The Official Graphics Card and PC gaming Thread

I'm obviously missing something here @_@ Did they make it too arcadey or something? Forgive my transgression, I haven't gotten it yet. Is the single player at least as kick ass as it looked??

 

The SP looks amazing from what I've seen so far, and Shaff is very impressed. However, unless you don't read any gaming news journals you'll realise COD6 has begun the slow painful death of multiplayer tactical FPS on the PC.
and remember children:
There IS no PC multiplayer for Modern Warfare 2.
I do not want to hear otherwise. Otherwise is heresy!

 

So basically it's devolved back into old school deathmatch to satisfy the "Casual" market? Stop speaking in riddles and give me the story and your opinion XD

Oh yeah just for the record my Battlefield 2 clan is still alive and kicking. There are always loads of full matches available. Not to mention BF 2142 which half of my clan also plays. So maybe the end of any decent new ones, but nowhere near the death.

 

No, it's not devolved into oldskool DM, it's just ruined PC multiplayer gaming:

After the demise of the COD series, Battlefield is now carrying the tactical FPS franchise, but how long for? This is EA after all...

 

Ugh good thing I never played CoD4 MP to begin with. Not my kind of PvP game

I have a feeling any true CoD'ers will be sticking with 4 if they need MP. I'm more about the single player campaign because that is the true bread and butter of the Call of Duty series and always has been. PC gaming is also their bread and butter but it seems they hate everyone who made them famous to begin with. If it weren't for PC gamers, CoD would have been just another WWII game in the post 2000 flood. Infinity Ward would have faded into obscurity.

If the single player turns out anywhere near as awesome as the previews though, I will be judging it based solely on that.

Though the best CoD for me is easily CoD2. One of the few single player games that I still pay often(at least once a week) this long after release...

 

well i meant it killed off MP gaming for FPS, yeah.

now ID software (DOOM, RAGE etc) want to use P2P connections for MP aswell. most likely all big games are going to go up in price aswell.

i picked it up for £26 for the PS3 version (only £2 more than PC) for the SP. was bloody brilliant. (well gfx wernt, they were under cod4 maxed out, on pc at 1920) (i played at 1920 on the ps3 but it being upscaled so much that jaggies were insane).

BUT, and its a major but, the SP is mind blowingly good. i have never been a SP person, just MP, and this game has me untill i finished it form start, no breaks. its so gripping and riviting! action packed from the first mission to the last.

 

I played COD4 multiplayer and enjoyed it, but I was put off because of the gamebreaking holes in the realism of it. You can stealth up to the guys and keep yourself hidden, scope and try and pick them off for a distance, but ultimately, in the 100+ games I've had, well over 90% of them I was massively more successful when I just turned up and sprayed bullets like nobody's business. That shouldn't work. If you're going to go for everything else in the game to be right, hipfire accuracy being off the scale is disappointing, and that's beforethe steady aim perk. I bought COD4 because I loved the single player, and because owning the game legitimately only made it almost impossible to play online without getting kicked by buggy punkbuster, not actually impossible.
Quite frankly though, even though I would happily have paid £15 or so for the SP alone in COD6 since I'm sure it's excellent, I refuse to, simply on the back of Activision's corporate attitude now.
Fact is, P2P connections do work if everybody has fastpath LLU or low-contention LLU broadband, a nation of gamers all using premium grade ISPs would work. Fact is though, that will never happen. The high customer proportion from companies like BT, AOL, TalkTalk and so on (and let's not forget the lack of LLU-enabled exchanges in large parts of the UK) prevent that from ever being the case until the whole country is on fibre. A long time to wait for not-laggy games.
If you want a dedicated server for a game, why shouldn't you have one? A few of us are now willing to hire dedicated servers just for the purpose of hosting multiplayer games, but this is the problem, it's not just that the game developers aren't providing ded servers, they're banning 3rd party ded servers as well. The idea behind this being they don't have any unscrupulous server mods to deal with that could cause hacks. The reality of it is that there's only one hack-protection system, client-side, making it easier to hack and ruin what little of the gameplay experience was left.

You sound surprised.... :S

 

Lucid Hydra update
http://www.techreport.com/articles.x/17934/3


Is Hydra's performance up to scratch: Yes
Does nvidia play a role in the Hydra delay: Doesn't look like it
Is Hydra's delay due to drivers validated: Yes

Should we expect Hydra on shelves in the future: Looking good

Disappointingly or otherwise, nvidia + nvidia works, so SLI is now functional on P55 with good bandwidth without nforce chipsets, and amazingly, nvidia + ATI works really well too, so the most difficult hurdle has been jumped. The big issue actually comes in the form of ATI + ATI, where scaling has not worked too well at all. This is evidently what they're holding back to fix, and just as well I suppose, since had I bought a Hydra around now, I would be worse off for it.


Something worth bearing in mind, these tests were conducted with Lucid's on prototyping motherboard, not the MSI BigBang-Fuzion.

 

Hydra looks promising though I'm in no hurry to upgrade. Currently Crossfire seems to be the best bet for ATi cards. I intend to eventually upgrade to 5870s or the like but not for a good long while. I haven't found a single game yet besides Crysis that requires that sort of power. Really for once, I have absolutely no itch for new hardware. I run everything maxed over 60FPS in 95% of my games. All of my favorites can be maxed with AA and run flawlessly.

 

The only thing that concerns me about the Hydra is how well it will integrate with X2 cards, since they will still rely on crossfire to run, and I'm not sure if that'll conflict with Hydra or not.
I like to think I run a considerable number of games out there, and there are a lot of titles that even four 4870 GPUs struggle to run at 2560x1600. That's partly the QCF scaling, but a lot of it is just due to how demanding games are now in the age of slacky console ports. There are numerous games out there which I can't run at 60fps maxed out, quite a few that are still laggy at 1920x1200. I won't be saying not to a performance upgrade for a long time to come yet. Quite frankly, two 5970s worth of GPU power isn't going to be sufficient for long.
Sad fact is, besides Borderlands, which is only demanding because it's biased, the most fun games aren't that demanding. Left 4 Dead is probably the most demanding game I play on a regular basis, and two 4870X2s have it covered (just - 8xAA isn't perfect). I will also need more CPU power than a 3400mhz Yorkfield can provide quite soon, hence the i5 and Lucid as a complete package.

 

I wonder about the performance levels for Cod4 MW2. Is it so mindblowingly awesome I might need an upgrade? That's a case where I would consider it. I understand 2560 x 1600 is a different story though.

 

I doubt it, it seemed pretty fluid for me in the brief intro I played.

 

See my point? I bet it will run similarly to CoD4 and if it's anywhere near it will be at least 60FPS maxed with AA for me. The truly good games are all decent anyway. BTW Bioshock.exe did work for me on Arkham Asylum as well. My framerate is locked at 62FPS with 4xAA.

I can run pretty much every new game out maxed and the few I can't are basically broken anyway. Why upgrade for a few broken games when the ones I play the most run maxed no problem? Even Crysis is easily doable for me. Though I use custom settings I run average of 40FPS with graphics nearly indistinguishable from DX10 very high.

 

To be fair, the HD4870X2 is the perfect companion to maxing COD4, HL2:E2 and L4D at 1920x1200. Four of them are the perfect companion for maxing them at 2560x1600.
Not tried Arkham Asylum yet, but it's on the list. Figures since they're all Unreal engine games.

Don't forget though, newer engine games like Dawn of War 2, Fallout 3, Far Cry 2 and the rest are more demanding than the others. Keeping a minimum frame rate of 60 (my current goal for all but silly demanding games) is easy with two 2008 gen cards for all the Xmas07 engine games with the exception of Crysis. This actually includes Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance too.
The 2008 generation games however, require a bit more than that. Crysis would of course require the equivalent of 5 HD5870s, so that's a bit silly (unless you can use the Lucid Hydra to run three 5970s, two of them would be at 8x though :S), but Dawn of War 2 requires the equivalent of 3 HD5870s (I say equivalent as CF scaling in it is poor), STALKER Clear Sky would need 3 HD5850s even on just High with no AA, and Fallout 3 requires two HD5870s (this all for 2560x1600 of course). Even at 1920x1200, it's three 5870s, two 5850s, a 5850+4890 pairing and a 4890 respectively. The only reason Fallout 3 is given only a single 4890 at 1920x1200 is because the CPU ceiling is 47fps.

Edit: I messed it up, the minimum fps of CPU ceiling card for Fallout 3 at 1920x1200 with AA is the HD4870X2 or HD5870. Without AA it's an HD4890.


Rather disappointingly, the HD5970 is actually going to be an HD5860X2 not the HD5870X2 we may have been expecting. It will feature the additional shaders that the HD5870 GPUs feature, but a lower clock speed, at 725mhz. The going theory is the power consumption is too high, however, that is certainly false as the HD5870 uses no more powerful than the HD4870 they managed a dual card of with power to spare. The real reason I suspect is to improve silicon yields of the 40nm process sufficiently to provide enough stock for the HD5970 to get off the ground. The downside of course is that this means the HD5970 could actually be perilously close to the potentially still up and coming GTX300 series card. On top of this, the HD5970 is expected to RRP at a higher than previous generation £449 or $599. Long story short, the HD5970 is marginally better than two HD5850s, and costs about that much.
The good news is that rumour has it, the card is unveiled to the masses on Monday.

 

HAHA just got my hands on Modern Warfare 2!!! Will be back with impressions on the game

 

Incredible! Awe inspiring! They've taken every white knuckle moment from the first game and tripled the action! The set pieces are excellent too. Great tension. An excellent sense of purpose to the game. And for the record, I DID NOT skip out on the censored mission.

Performance is excellent as well. All maxed with 8xAA is perfectly playable. Insanely detailed environments with loads of visual clutter and crystal sharp textures! Over 80FPS average with beautiful Crossfire support. Only drops to the high 40s in some scenes with heavy smoke. I applaud Infinity Ward. They've really outdone themselves!

 

if only the MP was the same as cod4.

liking it on the PS3, but with a limited numebr of players its a bit of a downer. playing with a pad wasnt as bad as i thought, the auto aim is BS though.

i wish the consoles had dedicated servers, trying to get people to get ready on the MP is so hard


the SP though was aamzing. first time i have ever sat through SP and finished it in one outing. totally gripping.

anyone that hasnt played it, PLAY IT!

one thing is its length, and it doesnt have any standout missions, (i say that, but every mission was SUPERB), like cod4's Al Ghillied up, and the AC310 mission.


lol sam, 5860!

meh, so what if its downclocked? how much does 50-100mhz make? about 3 FPS? overclocking GFX cards doesnt give too much, why would underclocking slightly?

 

Call of Duty 6, eh?

It's good (it's very good), but it's not exactly amazing...

The single player i feel is actually slightly worse than CoD4, but at least it's well above Cod5. At the moment i'm downloading CoD2 because i can't find my disks for it and i really want to play either that or the first one again because i swear (unlike what everyone else claims), that the first two are still the best in the series (to be honest, i'm not sure if i'm imagining that or not).

I got CoD6 last Saturday for the PS3 and whilst i only played the first couple of story missions because i found it relatively boring (well, maybe more that i just don't like it... i'm slightly annoyed with the directions taken), i find Spec Ops mode brilliant fun when you have someone else to play with (it's best when they're in the same room) and is certainly the best bit about the game for me so far.

The online is pretty good too (better than the story mode) and i like it slightly more than CoD4's (miss a couple of the old maps, mind), though i can't really comment on the PC side of things because i never played CoD4 online on that so i don't know how much it's been "dumbed down" between the two.

Overall, it's a fine successor to CoD4 - i'm not really a fan of the story mode, but to be honest, that's hardly even half of what the games are about any more (a slight shame, but what're you gunna do?).

 

While I will agree that Call of Duty 2 is the best in the series by a long shot, I will counter that Modern Warfare 2 was, in fact, amazing. It was the most graphically impressive and psychologically intense shooter I have ever played. It stomps all over Crysis and FEAR 2 really hard.

I didn't think it was short either. Took me roughly 8 hours from start to finish on hardened difficulty. While not lengthy by any means, it was timely and well paced. I imagine I will be playing all the way through several times like the last 3 CoDs. Oh yeah and an 11GB install for 8 hours of gameplay? It's quality by far over content that counts. And there's actually quite a bit off both there.

Haha try it again. The PC version is superior in every aspect.

 

ahem online play and special forces, ahem