The Official Graphics Card and PC gaming Thread

To be honest, ATI have absolutely no reason to cut the price until the card has a rival, with the discontinuation of the 4870X2, the 5870 picks up its sales, it's relatively similarly priced, offers similar performance, but adds DX11 and much better power efficiency. Until a GTX300 series arrives, I wouldn't mind betting the HD5870 will stay above $350. To be quite frank, I think an HD5850 crossfire setup suits people better, the HD5850 is 85% of the card that the 5870 is, but for 70% of the price. Of course, the 5850's are very hard to track down, but so are the 5870s...
Actually, the 4850/4870 were released in July 2008, so it's been 15, nearly 16 months since their release. This is actually only two months shy of the 18 month gap between the release of the 8800GTX and the HD4870.

 

mw2 will use steam fully, inc the vavle anti cheat tool, and its could service for game saves etc, but lack of dedicated servers and the high chance of needing to buy dlc is still too much of a negative!

i will pirate this game and IF the MP can be pirated ill play it to see hwo it is. i ahve put in 1500 horus into cod4 mp, so i WILL pay for it if its good enough. hell i bought cod4 3 times lol.

 

Given the pathetic approach to multiplayer, MW2 is a single player game in my mind. I'm not convinced it warrants the price for a short SP campaign.

 

I'm buying it on PS3 for 4 player split screen with friends and downloading the PC version to play through the campaign

 

Wow, I've been gone for FIVE days - that's like Sam taking a vacation! And you guys are - what - HOLY CR*P 10 pages beyond!!

(just kidding)

I've been doing some real estate, and an enormous amount of getting myself un-rusty on Left 4 Dead - in fact I'll probably jump back on it tonight! WTF that new Crash Course is HARD!! LOL

WTF - again! Is that article about Nvidia accurate? (I am secretly laughing and gloating - but at the same time I am worried for Ati - what stops engineering failures from hitting them?) Anyway, if the result of all this is that Ati/AMD get to make some decent profits and stay healthy - then yay! Sure we consumers might have to pay a bit more - but in the long run we'll be better off than seeing Nvidia drive Ati out of business like they did with 3dfx, and then play games with fake shadows and the like to drive up their fps rates.

Everybody - take for example our buddy shaff - says "Oh, I can't wait for competition to drive down prices." Well sure, but there is sometimes a flip side - as in when the good guys leave the market and then there is NO competition. In this case, if that article is true, the BAD guys are supposedly leaving the market (gloat gloat gloat.) Hahahaha. That was probably a bunch of stupid stuff to say - I have to get on L4D so I'm not going to clean it up, lol.

Oh, you Brits and you aussies. "I couldn't care less" versus "I could care less." You have too much time on your hands - just kidding.

Okay, let me 'splain:

"I couldn't care less" is such a common, hackneyed expression - as in USED A BILLION TIMES - that it has morphed into the non-sensical "I could care less" which Omega said, which MEANS THE SAME THING!

Kevin, in his coolness, is using the more hip, newer, fresher version, while you aussies (shokz) and you brits (sam) are analyzing the thing with your microscope "that doesn't make sense - it pisses me off but I never say nothin." Hahahahaha.

Just kidding again. LOL!

Hmmmm. Oh Kevin, it's "you're" again. (now I'm using my microscope)

Run that part about "learning from our mistakes" past me again

Tell me what you're thinking! Got it? hahahahaha

OMG - Sam has been trashing our new love and guess what:

He's playing on a pirated copy!!! Jeeps exploding when they hit water - people moving into space - frame rates dropping when you're injured - just be glad your computer doesn't explode when it hits the "pirate bay" you modern day privateer! Hahahaha

Sam can't quit:

That's it - he's ruined the game for me. I'll just stay with L4D for the rest of my life

Oh, wait - Sam is coming around a bit - got the frame rates up. There's hope.

Okay, back to Crash Course. What a bi*ch! I played through the finale on advanced to see how it worked, and now with hours and hours on expert, I have had two teams make it out - but with only two each time and not me - one time I was almost there.

The horde music comes on and the horde is already within 20 feet of you - really puts you on your toes. Hunters might be in the next room you're about to enter and it's Pounce, without warning. But all of it can be handled - it's that finale that is TOUGH TOUGH TOUGH.

I had a guy yesterday who said "I'm black and white." I said "I've been black and white for the last 20 minutes." You take pills and keep going - no med kits anywhere in sight. The secret is never take a horde out in the open - I mean NEVER!! And since the horde music gives you only about one second - I kid you not - you hear it and they're already pouring over the fence in greater numbers than hit the Normandy beaches on D-Day. So always, you better be ready to pop back into that room you just left.

A guy came on two nights ago who was really funny. Some guys immediately wanted to kick him. I never kick anybody but griefers. Anyway, this guy was named Jamba J. and at first he was Bill, then he became Francis. He left right after a split vote to kick - I voted NO - but came back in 5 minutes. He said "Oh, not you a**holes again" I said - oh come on Jamba - stay - I didn't vote to kick you. So he stayed and we got along. I said "Francis suits you much better than Bill." He was yelling lots of Bronx or Jersey stuff - "comon - bi*ches - take that - get that multi - move it - screamin - we shot a tank together and he laughed like an idiot. Really funny guy. Like I said, most of the other guys didn't like his style, but I was born in Brooklyn and have visited NY a couple times, and I like the accent and IN YA FACE attitude - sometimes

He was saying "come over here berkeley" - "don't look - just like the homeless people - don't look." It was funny - we were safe in our closet and across the alley the other two guys didn't take good enough cover and were bright orange, then their glow disappeared - DEAD!

So last night we're in a closet, just shutting the door, and downdogdude suddenly joins - throws a pipe at the shut door (maybe he didn't see it shut) - it explodes inside the closet to our astonishment, and suddenly we are all dead - I think the zombies just barreled in smashing the door down and killing us - or maybe the explosion also caused damage. At the safe house, he wasn't there. I said "Did Francis the bot do that?" The other guy, Your Mom, says "No, bots don't handle grenades at all" and he goes to the console and it says "downdogdude caused you 50 damage." I said, oh, he must have left from embarrassment. If you just joined, and killed your whole team, would you leave too?

So I was trying to invite some guys, then downdogdude shows up again. I said, Oh, he's back. And he starts talking "How ya doin berkeley - hey multi - let's get goin." And I said "Jamba - it's you!" He laughed. Your Mom says "that's the guy who just killed us" I said "Oh, that's okay - it's jamba - he's funny." I told him "I'm just gonna keep calling you jamba - that's the greatest name ever."

Anyway, back to the finale. There is an inside corner next to the spawn room, where you can mellee and the whole team will take zero damage. But that puts you inside where the tank spawns. So I don't quite know how to work it so that when the tank chases a guy in the dead-end corner, somebody else can grab his attention and lure him away.

The two successful attempts were on top of the bus - everybody bunched toward the back. You can do all facing forward, or two facing back, two facing forward. I think I prefer all facing forward - me all the way in back on colt to scan for smokers on the top of the building on the left, or pulling us from a window, or from the roof on the right. One guy handles the opening on the left, the other on the right, and one is just a few feet forward, probably auto shottie, handling the front with me. Everybody crouches. It's busy, and hunters will jump up from time to time, and a boomer if we aren't really watching - but you have time when the tank comes from inside. I will beat that expert finale, but it might be a month from now. I will perfect it! No achievement, just for the helluva it. Pretty intense new addition to L4D. Hahaha.

I don't know if I'll ever mess with Versus or Survival - maybe one day. After I have achieved my 6th degree black belt in the regular game. My friendly fire is usually lowest on the team, and now that I'm a bit more careful about boomers waiting in boxes or on the roof of the building you are about to exit, and hunters inside (in other words don't go out or in without being SUPER careful, lol) I can stay healthy for long periods of time, until I start trying to rescue people. But handling a horde out in the open like some of these shotgun guys - I'm a long way from that level of spinning around, melee, shoot, more melee, reload. Some of them are amazing to watch. I'd love to play with shaff sometime. And sam and estuansis again - hey jeff I saw you were on steam the other day, but you were doing episode 2 so I didn't bother you.

Well, I spent 4 hours today composing an email standard letter to use as a followup on my new short sale phone calls. I have a stack of about 250 people who are going to lose their homes in 90 days - these are the ones whose phone numbers were listed in "white pages.com". So even though it's not wednesday yet - I think I'm back on L4D for a few hours again tonight. I deserve it, right?

Sam is thinking "there is NO new rig in Rich's immediate nor mid-term future while his p4 is still holding out"

Rich

 

They have - remember the HD4770?
I don't consider ATI vs nvidia good vs bad, that really is prejudicial, but I do consider nvidia the more 'sneaky' company due to underhand business practices and so on and so forth. Either way, no competition = very bad. If nvidia don't produce a rival product, the HD5870 will remain £300, and the HD5950 will be released at £400, with the HD5970 left out of production until later on where it may debut at £450 after the other cards are pricedropped. Were nvidia to put out a stinkin' fast GTX380 or equivalent, we'd have an HD5970 under £400 by christmas. (HD5950 and HD5970 are the real names for the HD5850X2 and HD5870X2, AMD are doing away with the X2 suffix)
How do you remember the names of the randoms you play with? That is impressive...

 

LOL! I totally missed that one. Thanks for pointing that one out Rich. Now i'm gonna be more self conscious about that. ESPECIALLY that particular mistake!

Sigh, once upon a time, I remembered every little off the wall thing. I even memorized the Periodic table of the elements. Unusually, I still have an affinity for numbers though. Don't ever use drugs(The harsh chemical types). Worst mistake I've ever made. Though I can't say I regret it completely. I learned some things from my experience. Though I wouldn't wish it on anyone...

 

depends on the drug tbh,

paracetamol always helps xD

 

Basic numerics was always my strong point. Then again I effectively used to 'train' when I was bored. Take the alphanumeric value of a letter (i.e. A=1, B=2, Z=26) and multiply all of the numbers in a word. For example:
Reply = 18x5x16x12x25 = 432,000 (and yes, I did do that in my head).

 

I once stumbled on a way of doing triple digits rapidly. The same process didn't work all the time for quadriple digits, but it did sometimes. I DO believe you did that in your head

 

I've just stumbled upon something really rather impressive
It's a free DX9/10/11/OpenGL Benchmark/Tech demo its more then a little impressive graphically and manages to be fairly smooth even on the 4850 it's possible to use it to show the effects of hardware tessellation although obviously that's irrelevant to us for now at least.

Here be the link: http://unigine.com/download/#heaven

 

That's because it's only DX10 on the 4850

 

Well yes I meant that it's smooth for how it looks in DX10 mode!!!

 

I'm gonna grab the same sam quote that Kevin grabbed:

Sam, nothing comes close to being anywhere as impressive as your encyclopedic knowledge of PCs and graphics cards. I am happy for Nvidia to withdraw from the mid and high end, because then I don't have to even bother to try to figure out their product line the way that you and Jeff and Shaff have. I'll just keep my sights on the 5970 - because two of those should whip crysis at 2560x1600 and allow me to discover what you guys have already enjoyed about mind-blowing graphics.

. . . . . that is of course, presuming I start making money and can one day afford to do the new build, lol.

Hahaha. That explains everything How about LSD, mescaline, psilocybin, and peyote - do they count? LOL

I too don't regret a thing. (But that probably explains everything, hahaha.)

Does anybody know what they hell he is talking about?

Hmmmm. That begins to explain everything. Did anybody else see the movie Rain Man?

Hmmmm again. That looks interesting. I don't exactly know what tessellation means. Several months ago I pulled up some graphics demos to stress my 3850 - the fur one that Jeff mentioned is the main one that I used to test my overclock.

Speaking of overclock, I had to dial back just very slightly from my 3850 overclock in running Left 4 Dead - it looks like THAT game stresses the gpu more than anything else. However, where once I had to drop back to 695, I just did a small dial-back from 769 to 762, something like that. With the VF1000 after-market cooler that Jeff talked me into installing, the card runs super cool - look at my overclock - an extra 10%, and I ran for 10 hours last night without a hitch.

Thanks again Jeff for pushing me to the zalman.

Oh, and I should mention - I BEAT CRASH COURSE!! Hooray!

Several teams played the top of the bus defense at least 10 times, and two of those attempts were successful, and I got out with the rest of the team at the very end. Another group several hours earlier got out - all except for the dead Rich killed by the tank. So top of bus definitely works, and my melee seems to be improving.

I was on expert single player today with the bots, just to test melee. I found that standing up, I can melee almost an entire alleyway, taking no health hit.

I can certainly single-handedly melee the entire entrance to that first garage where the truck is blocking the alley at the beginning of crash course. If I crouch and melee - I may take a bit of damage. Melee seems to have a circle out from the player that extends at least four feet out - not really realistic - but that's how the game works.

I was interested, because again, defending the top of the bus, I re-discovered how easy melee is - and I am now thinking that melee can be virtually as powerful as auto-shotgun against a horde. You don't have to worry about reload - unless hundreds are pouring against you - you can pretty much knock them all back. Hunters can't get you. Smokers still can, and of course boomers. I am thinking that I may try to get the team to fire around me, while I stand, instead of over my head while I crouch and take damage.

Anyway, it changes my strategy of where to hold out. For example, in the beginning of crash course, the basement was proving to be hard to defend. The bottom of the stairway was hard to defend - they just pour down. I can melee at the bottom but I'll take a bit of damage. But I can crouch melee at the top, and handle the staircase with ease because I am above them. Or I can stand in the doorway above the stairs and easily handle the hordes coming in the other direction. It changes the dynamics of the game and I may start to do more melee than ever before.

We came up with a trick which probably works on every finale - not just crash course. You guys, I am certain, are well aware of the trick of getting your buddies to kill you before they close the safe house door to get your 50 health instead of maybe the 1 health you limped in with, lol.

Well, in the finale - and I bet it works on all the finales - you can be killed any number of times, and you will re-appear within seconds in that big double-door closet under the mini-gun - EVEN IF ONE OF THE SIDES IS BLOWN OUT! Hahaha.

Two days ago, somebody taught me the trick of using that instant re-incarnation game fact, in order to carry everything up on top of the bus - all the molotov cocktails, all the pipe bombs. Just take it up there, have somebody kill you, and then go back and bring some more stuff up. You wind up with extra rifles also - but I haven't tested to see if those rifles replenish your ammo. I had assumed they did, but it's easy to test and I should verify that theory.

Anyway, at one point there were 4 dead Louis bodies up there in the back of the bus. I was Louis, lol. Just be careful that stuff doesn't drop down between the two busses - although if it does - you can shot it out from the side with the sniper rifle. I taught that "delivery system" to yesterday's teams, and furthermore, we started using pills to keep us going - even on black and white - in order to carry complete health packs into the finale, because we had a good ending to the first chapter and we were all 100% green on replay of the second chapter. So in the finale, we all started with full green and full packs, and maybe even a pack or two extra on top that I don't think we ever had to use.

So having said all that - I'll be back on tonight, and all day tomorrow!

Time for some more zombie killing. Who was the one who got me hooked on this again? Was it you, Sam, damn you! hahaha

Rich

 

Simply put, hardware tessellation makes things with low polygon counts look like things with high polygon counts.

 

Don't...
The melee in L4D is an interesting one, because it's only spammable in campaign. Survival and Versus mode, there's a stamina effect that limits how often you can melee, which makes it a lot trickier!
When a finale has started there is no respawn. You can only get cupboard respawns before the radio activation (or lift activation in Crash Course).
I hadn't considered converting corpses into an ammo cache, but you're quite right, if you spend the time to set it all up, there's no reason why it wouldn't work.

 

http://www.fudzilla.com/content/view/16168/1/

pathetic ati, seriously

 

I think the Nvidia driver is nearly identical on everything as far back as a GeForce 6600. I know between a 7600GS and a 9800GT it's the same exact driver package but I haven't seen a GeForce 6 in so long. I miss the old days of Far Cry and Doom 3 looking awesome

 

http://www.anandtech.com/systems/showdoc.aspx?i=3666&p=14

who said gaming in vista was slow?

 

The people who have been using 7 since January?

And surely it'd be far fairer if if they were all gold (without service packs)

It's irrelevant anyway because it's all 32-bit and anyone with those specs will be running 64-bit