The Official Graphics Card and PC gaming Thread

I friended you on youtube

 

Bah, Youtube videos. High bandwidth usage and nasty sound quality, anything you post me just makes me download the song

 

I'll add you back. I'm at school now so I can't get to it.

Sam, That just means I have such amazing taste that anything I post you like

 

i just downloaded the left 4 dead demo and it is awesome. it looks great and plays well. i can max it out at 1920 x 1200 with my 8800gt ans q9550. the game is efficiently multithreaded and will benefit from a quad core. i played the first few missions and they were very fun. i cant wait for the full game to come out.

 

Is this going to a be a Valve developed game or is someone else making it? It's supposed to be on Source 2007 so I would expect both the graphics and performance are top notch. I've been waiting for a decent zombie shooter for a while now. RE4 just isn't what I'm looking for. Hopefully L4D is my hot ticket.

Downloading the demo now.

Edit:

Ahh, apparently it is a Valve in-house game. The demo is freaking awesome! It looks like another refresh of Source Engine. They heavily tweaked the post processing to simulate dust in the air and stuff. It looks great. Otherwise, it's identical to Episode 2 graphically. Not that that's a bad thing. It's quite a bit more demanding than Episode 2 though, but there is way more action on screen. All perfectly smooth and playable maxed at 1920 x 1200 with forced 4xAA and 8xAF. This game does Source Engine proud in a BIG way. Crysis, eat your heart out.

The gunplay is tight and the weapons feel nice and powerful. I LOVE having comrades and being able to do it all in co-op. The characters are all cool and likable and the AI is EXTREMELY competent. They'll kill as many zombies as you do easily.

And YES, they finally made the perfect zombie game. I always wanted Valve to expand on the Ravenholm sections of Half Life 2. But they went one better and made the PERFECT zombie game. They got everything right down to the tiniest details. It's all I've ever hoped for in a game and more. I've been seriously fiending for a game exactly like this for years and I knew somehow Valve would be the ones to do it.

Left 4 Dead is my new top favorite of all time. And I've only played the demo.

 

Can you tell me where to get the demo from??
I mean was it from an official site, or *ahem* torrents *ahem*

I really want to try this out

Thanks

 

It's on Steam. Just look up the game and there's a link to the demo on the page.

The recommended specs for the game are pretty nice too. Especially for how mind-blowingly sweet it looks. Source Engine produces excellent visuals. It's always been my favorite game engine.

Minimum:

Supported OS: Microsoft Windows XP / Vista / Vista64
Processor: Pentium 4 3.0GHz
Memory: 1 GB
Graphics: 128 MB, Shader model 2.0, ATI 9600, NVidia 6600 or better
Hard Drive: At least 7.5 GB of free space
Sound Card: DirectX 9.0c compatible sound card

Recommended:

Supported OS: Microsoft Windows XP / Vista / Vista64
Processor: Intel core 2 duo 2.4GHz
Memory: 1 GB
Graphics: Shader model 3.0, NVidia 7600, ATI X1600 or better

It apparently needs 1GB of memory, but that's really all it needs methinks. It doesn't require much for a minimum video card. Only needs a Radeon 9600. It is multi-threaded very well and puts a considerable load of all 4 cores of my quad.

It says Nvidia 7600 recommended. I'd love to see how well a 7600GT handles it. Too bad mine went ka-blooey on me.

 

Thanks, I'll look it up

I might try it on my old rig
p4, 1GB, and 7600GS, and I'll let you know how it goes

 

I just downloaded and installed STEAM.

I'll try left for dead on my HD3450.

 

I bet it's playable at decent settings.

Yeah, that would be interesting to see. That PC mostly meets the recommended requirements.

 

I'll see what feats of magic I can perform with my dial-up to get the game, may take some time though

 

Ugh, dial-up

 

I remember when I had dialup. NOT FUN.

 

That was a while back... Not fun at all.

 

Thanks for telling me that guys
I never would have realized that by myself

But yeah, it's getting to be a pain, and I'm just waiting for a company/ISP to expand coverage (which should happen in a week or so )

 

Yeah. I'm currently on a 768k DSL line. It's perfectly fine for surfing the net, youtube, music and the like. But it sucks for downloading big files. 7GB+ downloads are quite realistic though with some patience. I just start 'em up and leave them running. Takes a few days to get anything but it's not really an issue. Most <2GB stuff I just leave going over night and that does the trick.

Hence my need for a separate machine for torrents. With a 768k DSL line, uTorrent sucks up all your bandwidth and makes even visiting AD a pain. Each computer gets its own separate 768k bandwidth though so I can run full speed downloads one PC and the other isn't affected.

 

Nice one

Does this work even if both machines connect through the same router???

Because my friend was complaining of the same issue (he cant surf and torrent at the same time, without limiting utorrent)
Would it work if he does what you do??

 

AFAIK it does. We have 4 machines in the house all through the same router and I'm pretty sure they each get their own bandwidth. I don't know if this works for every ISP. Though I also am able browse comfortably on my torrent machine if I limit uTorrent.

I'm not even sure if it works the same for other ISPs. I know my 2 PCs at once never had a problem, but I'm not sure if it affects my parents' PC or my sister's laptop(speaking of which, she gave away the one she was going to sell me, bi*ch >.<)

I'll check it out quick. Try and get a download going on all three of the ones I built at least. Will report back.

EDIT: It works fine for 3 machines all connected at once. Again, no guarantees for you. Our ISP sucks badly in that they're blatantly limiting us. I've seen some torrents top out at 300KB/s for like a 10 minute stretch only to drop back to my max download bandwidth of 100KB/s.

Hopefully, we're switching to a 5Mb T1 line in March

 

Packetshaping. A lot of ISPs do it, encrypt your torrents

 

Yeah, but if torrents can do it, how can I get firefox/explorer downloads to do it?

Checked with my sis... apparently with all 3 machines downloading at once bogs her down to like 30KB/s.... hmmm...