The Official Graphics Card and PC gaming Thread

Well, regarding where the Finnish servers are - the posted times on the replies aren't in European times, are they? I think I noticed once that the times were in central U.S. times - which would work with Houston Texas. Let's see - its about 7:30 in the morning here on the west coast - I'm gonna see what time this posts.

Hahahaha. Good one again, jonny boy. (Or I coulda said jonny yob.) But it's too early in the morning to think up a snappy retort.

I'm on my new get-up-in-the-morning-(yawn)-and-make-money-for-the-new-rig-and-say-see-I-told-ya-to-doubting-sam schedule. And no coffee yet!

 

Actually the 'time posted' is adjusted for your time zone, depending on where you are. It wasn't always that way, but it certainly is now.

 

I'm gonna have to change my sig because I've realised how aimless it is out of context

In context it does!! Honest! Although explaining the context will take 6 months....

 

YES! I've won against DiRT 2!!! I got the UK TV advert that's no longer shown taken off air

HECK YEAH! Aimless but successful!

 

Lol, I doubt you were the only one to complain, but congrats anyway

 

I have to wait till next week for it to be listed as an adjudication then I can find out more information

 

Nice going. Finally a company that listens to fans

 

Do NOT say that about Codemasters... Believe me.

 

Nah, more like an advertising standards agency that listens to complaints...

 

lol If I have a good root around I should be able to find the email where Codmeasters tell me to sod off

And the email where they tell me FUEL isn't going to be patched even though I tell them how to cheat at online racing by right-clicking in windowed mode or that AA doesn't work or.....

And the email where they tell me GRID 1.3 patch doesn't exist even though there was a forum post listing it's fixes 6 months previously and the online is fullll of cheaters.

And the email where they ban me from the CM forums for proving no actual fans want to wait for DX11 on DiRT 2.

 

So, i've been loosely following the development of Operation Flashpoint Dragon Rising for around two years, and at first i was quite interested due to how they presented the game; amazing graphics, gritty, realistic, wide open spaces etc etc...

But, over the past couple of months my interest had diminished because the few videos i'd watched of the final product made it seem pretty clinical with only "reasonable" graphics (and to be honest, i was really only considering buying it because the graphics had looked incredible in the rendered shots, and i was hoping they could pull it off in the full game), so i wiped it off my preorder list but decided i may as well give it a download (yeah, i know, i'm evil and all that).

First time i played it i cranked all the graphics settings to max and started the first mission. "Hmm", i thought, "it's ok, looks better than ArmA II, but everyone's right, they're certainly not as good as we were all hoping". So, after my first little disappointment i ran with my team over to the first objective, all the while thinking "games love bloom these days, don't they?" looking at the washed out colours and the annoying orange tinge to everything... Well, at least it wasn't quite as bad as ArmA II's...

I also noted that the gun was too close, it took up slightly too much of the screen, it got distracting.

I reach the top of a hill, i look down at the small cluster of houses below me where the Chinese are sitting, waiting. I crouched next to some rocks and released my first few rounds into an unsuspecting enemy below, the first volley thudded into the ground around him and he burst into action, turning round to face me, i released another and he collapsed; dead. The other enemies started returning fire and the other three members of my team did the same, i smiled slightly watching the rounds sale back and forth; white arrows of light shooting through the air.

Later on i'm driving a Jeep along the road and we come into contact with two more heading towards us, we stop and get out, watching the emeny draw closer, they in turn get out of thier vehicles and we start firing, slowly taking them out, but it was no use, they, using their greater numbers, start to flank us on both sides, they close in and i get hit in the arm, i hide behind a low piece of crumbling wall and bandage myself, one of my team gets shot dead, one of the enemy appear to my left, maybe a hundred metres off, i quickly switch to my gun but i hear a loud thwack and my screen goes blank; he got a headshot.

After finishing the first mission i exit the game, slightly underwhelmed, but certainly interested enough to give it another shot. I go to the nVidia Control Panel, go to the settings for Dragon Rising and set or force everything to their maximum apart from Antialiasing which i set to 4x with Supersampling enabled. I went back on the game and started the second mission.

It looked good. Very good. Very early morning, dark, subtle blue filter, nice sky, nice scenery, nice everything.

The only thing i could really fault were the relatively low resolution ground textures (nearly completely hidden in the foreground by the amount of grass, so only a minor issue).

Supersampling does a more than good job at smoothing the edges of the grass and the tree leaves in Dragon Rising, and even with only 4x AA there was not a jaggie in sight (i noticed later on there were still a few on some buildings where texture edges ran near 0 or 90 degrees, but there's not much you can do about that).

Anyway, point is, with the game looking beautiful and me running through the woods at night, closing in on my first objective, i was starting to love this game.

I do still have one nitpick, and i'm afraid it is a rather large one - you get about 7 or 8 clips in both your primary and secondary weapon at the start of a mission, and you can pick up more / swap weapons with downed enemies, but other than that, there very very few ammo stashes or anything, so you do have to watch your bullet count. A couple of times i've ended up having to use my pistol for long range firefights, but that's one of the things that makes the game good, my problem is that if you die and retart from the last checkpoint, all enemy bodies you'd killed previously are wiped from the map, so at one point i was left defending a village from around twenty enemy troops and only one clip of machine gun ammo left because there were no bodies left from when we'd originally stormed the village. I quickly used that and had to fight with only my pistol, spending the ammo for that even faster. In the end there were still a number of enemies incoming and all i had left were four grenades... Needless to say i failed.

It's very very hard to get out of situations like that, because whenever you run out to collect fresh ammo from the bodies of those you've just killed, you in turn expose yourself and are likely die anyway.

All in all, basing my verdict on the three missions i've played so far, it's a very solid "realistic" shooter and is certainly worth your time. Just make sure when you reach a checkpoint you have enough ammo to last you through...

Overall, an eight out of ten.

Screenshots later if any of you are interested

 

Nice Review. Currently in the process of getting it myself. Looks pretty good. It may be my new addiction a la Battlefield 2

 

Yeah, I haven't played I good "traditional" shooter in quite some time - sure Killzone and Halo et al are good, but after a while I crave a normal real world FPS, and there haven't been that many recently.

One good thing is it seems the PC version's being rated about one point higher than the console versions - nice to see an example of what the PC's good at.

 

I must admit, most of my enthusiasm came from the pre-renders, that's a shame. I will have to try it to see for myself though.

 

The only things graphically i can still moan about after setting everything i could find to max is that the grass draw distance is too little (as in, far away, there's no grass cover, just flat ground texture, which is slightly annoying), helicoptor rotor blades still look like fake disks when they're at full speed and trees at long distances look rubbish.

Not that point one and three could actually be made much better without adversely affecting performance, but still

 

mmm, Draw Distance is in the same bag as proper textures, physics and AI in my list of 'things developers should actually work on'.

 

Sam, Would you concur with this statement? I hate to lose all my progress!

Vista: C:\Users\YourUserName\AppData\Local\Rockstar Games\GTA IV\savegames

XP: C:\Documents and Settings\UserName\Application Data\Rockstar Games\GTA IV\savegames

Application Data and its subfolders are hidden, so go to Tools > Folder Options in Windows Explorer, click the View tab and 'Show hidden files and folders'.

Copy the saved games to a flash drive, floppy or CD. After you've reinstalled the game, copy the files back to the GTA IV\savegames folder.

 

Well I haven't gone looking for GTA4's save games, but that looks like the right location to me.

 

Can you think of any reason why simply copying that folder wouldn't work? Seems perfectly logical to me LOL!

 

The method's sound, that's something I do for a few games to keep the save files.