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Perestroika posted:Say, are there any good lan-compatible games that came out relatively recently? Magicka. The game is cheap and absolutely hysterical to play in groups.
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Mar 16, 2011 16:43
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I don't know if Altitude counts for relatively recent but it's a perfect game for quick matches. Easy to learn and very fun and addictive even with 3 vs. 3 matches.
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Mar 16, 2011 17:03
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Davincie posted:C&C: Generals is very popular among my friends for lans, it allows for a various play styles so it should suit everyone. Can I have any shoes?  Okay, Okay, I will work
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Mar 16, 2011 17:29
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Altitude is surprisingly fun.
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Mar 16, 2011 20:59
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SuspectedIdiot posted:Whoa, didn't know you could do that. Looks like I know what card I'm getting in the fall. Thanks for the input guys. I dunno if you bought a 6950 yet to convert to a 6970, check the serial # if possible, revision 2 doesn't allow you to flash the bios to upgrade it, just rev1.
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Mar 16, 2011 21:10
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I've got a few general questions that were actually not so easy to discover by googling around. 1) Which games, current and upcoming, can make use of more than 4 cores? 2) Which games, current and upcoming, are 64bit and actually make use of more than 2GB of RAM? I know for the most part the answers are "hardly any" which is why in the SH/SC thread people recommend 4 cores and 4GB and nothing more for gaming, but what special cases are there where a particular game may make it worth-while to get a bit more?
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Mar 16, 2011 21:38
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Bats posted:I dunno if you bought a 6950 yet to convert to a 6970, check the serial # if possible, revision 2 doesn't allow you to flash the bios to upgrade it, just rev1. Nah I didn't buy it yet, I'm going to wait until the fall when the prices drop. Don't know if the rev1's will still be available but hopefully by then the 6970s will have dropped a bit.
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Mar 16, 2011 21:47
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pik_d posted:I've got a few general questions that were actually not so easy to discover by googling around. I can't think of any that definitely use more than four. Bad Company 2 uses (I think) three, and I think Civ 5 uses four, but it's really a pretty short list. Probably the same sort of answer to the 2GB question. I've not really hit anything yet that struggles because of my stock speed i5-760, never mind the new sandy bridge stuff. Out of interest, why do you want to know?
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Mar 16, 2011 22:30
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Perestroika posted:Say, are there any good lan-compatible games that came out relatively recently? We're having a small one (6-8 people) in a few days and really couldn't think of any new-ish games to try. While it would probably still be fun, we'd rather not only play the same old stuff (usually Call of Juarez and a bunch of Warcraft 3 funmaps). Killing Floor is a great co-op FPS that supports up to 6 players at a time.
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Mar 16, 2011 22:40
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Fil5000 posted:Out of interest, why do you want to know? Because sometimes I wonder about conventional wisdom blanket statements like "4 cores and 4GB are good enough for any game". I figure eventually someone will make use of the higher end stuff that's out, I'm just not sure if that's happened yet. Also a conversation spawned from an off-topic page or two in YOSPOS where someone claimed that 6 cores was useful for some games. To quote, "anything ut3 engine from 2010+, BFBC2 / JC2 / Crysis/Crysis 2". Given that you contradicted the BC2 one, and Crysis came out like 4 years ago when 4 cores was in the "no you don't really need that" category, I've got no real idea about the other three. I've got a Q6600 and I'm not looking to upgrade that in the near future since nothing I play seems to get tripped up on the CPU side of things. When Googling around I found something interesting. Some people claimed that anything with DirectX 11 support has the ability to use quite a few cores due to Direct3D 11's multithreaded rendering. I haven't really been able to find too many actual facts on this though.
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Mar 16, 2011 23:05
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SwissCM posted:Can I have any shoes? They get shoes in the expansion! 
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Mar 16, 2011 23:12
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Thanks for the suggestions! I haven't thought of Generals, that might possibly be a happy ground between our tastes in RTSs. And we already have Magicka and Altitude, but oddly I never thought about them in that regard. They may serve well to fill in a gap or two. Killing Floor is already one of standards, but it's also a bit stale from former LAN's and we prefer competetive multiplayer on the whole. And perhaps we may even get L4D2 to run, but we didn't manage it the last two times. But on the whole there apparently really aren't any major titles with good (or really any) LAN support that came out in the last year or two. For shame.
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Mar 16, 2011 23:27
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pik_d posted:When Googling around I found something interesting. Some people claimed that anything with DirectX 11 support has the ability to use quite a few cores due to Direct3D 11's multithreaded rendering. I haven't really been able to find too many actual facts on this though. Wish I had gone Intel this time around but oh well.
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Mar 17, 2011 00:04
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I got a CR-48 from a friend and I've been jumping between operating systems trying to see what will work and I'd love to get some suggestions for Netbook compatible games. I want to play a lot more RPGs, something Web-based if possible. Are there any good Facebook games too?
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Mar 17, 2011 02:44
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Ularg posted:I got a CR-48 from a friend and I've been jumping between operating systems trying to see what will work and I'd love to get some suggestions for Netbook compatible games. I want to play a lot more RPGs, something Web-based if possible. Man, if you're into that kind of thing, you could totally load up some old classics like Baldur's Gate 2, Diablo II, etc. They play nice with the small resolution too!
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Mar 17, 2011 04:31
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Olivil posted:Man, if you're into that kind of thing, you could totally load up some old classics like Baldur's Gate 2, Diablo II, etc. They play nice with the small resolution too! I love me some diablo II, though I couldn't think how it will work with a trackpad. I gotta think about space too, I only have 10GB of free space, and I'm running Ubuntu 10.04, so I guess that is something to consider. I remember getting Starcraft to run through Wine at one point, so maybe...
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Mar 17, 2011 04:59
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So I'm looking to upgrade with BF3, but with everyone in SH/SC saying you don't need more than 4GB of RAM and a dual core I'm wondering if it's really necessary. My current specs are: Core2Duo E8400 @ 3.00GHz Radeon 5770 8GB RAM 1TB split across 2 drives I currently play at 1440x900. I was thinking of boosting it to: Core i5 2500K (Sandy Bridge) and OC'ing it to some huge number GTX 560 (and again OC'ing it to some huge number) another 4GB of DDR3 and a bigger monitor probably something that does 1920x1080. Is the new cpu, and video card really necessary for a monitor upgrade? Playing BC2 right now I can't jack all of my settings because the framerate just drops too much. But this machine handles pretty much every other game just fine.
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Mar 17, 2011 06:50
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SH/SC is wrong about dual core. Bad Company 2, which uses the same engine, I think, gets huge improvements with quad cores.
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Mar 17, 2011 06:57
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Blocko posted:So I'm looking to upgrade with BF3, but with everyone in SH/SC saying you don't need more than 4GB of RAM and a dual core I'm wondering if it's really necessary. The resolution bump is going to cause the biggest performance hit, so yes, a new CPU and video card are in order. It's just a question of whether X game is CPU bound or GPU bound. Some games like Dragon Age 2 are total GPU hogs, but you can run it with some old CPU and it won't make a difference. Other stuff like CIV4 is processing huge chunks of data and will definitely choke on lesser CPU's. Hard to say which way BF3 will go, but it'll likely go whichever way BF2/BFBC2 went. See if you can find any performance reviews of those two and see if those games iare more demanding on the CPU or GPU.
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Mar 17, 2011 06:59
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Blocko posted:So I'm looking to upgrade with BF3, but with everyone in SH/SC saying you don't need more than 4GB of RAM and a dual core I'm wondering if it's really necessary. Unless you have a good reason to upgrade now, you would be better off upgrading closer to release. Six months in the hardware market can create some significant improvements in performance and value. It's highly likely a new AMD graphics card generation will be out, new AMD CPUs will be out, and Ivy Bridge won't be too far away.
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Mar 17, 2011 07:02
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brainwrinkle posted:Unless you have a good reason to upgrade now, you would be better off upgrading closer to release. Six months in the hardware market can create some significant improvements in performance and value. It's highly likely a new AMD graphics card generation will be out, new AMD CPUs will be out, and Ivy Bridge won't be too far away. I don't plan on ordering anything tomorrow. I'm mostly just doing preliminary research. I kind of want to go AMD this time around since the idea of a 6 core processor makes me a little bit giddy, but everything I've heard about the Thuban core is that they are dogshit, so I'll likely just go Sandy Bridge when they drop in price.
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Mar 17, 2011 07:14
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I'm having a really hard time thinking of reasons for having 12GB of ram besides "e-peen dickwaving"
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Mar 17, 2011 07:19
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Cheezymadman posted:I'm having a really hard time thinking of reasons for having 12GB of ram besides "e-peen dickwaving" Pretty much. The only really legit reason for that much ram is if you're doing some seriously heavy graphic design/3D work, and even then it's still a bit much.
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Mar 17, 2011 07:21
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I have an E8400 too but I'm going to just wait until a game requires triple or quad-core. Or my motheboard shits the bed or something. What irks me is that in most games it doesn't give you the option to turn down CPU-intensive effects in the game like the physics or pipe it off to the video card using PhysX or OpenCL. I have a GTX 460 so I would think it would have horsepower to spare for that kind of stuff but I'm only seeing CPU based PhysX and Havok Physics thus putting more load on the CPU. A question I have is that would games or my computer programs overall load any faster if I upgrade to 8GB of RAM on my current system? DDR2-800 RAM is cheap for 2X2GB but is it worth it? I'm running Win7 x64 Home Premium if that makes a difference.
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Mar 17, 2011 07:22
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If you play one game particularly over and over then it might be possible that a RAM upgrade will make it load quicker since Windows will learn to cache its data files into your unused RAM. However, a SSD would probably be a better use for the same money.
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Mar 17, 2011 07:35
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But a decent SSD is $200 or more. I was thinking about getting one of those but some people have posted that even the good ones are hyped so to speak. Yes you will get faster load times but it won't be instantaneous unless you get two of them and do a RAID 0 which I would love to do in a new build but I'm not made of money. My E8400 is a C0 revision so it won't overclock for poo poo. My replacemnt Hawk GTX 460 (should have spent the extra $20 for the cyclone model  ) hits its limit at 800/1600/1900 unless I overvolt the piss out of it and even then I only get 850/1700 on the GPU/shaders. I'm just trying to squeeze as much as possible out of of this system before I'm forced to upgrade. And I usually gnash my teeth when I'm forced to upgrade. BF3 is making me gnash my teeth.
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Mar 17, 2011 07:55
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~Coxy posted:If you play one game particularly over and over then it might be possible that a RAM upgrade will make it load quicker since Windows will learn to cache its data files into your unused RAM. However, a SSD would probably be a better use for the same money. I'm not even sure if this is a real thing, but if it is, that's one step closer to computer sentience.
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Mar 17, 2011 07:56
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Is there some agreement on when SSDs will be the go-to over traditional drives? I would guess when price-per-GB is equivalent or close, give or take some room for the additional speed. I'm not looking to upgrade for a few years at least, but I want to make sure I can see the change happening when it does come around.
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Mar 17, 2011 08:04
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spasticColon posted:But a decent SSD is $200 or more. I was thinking about getting one of those but some people have posted that even the good ones are hyped so to speak. Yes you will get faster load times but it won't be instantaneous unless you get two of them and do a RAID 0 which I would love to do in a new build but I'm not made of money. I was sceptical about SSD's until I got one, but it's a night and day difference. Games might not be instantaneous, but what is, are the windows operations. You don't realise how much time you spend waiting for windows to respond until you don't. Not to mention the speed increase is not just in games, but in all your web browsing, email reading and booting/shutdown too, which is the majority of your computer usage. Get one, seriously. It's the best money you could spend on any single upgrade.
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Mar 17, 2011 08:06
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Cheezymadman posted:I'm not even sure if this is a real thing, but if it is, that's one step closer to computer sentience. That's the superfetch in Windows Vista/7 becoming self-aware.  Edit: On the topic of superfetch, I thought the more RAM you had, the more aggressive superfetch becomes and your system overall runs faster. Too bad Microsoft was stupid and limited the RAM to only 16GB in Win7 Home Premium x64 unless there is some kind of hack to get around it. spasticColon fucked around with this message at 08:21 on Mar 17, 2011 |
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Mar 17, 2011 08:15
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Red Baron posted:Is there some agreement on when SSDs will be the go-to over traditional drives? I would guess when price-per-GB is equivalent or close, give or take some room for the additional speed. You also need to consider the decreased power usage SSDs supposedly have, silent operation and lower probability of losing data(in theory). However, I don't think they will ever take over, it will be cheaper for a 1tb mechanical drive then an SSD for many years, and speed and reliability don't matter much when all you use the drive for is storing media. They are already the go-to for OS drives.
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Mar 17, 2011 08:21
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Node posted:SH/SC is wrong about dual core. Bad Company 2, which uses the same engine, I think, gets huge improvements with quad cores. So does Dragon Age. Those two games were the reason I upgraded from a Core 2 Duo to a Core 2 Quad (same socket so I was able to keep my motherboard and RAM) and it was well worth it because both BFBC2 and Dragon Age ran much better with the quad core.
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Mar 17, 2011 13:10
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I checked the last few pages and didn't see it mentioned, but Steelseries is running a gaming gear giveaway contest for their 10th anniversary. You pick what you'd like and you could win a pack of 5, mouse, keyboard, mousepad, headphones and I guess 3d goggle. All you need is an email. http://steelseries.com/10?code=IGA7axWy It gives you a code you can spread around to get more chances, and I don't want to get probated for solicitating or whatnot, so just go to http://steelseries.com/10/ If you want to participate without giving yours truly better chances. NOTE: it ends tomorrow. I would've posted it earlier but only learned about it myself today. Good luck goons!
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Mar 17, 2011 22:38
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What's the actual difference between City of Heroes (which I used to play years ago) and Champions Online? And is DC Universe Online pretty much the same kind of thing but with DC branding on it?
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Mar 17, 2011 22:51
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City of Heroes and CO have very different systems to calculate combat. City of Heroes is a proprietary system, CO is based off the champions tabletop roleplaying system. It's also not very good. DCUO, from what I played in the beta, is more of an action game but still an MMO. It was a buggy piece of crap when I played it, dont know if it ever got fixed.
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Mar 17, 2011 23:11
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Is City of Heroes actually still popular and attracting new players, or is it just a clique of hardcore veterans hoping the game won't die? It seemed to be stagnating a couple of years back but I didn't know if there'd been any kind of resurgence.
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Mar 17, 2011 23:21
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This week's Weekend Impulse Buys: I'm tempted by Evochron and the Drakensang prequel. Divinity II & Sacred 2 (which is fun) would be a good deal if the copy of Div2 were the dragon knight saga version, but as far as I can tell it's not. Edit: There's also a daily deal on Impulse and today's is Space Rangers 2 + the expansion. SR2 is a FANTASTIC game. If you haven't played it you goddamn should. The bundle is £7 ($11). Tufty fucked around with this message at 00:01 on Mar 18, 2011 |
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Mar 17, 2011 23:51
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Tufty posted:This week's Weekend Impulse Buys: Is Sacred 2 worth it for $12 on it's own? I really enjoyed Sacred 1.
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Mar 18, 2011 00:02
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A Fancy 400 lbs posted:Is Sacred 2 worth it for $12 on it's own? I really enjoyed Sacred 1. If you liked Sacred 1 and that sort of game in general then I'd say so. There's just one point to be aware of and that's don't sink too many skill points into your main attack power. Higher levels have a longer cooldown time (you can reduce them with equipment and talent tree specialisations later and that lets you beef up your main skill). You need to limit yourself a bit and try and keep it hovering around 1-2 sec refresh time. I wish I weren't stupidly busy at the moment - some Sacred 2 co-op with goons could be fun.
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Mar 18, 2011 00:08
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I have a question more about the games industry, hopefully a goon can answer it. I understand why games like Halo, Killzone 3, etc. come out exclusively on consoles, but what about games like, say, MvC3? Wouldn't it make sense for the developer to release them on the PC to make more money? From my understanding, consoles (especially the 360) are just low-spec PC's, it can't be that hard to port them, and you can use whatever input method you want on the PC.
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Mar 18, 2011 18:01
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