, if you see the exclamation points, counter him, or maybe the grapple hook at that time - which will turn his attack into your grapple. But mostly pound him. Occasionally it will do a slow-mo as you build up your 2x, 3x, whatever they call that combo build, and pay attention if you see the "counter" indication, a picture of the right-mouse button as I recall.

One of the really cool counters, is that you will knee him hard - that has got to hurt him. Again, you won't see the effect on his health - he continues to have perfect health. But if they had a separate anger meter, you would see his calm factor hit the boiling point - that's your goal - for him to get enraged and flash-bang attack you.

While you are beating him, he is countering. He will do some swings and I have read some bloggers who said, "Don't press the attack, or he will hit you on the head." But I believe they are wrong. I think he hits the floor - not your head.

I say that because before I started my aggressive grappling, many times I have mis-timed his basic swing, delaying my hitting counter by about 1/30th second. I got belted hard, and I could see my health, about 1.5 inches, drop about 0.25 inches - a quarter inch. So you really want to never miss a basic attack of his pole.

But if you grapple him, that can never happen to you. YOU ATTACK HIM - you can then body-slam him.

So that is the strategy. Grapple, body slam, press for about 10-20 seconds, let it end, then grapple again and repeat the same thing. You will get to the flash-bang in 60-90 seconds - YOU WIN ROUND ONE.


RANDOM BARREL ATTACK THAT CAN OCCUR ANY TIME


I need to mention this - you will see it in the videos - at any time he may make a leap backward, and shoot a grapple hook into your chest. I think it's a chicken move - I used to say "Oh you chicken." But welcome it - it is a sure sign he's getting desperate. What he is doing is not working - he is staring at his own defeat and starting to do bullshit techniques, that won't really hurt you that much, even if the barrel explodes on you, and even if he shoots you.

The grapple in your chest will pull an explosive barrel toward you. As soon as you see the thing in your chest, start mashing the counter key as fast as you can - don't wait until you see the barrel coming toward you. If it works you will catch the barrel and throw it at him. If not, it will hurt you a bit, maybe 0.1 inch is all - but he will be way over on the other end of the arena and he may start shooting you with a red-laser pistol - just do the double-tap of the bat claw if he does which will stop the shooting by grabbing his gun, and then move toward him.

Optional - not needed: You might also want to add the double-tap of space bar, which is a forward vault evasive move. I saw some guys doing that - as you attack him, you grab his stick, and he flips over your head off the stick, rolling behind you. You can turn and do the evasive move double-tap of space bar, while holding the W move forward key, and you will flip over him, but he turns right away - you really can't get him from behind, but it's a way to continue to attack. I did it many times.

However, why not just grapple him as you turn? He finishes his roll and stands up. Often I just pressed and that was okay too. But really, why not just grapple and body slam again?

Yes, grapple and body slam.

However, don't forget that evasive move we just talked about - the roll. You will need it in segment 3 right after the body slam.

Okay, as you get good at this, you will sooner and sooner hear him say "So you are not a pushover after all." This is followed by flash-bang. And delicious payback.

Battle Segment 2
After you do the final pound and knock his mask off, he is now very angry and glaring at you. You are now only about 4 feet apart. What do you think I am doing? Hitting the 2 key as fast as I can. I don't wait. As soon as the controls come back to you, before he can even attack, you have grappled and body-slammed him. Then you press the attack.

--- Now, this is not a repeat of segment one. ---

Let me say that again, because on the forums they indicate that you stay with the same strategy always.

No you do not.

Before I got good at this, I feared him more with his mask off - he had a thing he did = high in the air, swinging his stick in a whirl, that would catch me and deal damage. This is why the forum guys say "Give him a few hits, then no more. Be patient.

Yes, and No.

You will find that you can get through segment 2 as fast, or maybe even faster than segment one. He is already agitated, upset, on edge, and not trash-talking any more.

Do the grapple, body-slam him (if he doesn't body slam don't worry - just press the attack for a bit - applies to segment one also.)

But in this segment, segment 2, be more watchful for the "counter" hint.

(By the way, of course make sure on Game Control settings, that you have hints turned on.)

That's what I mean when I say, Yes and No. Be more patient in segment 2, in terms of, don't be mad-pounding him, and miss watching for the hints in the lower part of your screen.


BE VERY WATCHFUL FOR THE COUNTER HINTS - YOU WILL BE VASTLY REWARDED AND SAVED FROM PUNISHMENT.

As you are pressing the attack and fighting him, you will see the counter hint, just as the action slows a bit. Hit counter, and then just watch what happens next. Often after you do some effective block, he will then go way up in the air, into his deadly spinning stick move where he used to get me, and you will get another "counter" hint - maybe 2-4 seconds after the first one - so again hit the counter button (right-mouse button) and then enjoy the show.

As he swings violently, and dangerously, Batman will duck - and then Batman does this wonderful thing where he grabs Deathstroke, and flips him over throwing him onto his head. It is the most wonderfully-satisfying thing to watch, but I didn't learn to watch for it until about 4 hours into the total of 6 hours.

You will just watch it in amazement.

And then maybe grapple him again, and then expect the exact same sequence of slow-mo then two counter hints close together, and again you will give him that same awesome head throw. It doesn't take more than two of those for him to fly into his rage, "So you aren't a pushover after all" and trigger the flash-bang.

CONGRATULATIONS, YOU HAVE WON ROUND TWO.


Battle Segment 3
I reached this point, maybe 30-50 times. A couple times I had good health, maybe 1 inch of my 1.5 inches. I played it every which way. I played defensive only - but that seemed to be a repetition of the 8 most boring minutes of my life.

However, he cannot hurt you. He will attack, you will see the indications, you will counter, he did not hurt you. This is not the stick where you can mis-time the counter and get hit. You can't mis-time this counter, and you won't get hit.

But he won't fly into his rage like that. At least I don't think so. Try it once and see. Or try it for 3 minutes, just to see, then when it is obvious he is never going to get angry, do what I am about to tell you, which will work within 2 minutes. Here it is - big surprise:

Grapple and body slam.

Wait, didn't I say this segment uses a different strategy? Okay, here it is:

Grapple and body slam, then roll.

After the body-slam, do the evasive roll, and get out of there.

Then turn quickly to counter his attack, or if he gives you time, grapple him again which turns his attack into your attack, then body slam.

Yes, I have tried it every which way. I have stayed aggressive, since it had worked so well on the first two segments, watching for the counter hint, seeing it, doing it, but then getting sliced by the missing second counter hint. It's there in the console, missing from the PC port. Why? I don't know.

So what. Just be satisfied with the body slam. A few body slams - maybe 4 - will get the job done, and you won't get killed.

So for segment three only, grapple, body-slam, then evasive roll away - (double tap space bar while holding W key) then surface quickly preparing to counter, or maybe use grapple again.

Don't mix it up with him when he has the sword - the PC port guys left something out - he will cut you.

And remember to be prepared for the barrel move - it may occur repeatedly in this last segment. He is growing more and more desperate. That's a really good sign that your victory is close at hand.

Read above about that - mash the counter - be ready for the double-tap on 2 grapple hook if he shoots at you. He is getting desperate as you are winning. And remember this:


YOU CANNOT SPAM THE GRAPPLE


Be aware - on segment 3 especially, if you grapple every time you face him - he will catch on and start evading you. He will roll, he will dodge, you will waste your time. Let him charge you, then counter. Do that a couple times. It will relax you, and it will relax him. Then surprise, grapple him and body slam. Roll away. Turn to face him and fend off his angry counter. Do it again. Surprise, grapple and body slam, then roll away.

You can do this without losing any health.

Occasionally, however, he will get so angry at the body slam, that he will pursue you so quickly, you will find yourself in a tight in-close fight - watch for any counter hints, and if you can disengage, try to do so - or maybe try the grapple as soon as possible - that might stop the engagement before you get sliced and lose about 0.3 inches.

===========================


On my last successful round, I entered segment 2 in about one minute, it seems. I thought to myself, "great, I think I have full health." I then watched for the counters and ended segment two, after two throwing-him-on-his-head moves, in about 1 minute again, having lost maybe 0.2 inches - still about 1.2 inches of health left - the most of all time. I thought "Wow, really fast, and I have about all of my health."

I did not think, "I might win this time" because I had sort of decided that the PC version was broken, and that I could not win. I was thinking ahead to the Burnell tower cheat - restarting and accumulating all those xp points, and buying all those upgrades, but especially body armor.

But I did my strategy that I presented here - I immediately grappled and body-slammed. I rolled away. I countered his move. I relaxed in the safe defensive counter.

After a bit I grappled and body-slammed him again. I did not try anything fancy like an evasive roll over his head. Just safe defensive grapple and body slam, which I thought surely must be enough to get him angry.

I totally abandoned any of my prior thinking - "well I should take advantage of that body slam and sock it to him a couple times at least" which was me being impatient, me being caught up by the success of the first two segments, and me forgetting about the deadly sword swing with no help in slow-mo by a missing counter hint.

So the last time, after maybe 3 or maybe 4 body slams, suddenly he said "So you're no pushover" and there was the flash-bang - and I was like in a dream sequence - I had won the incredibly challenging battle - and I was totally shocked. "This f**king thing is finally over - that fast - that easy. What the hell!"

I must have been 80% close to beating segment 3 about a dozen or more times, only to get suckered in to a close-in situation and a sword swipe.

It is a head game - will-power. You must realize the simple truth: on PC, segment 3 is not like the other two segments - the sword will cut you to deadly effect if you continue the attack after body slam.

After beating Deathstroke, I played after for about 5 hours until late this morning, well after daybreak, sort of to cement it in - to celebrate the victory. When you win like that after - not giving up - but after deciding it can't happen - but continuing to improve your game-play - then finally faithfully following a certain strategy - and then all of a sudden the idiot throws the final flash-bang - I COULD NOT BELIEVE IT!

Yes, my smile was a mile wide. One forum guy said "It took me 5 hours. I was so happy when I finally did it, only to meet Bane." Well, I am not scared of Bane. I know how to defeat those Titan guys. I will tell you how, right now, in the rest of this post. And furthermore, in my reading, they all say that the Deathstroke is the hardest - like I said, one review said that "Other than the Deathstroke battle, it's a good game."

There were a couple times that I felt I had hit the counter in plenty of time, but I got re-soundly whacked by the stick. I said out loud "Oh come on - I countered - what the hell."

But that ceased to be a problem when I married up with the strategy Grapple and body slam. I got to be pretty good at countering his swings with that stick - which is a bit harder than his sword thrusts, which are easy. I think the difference is about 1/30th of a second tardiness in hitting the key. You have hit the key well in advance of getting the punishment, but still too late. "How the hell could that happen?"

But once you learn, Grapple and body slam - End of problem.

You never wait for the guy with the stick to attack. He never was able to attack me to test my counter timing. In fact, you can grapple him in the middle of his attack. You can do that instead of counter. His attack will turn into a dumb look on his face as you haul him toward you, and then you body slam him.

But with the sword, you can relax a bit and just do the counter. You will never be late. You will never get hurt. When he doesn't expect it anymore, grapple and body slam - then quickly roll away. Have the discipline to accept the body slam as enough of a win for that moment. Believe me. He's upset. It's working. Don't get greedy - you'll get sliced. I don't believe more than 4 body slams will be needed. When he starts that bullshit about throwing explosive barrels at you through the grapple hook method, just know that he's getting unbalanced and close to that game-winning final flash-bang. If the barrel explodes on you - don't get flustered, it's only about 0.1 inch of health. But since you didn't throw the barrel to explode on him, he will have pulled his little gun on you - so quick with the double tap of 2 key, disarm him with bat claw.


BATMAN GENERAL FIGHTING TIPS ALL 3 GAMES

1. Fighting the titan, City and Origins: There is a special stun move - middle mouse. It is nothing more than a swipe of your cape. You might have to do it 2 or 3 times. It confuses them. Then you can do a beat-down - hold middle mouse and attack and attack - it should turn into a quick rain of blows - and suddenly you swing up on his back and you can direct him to run toward other enemies - he swings his arms as he runs which knocks them down and does damage to them. The hardest battle for me in City, where I was playing on easy, was against a Titan, plus a one-armed heavy with a big hammer, plus a bunch of goons. I was killed several times - on easy. I forgot to go beat on the Titan, get on his back, kill the heavy that way by running into him, and when I was thrown off, do it again as soon as possible.

2. Fighting the titan, Asylum: I should mention that the titan in all games is susceptible to batarang. In Asylum, that's what you do. You do the evasive roll move to avoid his charges, and his throwing objects, then you are constantly using the quick batarang button, the Q button. You don't do the right-button aim, then left button throw - you just hit Q - you can be running away - hit Q and the batarang will go for his head. (The bat-claw quick button is the C key - useful for disarming guys with machine guns. City and Origins have abandoned the Q and the C buttons - so instead you have the double-tap. Oh well.) Once the Asylum titan gets tired and hurt, he goes down on one knee. Be watching for that. If you are in a room full of guys, rolling away from his charges, he may suddenly go down on one knee. When you see that get to him as quickly as you can, by roll or by run, then do the beat-down (or maybe it's just the regular attack, I forget.) You will not take damage from him, and suddenly you will be on his back and now, through directing him, you can attack all the others and do damage to them, until he throws you off his back. That sequence may occur several times.

3. Avoiding the titan until you fight him: You cannot let the titan run into you when he charges - you will take damage. Use the evasive move - the double-tap of space bar, which is a roll, when he starts toward you. If he grabs something, a dead person, anything, roll away from that.

4. Other heavies or guys with body armor: The cape swipe, middle mouse, works on everybody except Deathstroke. It works also on guys with guns, but if you are that close, just hit them. On heavies in body armor, the game will teach you beat-down - hold middle mouse and attack. Sometimes there is no quick rain of blows, and the body armor guy is not going down. Stop, use cape swipe, then try to restart the beat-down, once it starts he will go down. If you are attacked from behind you might have to suspend to do a counter - which is why I usually evasive move (double space bar roll) away from those guys and concentrate on taking out the goons first.

5. Guys with guns: If you are close enough just attack them, if not use double 2 key, bat claw, and disarm them that way. On Asylum, use C key instead of double-tap 2.

6. Guys with riot shields: You can do the evasive move and roll over their heads all you want - they will instantly turn toward you with their shield - it doesn't work. But if you hold middle mouse, then do the double-space bar roll - it results in you jumping up in the air right over them, and slamming down on their head. Since they never hold the shield other than right in front of them, they can't block that move - you will slam them unconscious to the ground.

7. Crowds of goons: The evasive move, the roll, is one of your best friends. Roll away to one side, then start spamming batarangs. If you have the multiple, 2 or 3 batarangs, on key four, use that one, even better. It may not knock anyone senseless, but when you re-engage in the battle with the 4 or 6 or 8 goons left, you will see how much more quickly they get knocked senseless because you rained batarangs on them.

8. Heavy not affected by batarangs: In the prison riot at police headquarters, there was some strange guy with a yellow apparatus on his back, and he would get me in a bear-lock from behind, letting the other guys pound me. I had to hit space quickly to break his bear hug. I got killed twice. He charged right at me and seemed impervious to the batarangs. The final successful third time, I rolled away from him, did some beating on the others, then got to him and did the cape stun - middle mouse, then the beat-down - hold middle mouse and repeatedly hit attack key, left mouse. I knocked him senseless, and then taking care of the rest was easy - moving to one side, spamming multiple batarangs, rejoining the action, taking them out.

9. Knocking a guy down so he stays down: The best knock-down, is the silent takedown from behind, creeping up in fast-moving totally silent crouch (left-control) mode. It truly is silent. His buddy can be two feet in front of him - he will muffle a groan that you can hear, but his buddy will hear nothing. Then you do his buddy. Don't do the smash move that Origins is prompting me to do, while I am holding him waiting for him to go unconscious from being choked. The smash sound will alarm nearby enemies. It takes about 3 seconds longer to wait - which however, could be dangerous if enemies are moving around close by. On the freeze in City, you can do a freeze takedown smash - which is not silent. What works well is freeze one guy, then silent take down on the other, then go smash the frozen guy - let's say there are two with machine guns on that particular rooftop.

10. Taking advantage of the guys with collars in Asylum: In Asylum, where the guys wear little collars that buzz when they go unconscious, you will have a few seconds time to spray (3 key) the explosive gel, on the unconscious body. Spray it 3 times right on the guy's body, if you have time for 3 sprays, each takes 3 seconds. They call the others over "Hey this guy is down." You can do this even without the collars. From a safe position, or behind a box, you can activate the explosive gel with the right-mouse, the detonate it with middle mouse when all 3 guys show up. With 3 exploding, it should stun all 3 guys, allowing you to go one by one, left control crouch, unconscious smash (right mouse I think) and possibly you will have time to do the gel spray again on one of them. On asylum, this crouch, plus right mouse, seemed to work better than now on Origins. But perhaps it is only because sometimes I have a weapon selected other than the batarang, which may confuse the game.

11. Knocking a guy down so he stays down after a flying drop: A gliding kick drop is great, knocking the guy down, but he won't stay down. You then have to hold left control, which causes you to kneel, then the right-mouse key I think. Be careful you didn't leave the device set to hacking a control box - the right-mouse might trigger a motion of doing a hack rather than knocking the guy senseless. It's best to leave your action device set to batarang, or multiple batarang. This is not silent, and in fact may bring everybody over. If you have escape roof rafters, be prepared to hit the F key and grapple your way out of there, and then change to other gargoyles or roof rafters if they spot you.

12. Knocking a guy down so he stays down - doing this with the glide itself: Origins offers a move, where you glide kick from a great height, holding the left control dive key, and your bat on the target changes from yellow to orange then to red. At red you have reached fast enough velocity that he will stay down. Then hit F to go back up and do it again. You have to upgrade to this. On Origins, upgrade to this, or to anything else, ONLY AFTER you do the max available body armor melee upgrade, to help you get through the Deathstroke fight.

13. A room full of guys with machine guns - you are on the rafters: Use your detective mode to keep up on everybody's position. You can hang upside down with middle mouse. You can noiselessly drop to the floor with left control. You can sneak up on him, trigger right-mouse silent take-down, let him go unconscious, do it again, or hit F and grapple to safety. On Origins last night, in the police station full of crooked cops, I saw a vent grate. I went to that office, removed the grate, then removed the other side. That was better for sneaking than being high up - I was already down on their level. There was a jammer preventing detective mode, so that worked better than high up. I got killed twice and then got more cautious and used that vent technique.

14. Boss fight with poison ivy in Asylum: Part 1 of 2: This caused me trouble so I watched some videos. Don't look at her, look at the plants that are shooting at you, and look at the plants that are sprouting ivy near you that will catch you up in it and force you to hit space to free yourself. Keep hitting the batarang quick-throw which is Q in that game. Hit is, move, hit it, move. Even if her pod is completely closed, her life will take a tiny drop on every batarang. Occasionally she will scream - her pod opened and she was vulnerable and lost more health on that particular batarang. But don't look at her - that is how I beat it quickly. Part 2 of 2: This is the same, but in come some goons, first 3, then 7. The video I watched - the guy beat it without defeating the 3 attackers, but he said "I wondered if maybe I should have defeated those guys." When I did it, by the time the 7 guys showed up, they were blocking my moves, and I was being captured by ivy, or shot by the plants. So on re-spawn, I focused on defeating the 3 goons. When they were defeated I did my strategy from part 1, and beat it before the 7 even showed up.

15. Boss fight with joker titan: I watched a video. He ran around and didn't try to fight joker. Then joker turned his back while some goons came in. He grappled joker with the multiple grapper and pulled him down, which caused him some damage. That repeated once or twice more, then joker was defeated.

16. Killer Croc in Origins. On a forum some guys complained about that one. He is there along with a few goons. Again, he is a titan, and susceptible to cape swipe - middle mouse - then beat-down, middle mouse plus attack. He tries to eat you, but you press space and hold his jaw. I had no trouble with that.

Have fun.

Rich

 

Rich, Far Cry 4 is definitely more demanding. If you leave out the Nvidia-branded settings, the two games are pretty similar performance-wise. When the Nvidia settings are turned on, they push Far Cry 4 far beyond 3. It's one of the most demanding titles out there. In your case I think it's a matter of the CPU skewing the results. You definitely have a bottleneck.

Seconded on the water in different environments having different reflective properties. Far Cry 3 is bright and sunny and most of the water in the game is open ocean and tropical streams and ponds. Far Cry 4 is more moody and dramatic, and most of the water is mountain lakes and streams. There can be vast differences in the composition of the water, and simply the lighting as well, that make the reflections different.

As far as AA goes, that's always been the general pattern. After 4x the returns diminish.

The effects you're thinking of are SSAO, HDAO, and HBAO.

SSAO - Basic ambient occlusion. Lighter and darker shadows according to light source and direction.

HDAO - High definition ambient occlusion. Much higher quality.

HBAO - Horizon based ambient occlusion.

In most games you'll find HBAO is the best choice. In Far Cry though, I find that HBAO simply doesn't work like it should. It puts a black shadow outline around every object and person and darkens the image a lot. It doesn't look natural. The effect is way too heavy. A lot of people will argue that HBAO looks better but you'll often find that they have no clue what the effect actually does and how it's SUPPOSED to look. Battlefield Bad Company 2 is a good example of how HBAO is SUPPOSED to look.

In conclusion, I find HDAO to be the superior option for Far Cry's post processing shadow effects.

 

Hey Jeff, great explanation - thanks.

Well, I really did not know that water can have so many different reflective qualities - I was disappointed by the water in Far Cry 4, as you can tell.

Thanks for reviewing those post-processing effects.

Early on, it wasn't too hard to see that SSAO was the basic effect, and that the other two were better. I took some pictures comparing HBAO, versus HDAO.

Here's the airport shot with HBAO. Click it for full 2560x1600.



And here is the one with HDAO




Like you, I preferred the HDAO and ended up sticking with it. Here below are two closeup comparisons of the truck in the middle left part of the full shots we just saw, and also of the helicopter right next to the truck.

In each closeup, HBAO is on left, HDAO is on right. The HBAO is a lighter, brighter image, I notice now - but the brightness came at a cost - loss of detail and changes in color.


The greener, lighter truck is not bad, but I prefer the darker truck - seems to be better, more-modern quality.




Here's a closeup of helicopter - extra light that makes truck greener, makes helicopter too bright, losing detail.



So, yes, you're right. I totally agree. On Far Cry 3, HDAO looks better.

Rich

 

Basic SSAO is a good failsafe if you're not sure about either of the two more advanced effects. It performs better while still giving the same general effect. Luckily HDAO seems to work fine. HBAO+ in Far Cry 4 is a different story entirely. There are videos that show it in detail if you want to know all there is to it, but it really is stunning. I had to have it, thus SLI GTX970s.

FXAA in most games is a good example of a grossly over exposed effect. Battlefield 3 and 4 are the exception so far as they allow you to use a 'Low' setting for FXAA which is pretty nice. The effect itself is good but the implementation is almost always terrible. FarCry 4 won't let SMAA work with SLI, which is a bummer because it's a pretty good effect too, and Far Cry 4's FXAA is as terrible as ever. TXAA is an MSAA/FXAA hybrid, and it is great, because the FXAA is very subtle. Battlefield's settings can be combined to approximate this.

 

Wow Jeff, as always you are THE graphics connoisseur!


Refresh my memory on TXAA - is that an nvidia-only effect? I seem to recall that it's an nvidia effect that gives wonderful results, at very low increased load on graphics card.

====================================

​

...... speaking of using your vast knowledge, Jeff, to tune the settings to create fabulous graphics.....

here is a little story you might like:

I OWE IT ALL TO DIGITAL VIBRANCE!
I just did something wonderful - and I owe a thanks to nvidia digital vibrance. I remember years ago Sam was egging me on, "sorry Rich, nobody really cares much about digital vibrance."


Hahahaha.


That was when I was such a fan boy about it, because I LOVED what it did to World at War, the Treyarch COD title. The fire was so splendid - the red tractors in the field so vivid and colorful.

Some people said "Oh, that's cartoonish!" I guess it's certainly just a personal choice.

This was way back when I first got my current 9450 quad core, which came with the 8800 GTX nvidia card. I ran the nvidia monitor wizard, and the result was a very color-rich display. I soon after learned that they had goosed the digital vibrance. At that time AMD didn't have the equivalent, but was talking about coming out with something soon.


But let me get back to the WONDERFUL thing that just happened.


I think I mentioned that I was going to convert the core 2 duo compaq DC5800 microtower that I bought on ebay for $100, to my main desktop, replacing my xp machine, the Dell XPS400 (which animated Left 4 Dead) pentium 3.0 ghz. The pentium scores 202 on my speed test, the microtower scores 380 on xp, 365 on windows 7 - and there are two full cores - so on xp it's faster by 7.6/2 - nearly a 400% improvement in processing power. The xp mode within windows 7 scores 351. Because xp is 3% faster than windows 7, dropping into the virtual mode reduces your power only from 365 to 351, only 4%.

BUT the virtual mode only has one core. So the virtual mode is 351, versus my old full xp at 202, or my new full core 2 duo xp at 380, times two full cores, equals 760.

That's not a completely accurate comparison across the spectrum of applications, because I drop frames on the YouTube videos in the 351 xp virtual mode, but I don't drop frames on the 202 Dell pentium.


Anyway, I am running dual boot xp and windows 7 on the compaq microtower, two separate disk drives, and as I said, on the windows 7 disk, I have xp mode enabled and all my apps loaded. I added 2 gigs to the 4 gigs of Ram that the microtower came with, so windows 7 sees 6 gigs of ram, and I give 3 gigs to xp mode when it is running.


SO BACK TO MY STORY.......


I have both towers in the trailer, sitting on top of each other, with the side panels removed. I am using one dell 20" 1600x1200 display, to see what is going on, for both computers, connecting to a $7 dvi nvidia card in the Dell, and connecting to the on-board intel vga on the core 2 duo microtower, which is sitting on top of the Dell.

I press the display button once, DVI, to change to the bottom pentium Dell, and then I press it 3 times to switch to D-Sub, for the microtower on top.


This setup is helping with the conversion - both towers are on the LAN, and I can pass things back and forth. I am almost done with the conversion.

Once I finish, I will clone the RAID mirror in the bottom pentium to a single drive, take out both 1 TB enterprise drives, and use both of those in the microtower, one as the xp drive, the other as the windows 7 drive. That drive re-shuffling will be happening in a week or so. Not only do I need the 1 TB capacity, but those enterprise drives are rated to 55 degrees, and it gets hot in this trailer. I have a loud 92mm fan attached to the side of the small microtower 2-drive HDD cage - the best I could do - better than an 80, and a 120 won't fit, and temps today are 40 and 44 according to HD Sentinel in my system tray. That is beyond 40 degree spec on non-enterprise drives.

The Raid temp of the bottom Dell pentium, of the cooler left Raid drive that HD Sentinel is able to measure (that's worth the $35 for HD Sentinel - just to see those temps in the system tray - and no other application is able to get any information at all from the Raid volume) is 41, but again as that is an enterprise drive, that is nowhere near the upper limit of the safe operating range, which is all the way up to 55 degrees C.


So, with that background, back to my story.


All this time, switching back and forth between the two computers, I have been telling myself, "Man, the vga display looks so washed out and colorless, compared to the rich color on the dvi display - the $7 ebay nvidia card!"


BUT TODAY I PUT A 6450 INTO THE MICROTOWER.


As I said before, I LOVE those 1 gig cards - it's the $39 sapphire 1 gig 6450 from newegg, with hdmi, dvi, and vga, with passive cooling. But I see that the cpu fan in the microtower - which is blowing like crazy since it's 100 degrees in this trailer today - sprays air all over the bottom rear of the case, and the 16x slot is at the very bottom. I was considering putting a little fan on the passive heat-sink, but now I see that there is a nice breeze from the cpu hsf.


I filed a little bit of metal off the screwless expansion card holder, to allow a tiny bit more access for the vga cable, and installed catalyst. To my disappointment, the 6450 vga display was just as flaccid and colorless as when I was cabled to the on-board intel vga port.


I flipped back and forth from the microtower to the pentium, clicking for DVI, then triple-click for D-Sub. I have the same Webshots wallpaper up, one of the 1100 pictures that came with Vista and windows 7, which I have included in webshots along with my wonder interfacelift.com pictures, thanks to Sam, that are GREAT wallpapers.


So I said to myself, "Well, the intel on-board vga was not so awful after all - the 6450 vga is no better. Maybe if I were running on the dvi cable it might look better."


BUT THEN I REMEMBERED CATALYST


I went to Catalyst, monitor, color settings (using xp catalyst 12-8 which is similar to the modern w7 catalysts) and increased saturation from 100 to 145, leaving color temperature at default of 6500 (lower color temp adds red for warmer, higher adds blue for colder.)


HOORAY!!!! WHAT AN UNBELIEVABLE IMPROVEMENT!!


Now I flipped back and forth. The microtower looked fabulous, and the nvidia now looked slightly TOO saturated. I went into the nvidia control panel, and found digital vibrance ("use this if display looks washed out and colorless") and reduced digital vibrance from 46 to 20.


Now both displays are virtually indistinguishable - both look fantastic - and the $39 sapphire 6450 investment is totally worthwhile, even if for no other reason than to get a display that looks this good.

In some other documentation that I just found, from back at the time when I was talking about digital vibrance, and AMD had just added the same capability to Catalyst, I extol the virtues of 6400 temp, and 120 saturation, but earlier research had one nvidia guy saying that he used 6700 temp and 140 saturation, to match the effect he had liked using digital vibrance. After staring at these two displays, for several weeks, loving the nvidia by comparison with the bland vga, like I say, I'm leaving it on the default 6500, and at first I used 140 saturation, but a few minutes ago I decided that the nvidia was still a tiny bit more colorful, so I bumped saturation to 145, and now I can't really tell which computer I have selected. ​

THANK YOU NVIDIA DIGITAL VIBRANCE FOR LEADING THE WAY!!

THANK YOU AMD CATALYST FOR CATCHING UP AND OFFERING SATURATION SETTINGS!




Rich

 

As far as TXAA is concerned, I'm not entirely sure because I haven't run AMD video hardware in a while. All sources point to it being an Nvidia-specific feature since the GeForce 600 series.. I think the rest of the Nvidia effects in Far Cry 4 will indeed work on AMD cards though. HBAO+ Enhanced GodRays, Tree Tessellation, etc just with a larger performance hit. Try it and see.

As for Digital Vibrance... probably not for me. I leave all of my software video settings at stock, and simply set the monitor to its factory calibrated sRGB color preset. Several testing sites show that the default "Standard" preset for this monitor is quite a bit off as it adds saturation, much like Digital Vibrance.

The "sRGB" preset looks significantly different, and is some 99.x% of true sRGB when brightness is lowered from the default 75% to 50%. This means it displays colors nearly perfectly. The NTSC color spectrum is even wider, and it doesn't quite do that, but that's really nitpicking for games and movies. My U2713HM displays a brilliant and colorful picture that is very lifelike and vibrant. No HDTV can do what this does. It shows games and movies as they were intended to be seen. The 2407WFP is similar, but needed a lot of calibration with a monitor calibrator to get it right. It comes to about 98-99% of sRGB which ain't bad for its age. Also 72% of NTSC the same as the newer LED-lit display. Both show similar colors but the newer display is obviously brighter, with better contrast, and far better black levels.


Cheaper panels struggle with black levels, and dark or shadowy environments sometimes become very washed out because they struggle with contrast, and the added saturation from the factory preset doesn't help them at all. With a properly calibrated professional monitor, and everything left at default, it shouldn't be much of an issue. Both of my Dell UltraSharps have excellent black levels, with the newer LED-lit one holding an obvious edge. I would think yours is similar, if left to its own capabilities. With monitors like these, you'll likely have better results from changing the monitor's settings, not the software's. Try looking through the monitor's color presets and see if something there is a bit better. Maybe a Google at what might work better on that monitor. It doesn't take much to get good color accuracy on these, which should give you all the vibrance you want.

 

Hi Jeff, thanks for the tips.

I actually went through the Dell's settings. and there is a blue preset, normal preset, red preset, then user preset. I didn't like any of the others, and some years ago I guess, I already had set user preset to 50% on each color, rgb.

But the vga - either the built-in intel vga on the core 2 duo microtower, or the vga on the 6450 card - was washed-out and pale. Simply too little saturation for me.

Go to your nvidia control panel, find digital vibrance, and turn it way down from whatever it is on, and when the display looks blah - flaccid - lifeless - no punch - that's what the vga looked like, compared to the dvi from the cheap nvidia card.

It just didn't look vibrant.

There are a lot of people, looking back on some of the articles that I "printed" to paperport, that decried digital vibrance as "a gimmick" or cartoonish. It is totally subjective. Like anything, it can be overdone, and you can end up with color that is garish - too saturated - a joke. I agree. But when you take it in the other direction - it's like taking a brilliant color photograph, and accidentally leaving it out in the sun for a couple hours - coming back to see much of the color washed out. "Oh, what the hell happened to this photo - it looks like hell now. Where are the rich colors?"

Well, that was my microtower display - disappointing.

That is exactly what nvidia says when you go to their control panel (which I can do on the pentium sitting below the newer tower - connected to the same monitor via the dvi cable) and select digital vibrance. It says something to the effect: "Use this if your display looks washed out and pale."



Batman tips - conclusion


I finished Batman Arkham Origins.


It was a good game. Do I regret playing on Normal, vs. on Easy?

Yes and No. I have more of a sense of accomplishment than after playing City on Easy. More like after playing Asylum on normal. But it was hard - and no way am I going to consider re-playing any of the three on hard - I am not that good, and I question whether the PC is as responsive to controls as console. It's a console game, with a pretty good PC port.


After mastering Deathstroke, I got killed maybe 40 more times. Sometimes just in street brawls. Often in the game. I improved my fighting and learned a few things that were very helpful:


FIGHTING A CROWD OF THUGS
1. The single most important move, for me, is the evasive move - the double-tap of the space bar while holding the W key. You launch into a forward roll. In the very last Bane battle, I learned that this move is faster than a forward run - you cover more ground and it's harder for the giant totally pumped up Bane to catch you. (More of that in a minute.)

2. The cape swing. This is the middle mouse button. It works on any enemy, from ordinary thug with his fists to heavily-armored thug with machine gun, to venom pumping bear-hug guy with a yellow venom pack on his back, to giant enforcer guy, who is about 8 feet tall - almost as big as Bane. It works on kung fu guy - while the screen is suggesting you should have countered the karate guy - if your battle was fatal for you - despite that I just don't do that much countering when I fight. If I am rolling, I am gone before they can strike. If I cape swing the karate guy, that ruins his attack, and usually stuns him. I just watched a good video on the fight with Shiva, the last assassin that is fought in a side-mission outside the main game. The fight did not look that hard, and I have already fought groups of 5 shiva warriors twice. The guy did a lot of nice counters. I'll see if my style works as well as his did, and let's see how they like my shock gloves! If it turns out to be really tough, I'll post about it. If I never do, Shiva is not a big deal.

3. The beat-down. If you have swung the cape with middle mouse, you can hold middle mouse and do attack with left mouse, and you can launch a quick series of punches - works on anybody - it's the ONLY thing that works on heavily armored thugs.

4. I really don't utilize counter very much as I said. The cape swing is just as good as counter, maybe better. I am more in the mode of left mouse for attack, some middle mouse for cape swing, holding W the entire time, double-tapping space bar to do the roll, and once in a while I hit the right "counter" key but hardly ever. Rolling around, you are not there when they want to hit you - except if you are doing a beat-down on somebody, and occasionally I will go ahead and take the hit in order to take out the guy I'm beating on - sort of spending my health capital to whittle down the enemy count. That does not apply if a bear-hug guy comes up behind you - get the hell out of there. If he does grab you, then hit the space bar as fast as you can to break out.

5. Hold the W key all the time - and try to push the guys you are fighting with out away from the crowd. This always works, and it worked really well, as I recall, in Asylum. You were able to push him away, and sometimes finish him off, as the guys who wanted to punch you followed along from behind. In Origins, it seems as though the guys behind often close that gap and are still able to attack, but the idea is still good, and still works.


Since my last post, I got killed in a battle with a bear-hug guy and a bunch of thugs. I then beat that, and rowed over to another area where there were two bear-hug guys, and I got killed. I was disappointed to see that the two segments were not separate - I had to restart the whole sequence of two different battles.

I tried again, and failed again, and called it a night. The next day I got killed again at the second area. On my final fourth attempt, I used the evasive move like I was accumulating money based on the amount of rolling that I did, making sure to keep away from the bear-hug guys - the guys with the yellow venom pack on their backs.

But as my punching flow increased - where I was jumping from one guy to another - I was able to temporarily discontinue the evasive move roll, because Batman was jumping all over the place by himself.

By this time, most likely the shock gloves had kicked into action. The shock gloves mean that guys with shields are no problem - you don't have to do that fancy aerial attack - and guys with shock sticks are no problem - you just take it away from them, and also it charges up your shock gloves.

When I found myself having jumped face to face with the bear hugger - that's no big problem - he can't bear-hug you from the front. Treat him like any heavy and cape swing once or twice until the dazed stars start twinkling over his head, then do the beat-down.

You have the W key pressed, so you are trying to push him back away from the crowd as you are beating on him. If I am interrupted by an attack from behind before I can finish him off, too bad, but I'll get back around in a minute and finish him off the next time.

So when I had the two bear-hug guys, that's what I did - a lot of evasive move. Then my shock gloves charged up, and then all my blows became more powerful, although out on the street, or in a regular mission, I still have gotten killed at least 10 times after the shock gloves have kicked in. But I really do like those shock gloves, and the effect is neat!

So there is no substitute for keeping your health up, by not getting hit, by using evasive move.

It is also good if you are getting shot at.

I have tried the double 2 key, to pull the gunner toward me - but what has overall worked out better is just to roll toward him with that evasive move, and start pounding him - hopefully taking him out, but if not, then returning as soon when he starts shooting again.

I have of course upgraded to the highest level of armor against bullets and against melee damage, but I have still gotten killed.


DEADSHOT ARKHAM ORIGINS SIDE MISSION

I finished the game, and I now wish I had learned about how to create my own save points, since the game doesn't have any. I am sure it is easy - I have no idea how big the save file is. The reason is, I just beat the Deadshot, and it was kind of fun, once I started doing some of the things I have never done before.

Here is something that I learned from the videos, that I never knew:


I THINK THIS APPLIES TO EVERY GAME, ASYLUM, CITY, AND ORIGINS:
When you do the inverted takedown - you are above an enemy and you right-click when you see the hint "inverted takedown." They have walked right under you. You flip down from the gargoyle, put a rope on them, then flip back up, leaving them hanging.

That is great. One guy down. But also one gargoyle out of service, at least as far as pulling that trick again.

As long as the guy is hanging there, you can't do it again. So, when you see him stop moving - he is already unconscious from the blood going to his head - throw a batarang and break the rope. You can then reuse that gargoyle for the inverted takedown. It takes only about 15 seconds for him to stop wiggling. Then let him down.

I NEVER KNEW YOU COULD DO THIS UNTIL I WATCHED ONE OF THE DEADSHOT VIDEOS

What else did I learn from the deadshot videos?

I never knew that the 8 key device, the remote claw, could be used as a weapon. Of course, that's what Deathstroke was doing - he grappled you with it, and then pulled an explosive barrel to you. But I never thought about using it that way.

So all over the place, I have seen fire extinguishers, explosive barrels, etc etc. and I thought it had something to do with the 2 key claw. They might have said "grapple" but I never put two and two together.

You are up on a gargoyle, a bad guy walks along underneath a different gargoyle across the room, and you target him with the 8 key "remote claw" and if there is something nearby, a green line will connect him to it, showing you what is about to happen, and you can shoot. If the green line from him pointed up to a gargoyle, that is where he is going as soon as you shoot.

If there is no green line, nothing will happen if you shoot.

I watched the Deadshot youtube video by Most Wanted. He was using #8 remote claw. He ignored the 5 guys walking around with machine guns, and targeted deadshot, from up on a gargoyle. He fired it at Deadshot, causing something to fly into Deadshot - like a fire extinguisher. He flew down there into the smoke of the situation - I thought he was using smoke, but then I read that on PC you only get to use smoke one time per situation. It was the smoke from the fire extinguisher. He flew down, did a takedown, then a takedown smash, then grappled back up, before the other thugs could shoot.

I got killed on that side mission four times last night, over the course of 2 hours, methodically taking out the guys, then beating on Deadshot, then getting out of there when 5 more guys came in with shotguns. Again I got rid of them, slowly, then beat on Deadshot, and just before he dies, he slips away from me and runs over and shoots the hostage. And I have failed the mission! What hostage? Oh yeah, that guy.

What a cheap shot - the game never did this!

Yes, it WAS a cheap shot. But now that I know how to do the fun stuff - how to use the 8 key to cause a guy to get hung on a gargoyle, and I am not even close by, then to release him so I can do that again - now that I know I can cause two guys to smash into each other, knocking them both out briefly, giving me time to do the finish smash with left control and right click, on each - now that it is more fun, I wouldn't mind playing it again.

But to do that I would have had to have found the save file, like I have done on Arma3.

The final time I played the deadshot mission, and beat it, I took out the first group of thugs, using silent takedown on the three on the ground floor, then using the remote claw to hang the two on top, to the gargoyles. That was fun. Then since there were no more enemies around, I flew down and got behind Deadshot, and then I beat him, and beat him, and beat him some more - using cape swing to stun him.

I got him to within one-fourth of his life. The second round of guys had shown up by then, and deadshot had grabbed the hostage and was using him as a shield, rotating around.

My prior try had me dealing again with the 5, but this time I said "what the hell" since the Most Wanted guy never dealt with any of the thugs. I flew down, got behind him, took the takedown cue, and that was the end - the guys automatically disappeared.

One video showed a thug saying "Hey, he just took down the boss, let's get out of here." For me they all just vanished. In fact, now I'm thinking that it might work better, when he has the hostage, to have a lot of thugs around.

The time before, the thugs were all gone, and I am pretty sure I flew down behind him, but my reward was he shot the hostage.



BOSS BATTLES NOT MENTIONED YET


You fight a clay man - he turns to clay. Watch the hints - let him roll into the explosive barrels on each corner. You don't even have to jump out of the way - when he starts rolling the film takes over. Then when you guys have crashed through the floor, watch the hints again - he is vulnerable to batarang while he is recovering and rising up - take a break from your battles with the little clay guys, and hit him with multiple batarangs. That one is from City.


You fight Bane.
This first fight is two segments. Much later in the game, you fight him again in three segments.

First you fight him in a room. You have to beat on him, get him mad, then he injects the venom, and you have to beat on him some more. I got killed 8 times. The reason I got killed, is that the triple cape swing is timed differently from city and asylum. They have slowed down the cape stun movement. That threw me off.

Also I wasn't jumping over Bane's head - just to the side.

Jumping over his head is best, because it puts you right behind him, and he hits the corner and takes swings at nothing. While he is doing this, start your three cape swings - BUT DON'T STAND TOO CLOSE TO HIM.

Again, they changed it a bit from before. He turns around and he belts you if you are too close.

So be one or two feet out of the reach of his fist when he turns around - a bit of distance. You hit middle mouse, cape swing. Then again, middle mouse cape swing. Then once more, middle mouse - but this time the third cape swing is not side to side, it is a forward flipping dramatic cape plunge. Think of a flag. You swing it from side to side, then you pop the flag behind your head and swing it straight forward. That's the one that stuns him.

Again, normal villains, just one or two cape swings will start the stars. For the monsters, you have to do a triple cape stun, to really get those stars buzzing.

As soon as you see those stars, Beat Beat Beat, then watch for the E key. The E key causes you to swing behind him, unhook his venom hose, and take him out of super charged up venom mode. It may be a bit harder to jump over his head, and do the cape swing, when he is glowing green in venom mode - more evasive move might come into play.


From time to time, Bane may be able to grab you and hold you up in the air, getting ready to do a smash down with your back on his knee. When that happens the hint is "Hit space bar." When you see that, and for the rest of the game, like in the fight with Firefly, TAKE YOUR HAND OFF THE MOUSE, AND HIT THE SPACE BAR AS FAST AS YOU CAN!

You can't move your thumb as fast as you can rotate your entire arm. I can tap the desk at least twice as fast with all the fingers of my hand, rotating my arm at the elbow, than I can by tapping it with my thumb. You need those extra space bar keystrokes - there is some kind of counter - meaning that they are counting those space keys - you will be rewarded with a fist smash to Bane that will result in both of you on the floor.

Then just evasive roll away - and you will notice that your health will not have been damaged at all. As I was beating on the space key, I would build myself up to the climax, then out loud I would say "Smash!!" as Batman hit Bane.

I rolled away no worse for the encounter. Once I learned about that, I never lost any health from him grabbing me.


You will know you have won that first segment, when you both crash through the floor and fall into the snow. They renew your health, and you don't have to restart in the room again.

In the snow, it is the same thing - use evasive move - use cape swing when you can - although some thugs have joined the battle and one of them has a machine gun. Your explosive gloves will activate. I got killed once, then beat it the next time. You will get Bane down on health - about one-fourth left - and then finally, thankfully, a cut scene will take over, and police helicopters will show up.


The second fight is much later, in three segments.
You are in the prison. Bane charges out, and he is pumped up with venom. He runs much faster than before. I tried jumping over his head, and I couldn't - he got to me too fast. He just runs around at high speed knocking everything over. There are a bunch of thugs. Jump to the side, and try to keep an eye on where the hell he is. Don't fight anybody.

I repeat. Do not fight anybody. Bane is already doing that for you. What got me killed was to try to fight the thugs. He always runs toward you and he is running over everybody he runs into. You will see all the thugs on the ground, temporarily dazed, and Bane will have slowed down a bit, and maybe he is thrashing one guy. That's when you move in with the triple cape swings, and then beat on him when he becomes stunned.

That first part will end when he suddenly grabs you, and despite your best jump, he gets you anyway - you didn't do anything wrong - the game had to enable him to catch you, to end the first segment. A cutscene starts, with him holding you on the ground with his boot.

Good - you have beaten the first part. I think they even restart your health. I got killed once after the boot, maybe twice, each time starting again, under his boot. I think I had missed a few cues - so I didn't make the exact same mistakes, and then I finally beat that one - no more boot. That one ends when you beat the crap out of him, and then use your shock gloves to actually cause his heart to stop!

Hahahahaha.


The final third segment, the end of the game, comes just a bit later, after you revive him from death. You had to actually stop his heart, because they were using his heart beats to charge up an electric chair - one more of joker's fun tricks - and joker was in the electric seat, at first.


So they all say to you, "You killed Bane." You say, "No, I can recharge his heart." And you do. Yes, you use your shock gloves and restart his heart. His gratitude is to inject a special M-1 compound into himself, and turn into a monster.

You go crashing through the floor, and this bit involves hiding from him, in vents, then doing a back stealth takedown, which just means climbing on his back, then watch for a left-mouse "wall takedown." He crashes into an electric wall, you jump off, and then beat on him. Then roll away and hide in a vent - the vents are swinging, and crouch plus the space bar will let you jump inside. His arms can't get you.

One thing that makes this one harder, is that - to be dramatic - they vary the angle of view - showing him down one hall glaring at you, then from another viewpoint.

It certainly IS VERY DRAMATIC, and very confusing. Twice I rolled right toward him, as they shifted the view. I got killed a couple times - yes at least twice - and then I was not so quick to roll until I made very sure that the destination hall I was about to roll toward, was clear of the Bane monster.

When I got him down to one-quarter of health, a jammer appeared that would not let me do detective vision to see where he was. They suggested I go and unjam the jammer. But I was afraid to go do that.

I got out of the vent, and looked around for him - no special detective vision. By then I had a fairly high level of confidence that I could roll away from him and get myself into a vent, rather than watch him pick me up and throw me into a wall, as I had seen him do many times - taking a good 0.25 inches of health each time.

I peeked around some corners, and then I saw him, facing away from me. I ran up behind him - I don't think I even bothered to do the stealth crouch run - then successfully hit right-mouse and swung up on him, and then did the wall takedown again, then beat on him, at which point it was over - almost.

He actually grabs you and throws you through a brick wall. You look back and see the small hole you made, and you see him get ready to crash through and make a much larger hole. But as he does, you get a prompt to shoot the remote claw #8 weapon - they give you the hint and they give you the time to do it. That strings a cable above you from side to side that stops him, his face 6 inches from yours, and then he gets electrocuted by the wire that stopped him, not dead but enough to take the fight out of him.

You string him up in the air with a winch and pulley, and the game is pretty much over.


You fight Firefly
This one is a bit of a challenge. Like the mad hatter, it puts you into a mode, like in Asylum, where the puppeteer was a giant, and you are a tiny Batman. In this case, there is no giant, but you are tiny, and the camera is looking at you from the side, and now A means forward, D is backward. The controls are changed from W and S. That occurs several times in this fight, but not at the major fighting times. The fight is in two segments.

First you fight him where you have two cars to hide behind. I got killed because I didn't dodge the fire sufficiently. When you get him down on health, then the strange camera kicks in, and you are a little Batman again.

Now he is flying back and forth, lighting up the middle of the bridge, saying "Kerosene, know what I mean?" I got killed a couple times, because I couldn't see where to go. I went straight and got killed several times. I was about pause the game to go watch a walk-through, then I thought - "what have I missed?"

Don't go straight. Well, yes, go straight, but only for 5 feet, then turn sharp right, and the camera will follow you to the right. THEN you can go forward. That takes you to the other side of the bridge and the final arena. The normal camera comes back thank goodness.

Finally you have taken most of his life, and Batman says, "I need to grapple him - it's dangerous but this is my chance." Firefly is 15 feet up in front of me, hovering motionless like a hummingbird, the game is waiting for me to grapple, and I am wondering why the #2 claw is not working. Then finally I see the F prompt - "Oh, grapple, the thing I do all throughout the game - why didn't you say so." I forgot it was called "grapple." Duhhh.

(Another dumb move I made at the very end of the game - I was so pumped up fighting the GIANT Bane, that as I ran up to him from behind, I hit the middle mouse button instead of the right-mouse takedown button, and saw myself swing the cape at him, instead of jumping on his back. I escaped and got into a vent and ended up beating the segment, but don't mix up your keystrokes obviously.)


With firefly, the game gives you prompts. Roll away from his fire - as I said - and in the first segment there are two cars to hide behind as you fight him. You get his health down by shooting him with the glue gun, the 5 key rapid fire, then use batarangs. But not the 4 multiple key, use the 1 key instead. Remember that. For some reason the 4 key doesn't work. Oh, I know why - because some people have not upgraded to multiple batarangs.

That's okay, you use the little finger for the batarangs, then the ring finger when the game prompts you to hit him with the claw - the double-tap 2 key. Then you are prompted space bar, to pull him in. Take your hand off the mouse and hit the space bar as fast as you can, or your hold on him will let go, like happened to me once. Don't worry about attack mouse key - when you get him reeled in, Batman will smash on him automatically, knocking off 1/4 of his life.

That happens a couple times - not too hard actually.


You fight copperhead
This little Latina is a poisonous snake. She injects you with venom, a bad neurotoxin.

(Let me set the record straight so ddp doesn't get any wrong ideas. I once was an amateur herpetologist. The only snake in America that uses a neurotoxin is the coral snake, a small relative of the cobra. All 3 other poisonous snakes, rattlesnake, cottonmouth, and copperhead, use a hemotoxin that attacks blood cells. In the National Geographic series Vikings, the king of england has a vat of "poisonous snakes" which I noticed are really harmless boa constrictors from South America. England has no poisonous snakes. LMAO.)

You stagger away from that encounter with the little b*ch, and then, after asking Alfred to send you a container of anti-venom, Copperhead attacks you before you reach it, with a bunch of fake copperhead ladies joining in.

Your best bet is to double-tap the 3 key, the explosive gel, and keep doing that. I got killed once. When I got killed, the hint implied that only one fighter was real, and suggested either concussion, or explosive gel, to reveal the true copperhead girl.

The explosive gel 3 key works best, because each time you shoot it out, you roll out of the way so you don't get caught in the blast. So it incorporates roll. Not a bad move. I have used it before with crowds of thugs, but I never thought it worked all that well, since they don't stay stunned that long. But with a crowd of phantom fighters, sure why not. They will mostly start disappearing, and you can figure out which one is real.

I like that explosive gel double-tap 3 key. Maybe I should have tried it more with the thugs. I do like the roll. It just seemed a little weak. I wasn't taking any damage, but I wasn't giving out any real damage either, is how it seemed. Oh, and also, I think the roll is not a huge roll, just a short roll - so when I want to really get away from the pack, the normal double space roll covers much more ground.


You fight multiple snipers.
This is tricky. There is one roof with a sniper on each corner, and two guys with machine guns in the middle, and absolutely no cover, plus another sniper covering you from another higher rooftop. You have to take that other sniper out first, then before you fly to the dangerous roof which is slightly below - you can fly there okay - throw a multiple batarang that includes both snipers. If you have upgraded for longest stun time, that will give you enough time to fly over.

Then maybe throw your one and only smoke into one corner, and take out that one sniper. For the other, do evasive roll, and / or 2 key claw, and / or glue gun, to throw glue all over him. The glue holds for about 4 seconds.

If you leave this area for 10 minutes, everybody respawns like Far Cry 2.


Final thoughts
Have fun. Should you play it on normal, or easy? More of a brawl on normal, that's for sure. Sometimes that's what you want. Other times you get a little tired of it. But maybe I cheated myself by doing City on Easy. Maybe the answer is - do normal - and keep the sessions down to a reasonable 2-4 hours.

Nothing is as hard as Deathstroke, but now that you know what to do, deathstroke is not so hard. I suppose it would be a bit easier on easy, but still not a pushover is my guess. I think I read about a guy who dropped down to easy, but who still couldn't get past Deathstroke.

I have had trouble with the bear-hug guys - the guys taking venom. I had trouble with two of them.

I had trouble with two of them, plus a giant enforcer, plus a ninja guy, plus a bunch of normal thugs, and some with armor.

You beat one gang, they then take that same gang, add one or two more of the worst elements, and throw an even harder situation at you. Could I have used the 8 key to smash guys into each other at the start of a fight? Maybe. Could I have at least thrown the one smoke bomb into the middle of each battle? Yes, I never did that, but I clearly should have.

You can practice these moves out on the street, before you continue the game progress. There are plenty of tough gangs out there on the streets of Gotham or Arkham City.

Rich

Update: (I recommend normal - see below.)

I beat Shiva - the last assassin. I died twice, and then I just ramped up the rolling evasive move - trying to make sure the karate guys who came in the second part of that fight didn't corner me. It's a short fight, so no big deal.

I spent about 8 hours more on Origins yesterday, and the game grows on you. Unlike the first two games, I am now going through trying to unlock all the little extortion boxes - sometimes needing the youtube videos to help. The game is loaded with puzzles. I have learned to fly higher than I ever thought possible, to reach some of the unreachable boxes. I have learned to push off a wall, to hit a pushpad halfway down a building, then hit the third one 10 feet above the ground on the building across the wide boulevard. I watched the video, then it took about 6 tries before I timed the space bar properly for the best push.

The street gangs occasionally still do kill me. And I have learned that the ones on the ground, whose machine guns unbelievably target you on a distant roof, are not good to fly into on a glide kick. I had one guy shoot me on the way down and kill me!!

For general gangs, sometimes I try to find a roof far away, but still close enough where the bat icon shows on a character, selecting "glide kick" not drop kick. Then as I glide, I hold down left control, and the bat icon changes to yellow, then finally to red. When I hit the guy he is taken out totally unconscious - I just reduced that gang from 10 to 9. That can be a huge help. Often I go do it again - go up, and then come crashing down. Then it's 8 guys, not 10. That can really help!

I have tried the 8 key, the remote claw, which smashes the thugs into each other, again and again - as soon as they get up you do it again. It often reduces the entire group to lying on the ground, stunned. If my crouch left mouse knockout punch worked better and faster, that might help a lot, but by the time I fly down they are all up again. (But maybe I should try that on a closer roof. Also I have tried rolling away and doing it to them as they run toward me - you have to get the guy closest to you first - I am not quite so good at doing that yet.) Does it weaken them up? Maybe so. I can't say for sure, but very possibly it DOES weaken them up. I just started doing that more and more. And yes, I am often tossing the one-time smoke before flying down.

I am using the glue gun more and more, but not in fights - the glue seems to hold only for seconds and it takes me out of my rolling evasive move - which overall works the best. Whoever is shooting at me - I roll in that direction - and I don't think I take too much bullet damage when I am rolling. The times I've gotten killed is when I took more machine gun damage than I should have in doing a beat-down on a guy and getting shot from behind. So you definitely have to keep an ear open for the sound of machine gun fire and start up the rolling again. The other reason I stopped the glue during the fights, is that I often found it hard to figure out which one was the shooter. And even when I pummeled him, the next moment the guy in body armor had picked up the machine gun, and now he was the shooter. So rolling seems overall to work best.

The fights are more fun than ever - I get to the shock gloves faster through an upgrade, and I start the free-flow now at X5 not X8, so all of a sudden I am doing huge things like jumping up and down, creating a pressure wave that knocks them all down - some amazing fighting stuff.

I AM NOW THINKING THAT IT IS BETTER TO PLAY THE GAMES ON NORMAL.

Yes, I am recommending normal. You might really get into the games, and become a fan. I am starting to. The extra challenge does add to the fun. I get killed, then respawn looking for that gang that just killed me - I'll get them this time. The Bane followers are Latinos, and the chatter is different from the mobsters. "Hey carnal, we have to get that guy that put Bane away."

Since you like games that take time, you will not terribly mind the challenges of normal. You can watch youtube when you find a really hard challenge. But you will get better, as you upgrade to more gadgets and better moves - like faster silent takedown, batarang stuns that last longer (I have time to stun two machine guys and get over and give the knockout to both of them - it's working well for me now), thicker smoke.

Oh, and by the way - re: digital vibrance - I found out it's my own family pictures. I just booted into windows 7 on my new machine - and the lighthouse picture was the wallpaper - the US-wp2 picture - part of the Americana theme. I looked at it and thought "Wow those colors are rich - which computer am I on?"

I realized I was on the same vga port, with no saturation adjustment. When I increased saturation to 140, it looked okay, but the change was unnecessary. It didn't need it. So I booted back into xp, and found the same wallpaper. XP has "stretch" and windows 7 has fill - I don't know if they are the same, but I am trying XP "stretch" to get the same look as Windows 7 without seeing the black borders on top and bottom on my 4:3 display - since the pictures are for a normal 16:9 display.

The wallpaper looked okay when I changed to saturation of 0, but it was my family pictures that looked washed out and colorless - not the wallpaper! For them I reset the saturation to 140 - THEY needed the extra saturation - but good windows wallpaper normally won't. So you were right - the Dell is fine without the color adjustment - my problem is that the family pictures I am displaying (using quicktime picture viewer - it's great - you just grab the edge and it adjusts size, with a very small menu on top of each picture) are lacking in rich color. ​

 

That sounds great Rich! A lot of monitors need calibration, but Dell UltraSharps are professional monitors and usually need very little or none. LCD models more often need it than LED models but it's usually not major. The default mode on your 3007/3008WFP is likely to be more accurate than anything cheaper, which most are.

I am in love with Dell monitors in particular, because the high-end UltraSharps are usually among the best available, and have been so pretty consistently for a long time. My 2407WFP will be 10 in a year or so and still blows away just about everything for image quality and color accuracy. The pixel density is obviously not amazing but I never found it to be a major issue. Also, it already had better pixel density than a lot of 22" 1680 x 1050 16:10's and similar monitors of the time. I upgraded from a 17" 1280 x 1024 5:4 so it was as close to life changing as computer hardware gets.

Thousands of hours of use on the 2407 and still love it to death. I bought it before I knew what it was. All I knew was that I wanted to spend a lot and get one that would last. Can't say it hasn't done the job The newer 27" U2713HM with LED backlighting is just icing on an already tasty cake. The older 24" 2407WFP lives on as the main monitor for my secondary PC, which has received a huge breath of new life with upgrades. It was previously using a 23.6" ASUS 1080p LCD, which had similar pixel density but otherwise worked more like a small HDTV. Oversaturated to the extreme. Took a lot of tuning to get it right, and it was still never very good. Both UltraSharps were superior out of the box.

 

Just scored a Logitech Driving Force GT, a very decent ~$300 racing wheel, Gran Turismo 5 XL Edition, and Gran Turismo 6 all for under $100. Happy Jeff today!

The wheel is a cut down version of higher-end Logitech wheels and is a bit old but has all the right features and quality to satisfy me. Perfect integration with Gran Turismo which is the undisputed king of driving games, and perfect PC compatibility as well. Proud of my acquisition

 

Bah, been missing out on thread replies again! Wow, do I have a lot to read - I'll be back with a reply in a while

 

Jeff, you know you're a hard-core racer, when you have a wheel. Way to go!!!

(Question: what about accelerator and brakes! I only ask because my old microsoft setup for Monster Truck Madness on windows 98 had a wheel, and then on the floor it had an accelerator and a brake pedal. Can you believe that! I still have one! (I might be wrong about the brake pedal - I sort of think it did have two things down there to press - but definitely the gas pedal for sure.)

=====================================​

By the way, Jeff - I was wrong about something in my prior post - when I was talking at the end of it about family photos.

Take a look at this windows wallpaper. in-betawp3, from one of the vista or windows 7 themes.



In all the re-installing I have been doing, pulling stuff off of my old O/S to make sure I have put everything on the new O/S (you'll see what I mean in a minute further below) occasionally I have not JUICED catalyst saturation to 140 like I prefer to do - or perhaps it has reset back to default.


I said that the saturation was needed JUST for my family pictures. I was wrong.

That wallpaper up there, as I mentioned, is called "in-betawp3" (if you google that you will find a whole collection of stunning wallpapers.) It is part of the themes offered with vista and w7 - I grabbed all the large jpgs and came up with over 1100 of them, which I added to the 200 from that web site Sam had told me about, interfacelift.com.

In xp I access them with webshots - in w7 they just rotate along every 3 minutes in the wallpaper slide show.

As I started to say, at one point a week ago, all of a sudden that particular wallpaper came up, and I noticed that on one computer - oh yeah, now I remember - the one in my room which animated Left 4 Dead, the Dell p2 3 ghz - the above wallpaper looked really rich and colorful, but in the trailer it did not!


I had just switched off windows 7 and was back to xp. I found that jpg in the second group on webshots - you can only have 124 in each group. and I put it on the screen, then went back in the house to look at the other 20" dell monitor. No doubt about it - the one inside the house, in my room, looked wayyyy better.

Back out here in the trailer, I then brought up Catalyst, and sure enough - no saturation adjustment. So I moved it from 100 (no adjustment) up to 140 - AND NOW THE WALLPAPER WAS ROCKING AGAIN WITH FANTASTIC COLOR!!!

Hahahahaha!!

--------------------
​

I haven't played Batman for two weeks - converting over to the E7300 for business use - the microtower dual core. I set it up dual boot, xp on one enterprise drive, windows 7 and xp mode on the other.

Then a few days later I thought - "Wait, I am only using about 300 gigs on the drive for both operating systems, and this way I clone the xp drive, then a separate clone for the w7 drive - why don't I just have both O/S on the same drive?

So I did, and I am still in the middle of finishing that up. I cloned over the xp to 400 of the 931 (large) gigs, leaving 531 unformatted. Then I installed windows 7 leaving 131 unpartitioned. Then I paid $25 for a little partition manager, IM - Magic Partition Resizer Pro - to put the empty partition in the middle between the two O/S. I did that because I don't yet know which O/S I will be using the most. Someday, down the road, I will use the partition manager again to add the 131 gigs to the xp, or to the windows 7 partition.

I normally run an XP shop, and just windows 7 on the gaming rig. But I am beginning to like windows 7 a lot, and xp mode seems to work fairly well. In fact, when I had dual disks, I had created a 45 gig virtual hard drive. I thought "Am I going to have to install all those programs again and copy in those large directories - or can I just copy over the virtual hard drive." It worked - the virtual hard drive came over - I swapped that one for the small one I created as part of installing xp mode - and all my programs were right there!

The other reason for doing this, is that I really liked running a Raid 1 mirror. This is the kind of raid that you like, Sam - redundancy!

So I ordered a cheap Vantec software raid card based on the sil3132 chip again - I say again because that is the chip I have on the little pci-e x1 power over esata card, with the two esata ports, capable of powering the special connector with the wide head, supplying power and signal, in hot-swap. Plug the sata drive in and it comes up just like with usb.

I really like that, but I found that I cannot boot off a drive that I clone to that way. I can make the clone, but I can't boot off of it to test whether I made a good clone. So I also put a slot cover esata port in, which is just a way to take an internal sata outside the case. Then I use a little AC sata power converter, and run the cloned disk that way. I can boot off of it and verify that the clone is good.

So the new sil3132 card (I'm going to take the old power over esata card out before installing this new one, just in case they clash) provides two internal sata ports, and soft raid 0 or 1 - I'm going to use raid 1, mirror. The reviews were good. It only works in an IDE environment, not AHCI, and that's fine because this microtower is IDE-only. If the microtower were Raid I could use Intel Matrix manager software raid like I am doing on the Dell (that animated Left 4 Dead P4 machine, which is now in my room - running the color Pixma MX870 canon printer that I just picked up.)

And the reviews said it definitely was Bootable. I have the card sitting here in the trailer, but I haven't finished completely installing everything on windows 7 yet - oh, and I lost my profile on xp, and I had to re-install my profile - that has never happened to me before in a decade with XP.

Anyway - been off Batman for two weeks, but when I was last on - my favorite thing now is to not deal with 10 or 12 street thugs - I just fly over and do the flying knockdown - holding the left control, watching the attack bat icon finally change to red - which means I knock him down and he stays down - AND GUESS WHAT - YOU DO TWO AT A TIME! I was very pleasantly surprised to see that often you take down him - AND his buddy. Then I turn around and rappel, or is it grapple, back up to some tall building. If the building is a little too far to see the bat icon, I just start flying toward them until it appears, then hold the left control for the takedown sequence.

SO JEFF, DID YOU EVER START ANY OF THE 3 BATMANS?

Sam, yes you have some reading! Did they ever release Arkham Knight for PC? Is it back on steam?

I'm going to play it, then I'm going to give Unity a try again.

Where did Kevin go?

Rich

 

Still not caught up, been a frantic couple of weeks. Arkham Knight was patched this week I think, but last I heard it hadn't made it back to Steam yet. Not really been following that one to be honest.

Quickly on the monitors front, after very nearly a whole year in storage, my 3008WFP and first U2312HM have made it back to the office, and still very much look the part. The old E5200 / X38 PC has not survived, however, so I'll take a look at that at some point. For now though it's not proving too necessary as after the old second-hand laptop the company gave me developed a charging fault, a new Surface Pro 3 (the 256GB version with an i5 and 8GB of RAM) has taken its place. With mDP -> DVI adapter, USB ethernet adapter and a keyboard/mouse connected to a USB3 hub, it's almost indistinguishable from a desktop PC and its CPU is actually going to be faster than the E5200 in the old desktop. Impressive device, full of Microsoft-y bugs as you might expect, especially with Windows 8 (the 10 upgrade hasn't come through for it yet) and ludicrously expensive at £1200 (or around $1550 pre-tax). That does however include the type cover which includes a fair screen protector (but nothing to protect the rear), a reasonable keyboard and a so-so touchpad, as well as the surface pen. Although nothing new, the charger also featuring a built in USB port for charging your phone is a nice touch.

Nice work on the wheel Jeff, I had a Driving Force 3 (the one that predates 900 degree travel) which was good for what it was, but I always found myself a lot worse at games using it than the controller, which after almost 20 years of dualshock, even going months at a time without playing, just feels 'at home'.
I installed Project CARS a few weeks back. Holy ****, without any assists, that game is hard!

 

Damn that is impressive. Touch screen devices do have their uses, though using it as a full desktop replacement would negate its advantages with less of the desktop benefits. Still though, would make larger tasks away from home much easier and a wireless KB/mouse would make it tidy and portable even. It would stand to reason that a reasonably equipped i5 laptop with a mouse would do it even better though. Interesting implications to devices that small and powerful.

 

That's the thing though, when I'm in the office it's a desktop replacement, but when I go to visit a client I just disconnect the cables and it's a touchscreen tablet. I considered using something like an XPS 13 ultrabook instead but wanted to minimise weight after having carried around a full 15" laptop on my back for a year!

 

Sam, what do you mean - you disconnect the cables. My roommate had a little laptop, and the keyboard disassembled, turning it into a touchscreen tablet - is that similar? I didn't pay a whole lot of attention to it - but you can bring up a virtual keyboard, right?

I just picked up a nice canon color printer/automatic document scanner - same that my brother had which right now doesn't print (I offered him the $50 he asked for at his garage sale, but he just gave it to me - so now I have two of them, Canon Pixma MX870) and with that I'll be printing out some new business cards pretty soon (I print them on glossy paper and slice them to business card size.)

I am gearing up to get back into doing in-home real estate presentations (taking listings) and now thinking about bringing along a computer - something that would be VERY portable - and show videos when I wanted to really jazz up my presentation. Kevin taking that UPS driving test got me motivated.

Should I just google your laptop, surface-pro 3?

[Edit - yeah went to steam store - Arkham Knight still not for sale although they sent the patch out - but still working on crossfire support - so that counts me out anyway until they get that working]

 

Well, I'm glad my initiative paid off for something Good for you Rich!

Finally got into my own apartment. A whole lot of reasons why it took 9 years for me to do it. Probably should have been much sooner, but there were circumstances...

A mere 8MB connection hooked up today. Quite the step up from my typical 5MB for so long. But what's funny is, my brother (whom I was staying with for 3 months) recently got a 25MB connection. Naturally, he has it for a short time before I move out... LOL! In my opinion, 8MB is nothing to sneer at though. If I can handle dial-up downloads, and than 5MB patient downloads, 8MB is like super duper high speed internet LOL!
Seriously though, the company I'm with said that Fiber Optic will be in my area very soon. They'll hang a note on my door when it's available. Weeks, months, not long...

Working part time, and in my own apartment(17.62 USD/hour). THAT'S what I like. Time is far more valuable than money to me

 

Well, as long as you can afford the rent on just under 20 hours a week. Why not?

We had 100mbits - remember when I was telling Sam that I was getting 5 or 6 MBytes/sec download, and he said - "Well that's not nearly 100!" He was right, but my speed was somehow throttled on this long cable out to the trailer.

But that's all ancient history - my brother dropped us back down to 12 after the Cox special expired. So you have 8, and we have 12, and yes, whether it's 5, 8, or 12 - IT IS HIGH SPEED!

I don't miss the 100 at all, but now a steam download comes down at max 1.5 MBytes/second and that's still fast enough to download a full 16 gig Batman game in under 4 hours. When the fiber optic comes in they'll probably offer you 25, if not 50 - but again, will the extra cost be worth it?

So Kev, what are you playing these days. I went back to Left 4 Dead - playing solo - and it IS A SCARRRRY GAME!!!

I can't believe I actually got used to all that violence! hahahahaha!

EDIT: Kevin - did you say 8 MB - the big B - bytes? That IS 100 megabits - what we used to have. I thought you were saying megabits because that's what the ISPs use - when they say 8 or 10 or 25, its always bits, not bytes. I read your post again, and I'm not sure.

 

They're pretty spendy Rich, there'll be plenty better value options you can get, but for something fairly potent, high resolution and light enough to carry in a backpack the surface is pretty good. It has a touchscreen keyboard but also a physical one (type cover) which also forms a soft screen cover for the device. While natively WiFi only I'm using a USB3 hub to attach a USB Ethernet adapter and full size external keyboard and mouse. Also using a displayport to dvi dongle to connect it to the U2312HM I have at the office.

Grats on the new place omega, still not a step I've taken, though I imagine it won't be too far from now.
I've got very accustomed to 65Mbps VDSL, and while I could probably live without it, it'd be very annoying as it's well utilised. That said, while I'd take any free increase in speed, there definitely is diminishing return after 50, primarily because international routing starts slowing you down instead.

Currently wrestling with replacement disks after one of my 5 year old WD20EARS developed lots of pending sectors. Its successor seems to blue screen the PC when I copy data to it, not sure if it's the disk, external dock or PC itself yet. All very frustrating when troubleshooting is already your day job!

 

Oh, I get you Sam. Well, maybe I'll google it and get some more info - OR MAYBE YOU'LL POST A PICTURE!!

I am in windows 7 right now, where I just checked my Outlook Express - which no longer comes with windows 7, but I paid some developer about $10 as a donation, I think, to get it. I like my Outlook Express which I normally use on XP, but on my windows 7 partition (with xp mode) I want to put as much of my software as I can, so that if I ever decide to really say goodbye to XP, I'll have most everything working.

Just now on XP I got an email that crashed my outlook express. Some real estate company trying to recruit me sending out spams about how great they are, using some special font. Whether I said "ok" to download the font" or "NO - don't" - my outlook express crashed. So I decided to see how my windows 7 outlook express would handle it - it pulls from the same two internet email servers, and it uses the same 6 gig outlook express folder that my xp uses.

It didn't even ask to download a font.

Maybe I should try to install all the windows 7 fonts into xp - that might solve that problem. I think I'll try it right now. I went the other direction a few nights ago, and 57 came into windows 7, now I'll go in this direction.