Rennn

Impressive... I'm pretty sure that last fractal is staring at me though.

That'd be because the main population of Twitch consists of 30 year olds hanging out in their grandparents' basements.

First - You're so wrong it's funny. Every streamer and Youtube personality I've ever followed for Demon's Souls and Dark Souls is still onboard with Dark Souls 2. Second - If you think those people represent the entire community, you've got problems. A couple dozen people aren't the community any more than the Congress is the country. There are always multiple summon signs by every boss, and scattered throughout locations, and I get invaded in ~20 seconds if I don't take precautions. There are still more people playing DKS2 than there were in DKS1 and DS combined, likely due to its larger sales figures. Not sure why you've got a personal agenda to make up lies about a game, but you at least need to say things that any random player can't prove wrong in 10 seconds.

I actually *can* go back and play Oblivion with its graphics, and they look pretty good most of the time. Just not the faces. Oh gods, not the faces. I need mods for those to make it playable, otherwise the compression artifacts make everyone look like they're suffering from the bubonic plague. I've also heard the newer generation saying that Wolfenstein: TNO and Far Cry 3 look like crap, which is clearly wrong. It just goes to show, our idea of what constitutes playable graphics is dependent upon the games we grew up playing. That was the PS2 for me, at 480p and 25-30 fps. Additionally, it's only in the last ~5 years that game developers started taking art direction and scene composition seriously. Color balancing and overall scene layout can matter just as much to realism as poly counts or texture resolutions. The new focus on scene integrity has advanced game realism far beyond the stronger hardware alone. But, I agree with the fundamental point you're making. By all rights, if a game is properly optimized, a GTX 780 TI or R9 290X should be capable of running graphics not far off from photo-realism, and perhaps close enough for it not to matter. Of course, the jump up to 1440p is going to reset the whole thing. Even a GTX 480 would have handled photorealistic graphics at 720p, and in a similar manner, the GTX 780 TI is capable of hitting the same performance levels at 1080p. But I predict it'll take at least a GTX 980 TI to hit that performance at 1440p. There's an argument to be made that 1080p is all that's needed to be realistic, and that's true, at 24" or below. Just like it's true for 720p at 19" or below. Once screens start to average 27" for gaming, 1440p will reset the performance clock and a GTX 780 TI or R9 290X will no longer be enough for photo-realistic graphics. I'm running a GTX 660, and I'm not concerned about it. I'll be staying at 1080p/30 fps for a long while yet.

Bought Deus Ex: Human Revolution Director's Cut for $5. Bought Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy because it was like $2 and I'll play any Star Wars game. I'm currently looking at State of Decay and Baldur's Gate.

I just saw Heroine's Quest: The Herald of Ragnarok on Steam today. It's free, so you may as well look at it and perhaps try it out. I've no idea if it's any good.

It looks impressive, but the community will either make it fun, or make it h3llish, just like with most online focused games.

Yep. Besides, the Titan Z or 295 are never going to decide which company is "ahead". Most self-identified PC gamers' cards in the last Steam survey averaged out to the equivalent of a GTX 650 TI. If we really want to get into who's "winning" we'd be talking about video cards in the $100-$200 range. The $2000 video cards are only ever in less than 1% of PCs, and even when they're used they see more professional use than gaming use.

This'd work. It'd manage medium/high settings in new games. If you don't need a copy of Windows or the optical drive, that could be put back into better hardware. PCPartPicker part list / Price breakdown by merchant / Benchmarks CPU: Intel Pentium G3220 3.0GHz Dual-Core Processor ($58.99 @ Amazon) Motherboard: ASRock H81M-DGS R2.0 Micro ATX LGA1150 Motherboard ($52.98 @ SuperBiiz) Memory: Team Vulcan 8GB (2 x 4GB) DDR3-1600 Memory ($64.99 @ Newegg) Storage: Western Digital AV-GP 500GB 3.5" 5400RPM Internal Hard Drive ($43.95 @ Amazon) Video Card: EVGA GeForce GTX 750 1GB Video Card ($109.99 @ Newegg) Case: Apex SK-393-C ATX Mid Tower Case ($26.30 @ NCIX US) Power Supply: EVGA 430W 80+ Certified ATX Power Supply ($34.99 @ Amazon) Optical Drive: Samsung SH-224DB/BEBE DVD/CD Writer ($14.98 @ OutletPC) Operating System: Microsoft Windows 8.1 (OEM) (64-bit) ($89.99 @ NCIX US) Total: $497.16(Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available.)(Generated by PCPartPicker 2014-06-02 14:53 EDT-0400)

I'm impressed with how well people are noticing its problems here, considering on half the internet saying a word against Watchdogs is like slapping the pope. We should get some people over to Tom's Hardware. Over there half the people worship the game and are insisting "It's not badly optimized, it just looks like real life so of course it requires 3 Titans in SLI, duh!"

The 295x2 has no throttling issues since the stock version (from AMD) is liquid cooled. In a review, at 4k textures, pushed to 100% load, the card topped at 68C. While the 290X does, the 295x2 does not. Meanwhile, all of 11 people will actually buy either the Titan Z or the 295.

That's surprisingly awesome of EA... Even though it's certainly just to recruit more fans for BF4.

That depends heavily on what games you run, and on your power supply unit. Games that make use of PhysX or HBAO (AC4, Metro LL, Batman Arkham) will give Nvidia an edge, and they already usually run cooler and consume less power. Games not using more advanced effects will be markedly better off on an AMD card, given their better price/performance ratio this gen in most anything else. Since Skyrim doesn't use any Nvidia specific effects, an AMD card will most likely run better. The best cost/performance ratio for Skyrim with graphics mods would be an R9 280X. Of course, it goes without saying that a decent i5 beats an FX-8350 in most games. In Skyrim, an i5 will beat any AMD CPU by a wide margin. The FX-8320 is the same speed core per core as your Phenom II 965, and would only be a worthwhile upgrade in games using more than 4 cores (which is like a grand total of 3 games right now, and Skyrim is not one of them). Additionally, the AM3+ socket from AMD has no upgrade path; there's no future beyond the FX-8350 that doesn't require better cooling and more expensive motherboards to run. Also, the R9 290 Fmod recommended has 2 'eggs' on Newegg, with nearly every user complaining that it's dead on arrival and/or breaking. Not a good idea.

I really don't understand the hate for micro-transactions and subscriptions. I don't understand the hate for anything that isn't free. Okay, let me think this through. -The developers spent a lot of money, time, and effort, making a massive and [probably] inspired game. -The developers let people play said game for free. -The developers should not ever expect to make money from their efforts, because LAME. GIVE IT TO MEH FREE BECUZ PAYING MONEY FOR A SERVICE IS EVIL. ALSO, WHY ISN'T THE STUFF AT WAL-MART FREE 4 ME SINCE I'M A SPECIAL BUTTERFLY?????????? The people who subscribe or "pay to win" are the ones supporting the actual game and the developers. They're the ones who let other people play for free. Without the people who "p2w", nobody would get to play the game at all, free or not. I can see how it'd be an issue if you were ever expected to pay a lot... Like that ridiculous train simulator where each new train costs $1,000 real world dollars. But spending $5 on extra bank slots and $10 to access a new location patched in 3 months after launch isn't going to sink anyone who can afford to pay for internet in the first place.

I'm actually glad they dropped Kinect, since there were no good games for it anyway it was just driving the price up (for literally no reason at all...). Now if they cut that price to $350 in the US, I might get one alongside a PS4. Anything else and they just lose all around in a hardware and budget battle against PCs. A similar version of CPU to the X1 CPU sells for $60 on Newegg... The equivalent of the X1 GPU sells for $100. When you consider most/all X1 games are at 900p/30fps and 720p/60fps with just MLAA, it's really not hard to beat the X1's specs even for $400, and most X1 titles that were supposed to be exclusive are going multiplatform on the PC (where they can generally be maxed by an R7 260X). I guess the developers decided too few people actually bought the X1 to justify a single platform release. Which is really not surprising, considering it's now basically just a PC in a box you can't upgrade or play old games with.