What games are you playing now?

[joxer]

There's very few games so far that are that demanding.

For all I know there is only one game out there so far that demands something better than GTX760. It's AC:Unity.
On GTX760 it runs on minimum settings and by the audience on minimum settings it looks as if it's Playstation 1, dunno where exactly I saw those posts, maybe on Steam, maybe on Metacritic, but most probably on Ubi forum.

It has nothing to do with PC nor GPU, it's just Ubi's decision not to optimize the game.

And we know they can and they could optimize it - similar graphics spectacle is present in Watch Dogs with a mod that unlocks deliberately disabled eyecandy on PC (so the game doesn't look better than on consoles).
WD works flawlessly on GTX 660 and maybe on even lower cards.

Or to quote some guy from Steam about AC:Unity:

So will you really buy an expensive card just because one game was not optimized? I wouldn't. Especially when that one game is one of the worst products ever made (check metacritic user reviews).

 

[danutz_plusplus]

Ok, I downloaded the HD textures for Shadow of Mordor, and played a bit with the texture quality set to ultra. It ran just as smooth as before. I also ran their ingame benchmark and averaged around 80 fps on my 980. So, if there is a difference between a 4GB card and 6GB one, I'm not seeing it. I thought about running nVidia's ShadowPlay, to see the actual load on the vram buffer, but it was way more trouble than I was willing to put in. It seemed to run fine for me. Maybe there are some locations in the game, where more textures are loaded that it overflows the 4GB limit? I don't know. Did anyone else test this?

So will you really buy an expensive card just because one game was not optimized? I wouldn't. Especially when that one game is one of the worst products ever made (check metacritic user reviews).

No, I bought it for The Witcher 3, which I imagine will be the highest demanding game so far.

I ran AC: Unity with everything on max, after the 4th patch of course, which from what I hear optimized a lot, and it ran smooth as butter. Also looked amazingly.

 

[joxer]

I ran AC: Unity with everything on max, after the 4th patch of course, which from what I hear optimized a lot, and it ran smooth as butter. Also looked amazingly.

Yes it probably did. But you do have a superexpensive 4Gb VRAM card (or a pair, I don't actually remember what's in your rig). Most of gamers don't have it.
I'm just unsure why you bought a multiplayer game that contains pay2win numerous horsearmorlike DLC inside and is connected to some phones avoidware. Because of sidescrolling upcoming AC game that'll apparently be free for Unity buyers or something?

For The Witcher 3 we won't know everything till it's released. And thank god it's just about a month left to feel it!

 

[JDR13]

It doesn't say it requires 6GB explicitly, but if you turn it to the biggest texture quality setting, you get this warning message. So I assumed it recommended 6GB vram for it.
http://oi61.tinypic.com/sy12me.jpg.

Yeah, I started LotF up just now and it shows the same for me. That's interesting because I could swear that message used to say 4GB. I wonder if that was changed in one of the patches. Either way, I'm pretty sure that's completely unnecessary. I run it just fine on "High" settings with a 2GB GTX 770 OC. I'm skeptical that there could be that much difference between High and Ultra.

A lot of recently released games seem to exaggerate the recommended requirements. If I was a conspiracy theorist, I'd claim Nvidia and ATI are behind it.

Another game is Dying Light, which a lot of gamers are claiming as the current benchmark for graphics. I can run it fine with max settings.

That's all fine and good, but I need to be playing Witcher 3 on max settings on release day . If I didn't have that obsession, I'd have also waited some more instead of getting the 980. But I'm more than happy with it. I expect it should hold me for 4 years in the future. There's very few games so far that are that demanding.

I'm disappointed the 980 Ti got delayed because I really wanted it for TW3. I'm pretty confident though that my system will handle it fine at max or close to max settings. I thought about getting a 980, but that wouldn't make much sense for me at this point.

 

[danutz_plusplus]

I'm disappointed the 980 Ti got delayed because I really wanted it for TW3. I'm pretty confident though that my system will handle it fine at max or close to max settings. I thought about getting a 980, but that wouldn't make much sense for me at this point.

It made sense for me as I was upgrading from a gtx 560 ti. So that was quite outdated.

 

[Moriendor]

GTX 980 is awesome, especially the MSI 4G model (though ASUS Strix and other zero fan models are probably in the same league). It's high performing and super-silent. Best card I have ever owned. Seriously.

Aaaannndd to get back on topic I've been using mine lately to play SWTOR again. Yes, that's right. You'd think with my backlog, I'd actually work on catching up some and play some new games, right? Well, not so fast.
I don't know where it came from, probably left field, but one day a few weeks ago I got that Star Wars itch and since there isn't anything new out there except for the Shadow of Revan expansion for SWTOR, I thought might as well play that one.

So I resubbed and found out they changed quite a bit since the last time I played which was when I played through and finished the Hutt Cartel expansion with my level 55 Jedi Sentinel (DPS).
In fact, all my skills were reset and my toolbar looked a little.... incomplete.
What to do? What to do? Well, spend days researching the new game mechanics and figuring out the best Sentinel build or just level up a new dude?

I went for the genius idea to level up a new Jedi Sage (Healer), first at a fairly casual pace until the weekend two weeks ago (I think) when they had a double XP weekend. Couldn't resist to go on a gaming spree and took my Sage from level 47/48, thereabouts, straight to the max level of 60 in those two days.
I even skipped my class quest (the character story line) for that, since I had totally outlevelled that content anyway, and just went for the high XP stuff including dailies and flashpoints (= small scale four player raids).
[By the way: It occurred to me during leveling up that, on a whole, they actually simplified the whole class system and it would have been pretty easy to just continue my Sentinel... so rolling a new character was pretty unnecessary... but also fun ]

Then at max level went back to wrap up my class quest and some other loose ends and started the Shadow of Revan prelude. Then made quite a bit of a stupid mistake by not finishing Shadow of Revan. Instead I decided to grind basic (and a bit of elite) commendations for level 60 gear for my character and my companion. Dumb idea.
If anyone of you is playing SWTOR. Don't do as I did. Use the commendations from the prelude (you get 297 basic commendations nicely packaged in three boxes for finishing the prelude) for gearing up a little but then just continue playing Shadow of Revan. Don't grind for gear at this stage.
You'll get decent equipment for yourself, lots of commendations and then really awesome gear for your companion once you reach Yavin. Just play through Shadow of Revan rather straight... maybe do a daily here and there, like the flashpoints via group finder but no more than that.

Anyway, I'm on my way to my personal finishing line now. I need to wrap up a few more loose ends like getting all of the collectible datacrons (already got more than half of them), finish the planetary quests on Belsavis, Voss and Corellia that I skipped when that double XP weekend hit, finish the Hutt Cartel expansion (Makeb) and then I think I'm done for this time with SWTOR.
I don't really want to get in a guild and participate in high level raids. Too time consuming. And the flashpoints (small raids) are already getting old and stale again due to the repetition.

To seriously gear up further, I'd have to get into raids though for ops gear and that's not really happening. It also has to do with a very anti-social community. I'm not sure if this has spread to all MMOs now or if it's just SWTOR but I remember back a few years ago when I played games like SWG that people were actually, you know, friendly and helpful. Not so in SWTOR.
Typing seems to be too hard for most people so even if you try to start a chat in a flashpoint, no reply most of the time.
Then, with me as the healer, the tank often times rushes ahead like a mad man and starts combat (which slows everyone in the group down to a crawl since you move slower in combat) and gets killed because I'm not even in range or have a line of sight on him (so how could I heal him if I can't even reach or see him?).
And what does the guy do instead of apologizing for jumping the gun? Initiates a kick vote against me to eject me from the group and the flashpoint.
Or then you have the DPS who get killed in hard mode (HM) because they get zapped by a boss' special AoE attack and blame it on me, the healer. WTF? In HM I usually have to focus all healing on the tank and carefully decide whether I can spare a heal for someone else. In many cases the answer is simply no. So DPS dies and then you get this in chat "yo healer r u even awake u n00b?????". Wow....
I wish all of this was the exception but it's not. I'm not a fan of ignore lists at all since I don't like censorship in general or even censor myself by using an ignore function but in SWTOR I'm now making fairly frequent use of it.
Helpful players who will give you tips on improving your gameplay are sadly the exception, rather than the norm.
And that (plus the time consumption factor) is why I'm not really interested in the very group or even large group (raids/ops) focused end game content in SWTOR. Games should be fun and not work where you get yelled at, often times not even justified.

As for the Shadow of Revan expansion itself, I'd say it's definitely worth playing. Just like the class stories and the Hutt cartel expansion, this is another quality delivery by BioWare that would make a pretty decent KotOR 3 expansion if it was single player. There are a few oddities in the story where you can tell that BW was struggling and stretching with the plot device of bringing Revan back to life but on a whole it's quite enjoyable indeed.
The new locations are pretty neat, too. Rishi is a pirate nest (Star Wars scifi kind... no scarlet sails and no jolly roger, I'm afraid ) with lots of aliens so it feels a bit like a big outdoor Mos Eisley cantina and Yavin (end of Episode IV: A New Hope) is a jungle planet with ancient ruins. It kind of has a South American feel to it (Maya/Inca ruins).
The locations are visually well done but BW has apparently still not learned how to avoid the frequent clipping issues which makes the world design feel a little unpolished at times.

I'm definitely looking forward to their next expansion, though I doubt I would ever want to level up a new character yet again. Next time I'll just play the add-on and that's it. Right now, I'm looking forward to wrapping things up and then there is another bounty week event coming up (with a daily bounty target to hunt down and a weekly one). And almost a full week of double XP starting on April 16 so I might actually replay Shadow of Revan with my Sentinel then to take him to level 60 as well.
And then it's finally time to get back to that backlog of regular, single player games... goddamn sidetracking Star Wars itchy crap...

 

[danutz_plusplus]

GTX 980 is awesome, especially the MSI 4G model (though ASUS Strix and other zero fan models are probably in the same league). It's high performing and super-silent. Best card I have ever owned. Seriously.

I went for the triple-fan version from Gigabyte, and have no complaints about it. Except that when the system boots, it starts off with the fans going off at a high-speed (seems to be the default for them, I think), and only go back to their normal fan-speed after Windows boots-up.

I meddled some more in Shadow of Mordor, just exploring and randomly killing orcs. Somehow I don't like the fact that the mobs seem to respawn after clearing them off once.

 

[danutz_plusplus]

Currently waiting for Steam to decrypt my GTA 5 files. And watching some guy's stream, and you're not gonna believe it, but this guy accidentally showed his GTA 5 key on the stream, and someone (of the 1000+ people on stream) stole his key. Jeez, some people just don't know what they're doing. Also didn't help that Steam displays your key quite easily.

 

[Moriendor]

Currently waiting for Steam to decrypt my GTA 5 files. And watching some guy's stream, and you're not gonna believe it, but this guy accidentally showed his GTA 5 key on the stream, and someone (of the 1000+ people on stream) stole his key. Jeez, some people just don't know what they're doing. Also didn't help that Steam displays your key quite easily.

Huh? How can you register a key of someone streaming the game (i.e. already owning the game which should prevent a second reg, no?) or was the guy streaming how he bought the game and someone jumped in before he could register it?
Sounds strange... even if he streamed pre-purchase or the purchase itself, well, was he also going to stream how he downloads 70GB plus the day one patch? Real exciting stream that .

 

[danutz_plusplus]

Huh? How can you register a key of someone streaming the game (i.e. already owning the game which should prevent a second reg, no?) or was the guy streaming how he bought the game and someone jumped in before he could register it?
Sounds strange… even if he streamed pre-purchase or the purchase itself, well, was he also going to stream how he downloads 70GB plus the day one patch? Real exciting stream that .

From what I gathered Steam popped up his key (after he downloaded/decrypted his files), and when he tried to link it to the Rockstar Games Social Club account (and he showed the key once more), the RGSC client said it was already claimed. So I imagine the guy who stole it, screen-captured it from Steam, and just attached it to his Rockstar account. At least that's what I imagine. Of course, this could have been handled a lot better by Steam and Rockstar by having the server-side infrastructure to not pass that key through the client. But I guess they never considered people streaming their keys.

But I'm not sure the guy who stole it can even use it to play. I imagine the Steam client does it's own check to make sure the account has a GTA license attached to it. So I would imagine the guy just caused the streamer a big inconvenience. I imagine the streamer should be able to recover it after contacting both Steam and Rockstar. I would be curious if what the malicious user did can be considered theft. If you reveal private information of your own accord, does the law protect you?

 

[Moriendor]

Ah now it makes "sense"... sort of. I forgot about the double authentication requirement (which, as this incident proves, is DUMB on all sorts of levels ).
The guy who was streaming probably forgot as well and thought he was safe since he purchased and owned the key.
Well, I hope he gets his key back and the other dude gets a lifetime ban. Must be easy for R* to figure out who the thief is. That is, when they get around to the guy's support ticket in a week or so because on the days of release they are probably drowning in tickets.

 

[danutz_plusplus]

Ah now it makes "sense"… sort of. I forgot about the double authentication requirement (which, as this incident proves, is DUMB on all sorts of levels ).

Yeah, stupid on a bunch of levels.
Steam should not so easily display your key. They should place it at least behind another level of validation. IIRC they just pop it without you even asking for it at a certain point during the instalation/configuration.
Secondly, if they must have 2 levels of authentication, it should have been done without even needing to show the key to the user. But I guess they couldn't be bothered with a solid implementation.
Thirdly, yeah, annoying as hell to have to login to 2 services.

 

[Moriendor]

IIRC they just pop it without you even asking for it at a certain point during the instalation/configuration.

Yes. Same with UbiSoft games like the Ass Creeds. The moment you launch the game from within Steam, you immediately get the pop-up window including ALL of the keys (i.e. main game plus DLCs or expansions if you bought them) in plain text for copy&paste purposes.
You're right that they should probably hide them by default and just prompt you to push CTRL+C to copy the key to the clipboard. And have an extra option to view your key(s) via at least one more additional prompt like a 'show key' button.

 

[danutz_plusplus]

Yes. Same with UbiSoft games like the Ass Creeds. The moment you launch the game from within Steam, you immediately get the pop-up window including ALL of the keys (i.e. main game plus DLCs or expansions if you bought them) in plain text for copy&paste purposes.
You're right that they should probably hide them by default and just prompt you to push CTRL+C to copy the key to the clipboard. And have an extra option to view your key(s) via at least one more additional prompt like a 'show key' button.

Yup.

Anyways, about GTA5 on PC, I'm running it with everything on max @ 1080p @ aprox 60 fps. And I must say, it looks gorgeous. And it keeps my gpu busy (it holds at about 60 degrees Celsius on max load). It has an impressive view distance. Everything looks very good. And the fps is quite decent. It's not as tight as with other expertly craft FPSes, but it's good. But driving in first-person is a real pain. Cars handle very arcady and you need very good spatial awareness in order not to keeep crashing your car. Anyways, all's positive so far. I'm off to bed as I've got work in 4 hours.

 

[joxer]

I'm not interested in GTA, however there is good news on the port for those who want to pay more than 10 bucks on that game.
You *can* disable motion blur!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r8MVrfPt5qs - slide to 1:00

 

[danutz_plusplus]

Yes. Same with UbiSoft games like the Ass Creeds. The moment you launch the game from within Steam, you immediately get the pop-up window including ALL of the keys (i.e. main game plus DLCs or expansions if you bought them) in plain text for copy&paste purposes.
You're right that they should probably hide them by default and just prompt you to push CTRL+C to copy the key to the clipboard. And have an extra option to view your key(s) via at least one more additional prompt like a 'show key' button.

Here's the guy I was talking about. Poor guy. He's already the laughing-stock of the internet.
Kotaku already reported on it.

 

[joxer]

It's not just one occurence, and IMO serves all of them right.
Next time, hopefully, they'll play the game, not stream (perhaps I should say - troll) the game.

 

[Moriendor]

Here's the guy I was talking about. Poor guy. He's already the laughing-stock of the internet.
Kotaku already reported on it.

Am I a very mean and bad person if I found this funny as fuck and laughed my ass off?

I mean lol @ this dudebro kid with his hat on backwards displaying his key for MINUTES before he tried to reg it. This is much worse and dumber than I thought it would be. Comedy gold. Thanks for sharing!

 

[danutz_plusplus]

Am I a very mean and bad person if I found this funny as fuck and laughed my ass off?

I mean lol @ this dudebro kid with his hat on backwards displaying his key for MINUTES before he tried to reg it. This is much worse and dumber than I thought it would be. Comedy gold. Thanks for sharing!

I love the moment when he realizes his key got stolen, and his other mates start laughing.

 

[Thrasher]

Bad karma for forcing his viewers to watch the boring installation / activation process. :/