Rennn

I recently upgraded from a 1440x900 monitor with only a vga connection to a new 24" 1080p LED monitor with a 2ms response time and a 50,000,000:1 Smart contrast ratio. (See? Working 12 hour days temporarily has some benefits :P) The difference is unbelievable, it's like when I switched from a PS3 to a PC all over again. I can look into the distance and see people's hair textures! The pixel density is slightly higher than my old 19" monitor, so that's good too. I can sit just as close, and at 24" only 1.5 feet away it's nearly panoramic compared to my old one. Games from 2006 at 1080p look like games from 2010 at 900p, I'm so glad I decided to not upgrade my graphics card! It's like every game I own just got a massive visual upgrade, between the ~40,000 pixel increase and the switch from vga to hdmi. The performance hit is small as well. :D As a nice side effect, I can now play my PS3 at 1080p on my new monitor. Previously I didn't have anything to connect it to. (tv is overrated imo) If anyone's debating what their next upgrade should be, my vote's on a 1080p monitor (assuming the person in question doesn't already have one ofc). This made me realize just how much a bad monitor was crippling my games' graphics unnecessarily.

I'd avoid this one. There isnt too much support for the 8 core processors. I suggested it more for the overall balance rather than the oct-core cpu. What's going to be better than a PC with a 6850 for $700? My $600 PC (which I've since upgraded extensively) shipped with a 5440... blegh. Prebuilts usually ship with the worst graphics cards.

There are tons of mods for it- there are so many modded maps, I've played for 300 hours and I'm still seeing new ones on occasion. Some modded maps include modded guns, enemies, and skins. There are also modded game modes that function differently than simple round defense. No mod installation is required, because all mods needed for a match are automatically downloaded and installed before the map loads. It's easy, but it can be quite lengthy if the host is using a lot of mods. Some modded maps can get up to 200 players, but you need a very strong pc to run those. With my AMD 6770, I can run the game on ultra smoothly in maps up to about 20 people. After that, I start getting lag. It's like the holidays; almost every time you start the game you have new modded maps to choose from. Some are awful, some are amazing. Most are somewhere in between; around vanilla quality. Some are more popular than others, especially for modded matches. Arcade-Gas Station has had various 32 player matches going almost nonstop for months.

It would really probably be better if this patent thing hit Microsoft in the soft bits. The company is virtually necessary and I wouldn't want them to collapse, but the low quality of their products needs to be corrected somehow. GFWL is not fun, nor is paying to play online. It's not fun when your 360 breaks randomly one day, nor is it fun to bottleneck gaming for seven years because you refuse to let an outdated console die. It's especially not fun when Microsoft pays to get DLC a month early, thereby tricking the uninformed into thinking that it's the best console, and forcing every other gamer to wait for new content. At least the PS3 supports antialiasing, can run at 1080p, and can run some anisotropic filtering without choking, but the 360 is just all around not a good piece of tech. It wasn't even jaw-dropping the day it released, which is the least you expect of a console meant to last 7+ years.

Yeah, I laughed at that too. Edited: Nvm, I read further. I'm on 304.48 on my 460 and I haven't had any problems so far, but I'm not interested in a flame war so I'm going to back down. I just left that line there to summarize what my original post was so that this edit makes sense. To the OP: I was looking at a 670 a while back. It looks like a very capable card, but honestly you probably won't use 2GB of VRAM at 1080p unless you go for a lot of very HD textures. Then again, Skyrim has memory leaks, so perhaps throwing more VRAM on top of it would help. I'm afraid I don't know enough about AMD cards to give my advice on the 7950, but with the 670 you can force Ambient Occlusion, which is a big improvement. Given similar specs, I'd take the Nvidia card just for the AO.

I'll try this when it's f2p. I may pay for premium content, if it's good and actually has players in it. From the Youtube videos it looks a lot like every other mmo on the planet, but it's Star Wars and you can't really beat free to play. Then again, if Dark Souls pans out well I probably wouldn't want to play an mmo anyway. Why can't anyone make a good new Star Wars game? Battlefront 3 is cancelled, I beat The Force Unleashed in 8 hours and the TFU2 in 6 hours, KOTOR won't run without freezing for me on Windows 7, and TOR is a WoW clone. What's left? (I'm not blaming the devs for KOTOR freezing on Windows 7, btw. I'm just saying that I obviously can't play it.)

The Killing Floor has recieved another update, adding new graphical effects and even more guns. I'm posting this because you actually need to start the game to get the update, so many people may not know because it's not downloaded automatically as soon as Steam goes online (and because I'm excited about this update). The update adds HDR Bloom and Motion Blur, both of which can be turned on or off in the graphics options. Apparently the game now also has improved performance if you leave the new graphical effects off. Note that the game must be restarted to see the effects when you first turn them on. It also adds new weapons based on the most popular mods, including a new high-grade medic gun (bringing the total number of medic guns to 3), a new shotgun, pistol, and more. For anyone who doesn't know what the Killing Floor is, it's a zombie-esque cooperative horde survival game focused around multiplayer. It's extremely active, with many vanilla and modded maps active at all times. If you're on the ropes about buying it, I'd say go for it. The devs are always adding new things and holding seasonal events, and matches range from 6 player vanilla games, to 64+ player modded games. I got into one with nearly 128 players once, but it lagged massively ofc. My ping was 500+ at times at that one, and normally it's at 30-90. The hundreds of enemies on screen in that match didn't help either, I imagine. The 32 and 64 player ones are usually fine as long as you have a decent internet connection and a moderately powerful graphics card (the host had better also be running a dedicated server, lol). My 460 is fine with modded 32 player matches at a smooth 60 on ultra at 1080p (with an occasional drop to ~55 in crowded areas), but in the 64+ player matches I drop consistently into the 30-40 fps range. Anyway, that's the update. The HDR Bloom looks great imo, and seems to add many nice effects.

It's been feared for a while that Dark Souls for the PC would lock the screen resolution at 720p, the 360's native resolution, and therefore the resolution of the version that is being ported from. This would be a bit of a baffling design decision, as it's literally no extra work to let your video card handle multiple resolutions. However, I've heard a rumor that an important person within GameSpy confirmed that Dark Souls will not be capped at 720p, or even 1080p. He supposedly states that there was a translatione error, and that it is texture resolution that will be unchanged from the console versions. While it's not certain it's likely that this was, as suspected, an issue in translation where texture resolution was mistaken for screen resolution. I haven't managed to find the original source, but we can hope... I don't mind 1080p, but 720p is kind of low.

You're not going to get something amazing for $700, which leaves mostly building one from scratch or buying from a company like Cyberpowerpc or iBuyPower. User feedback is mixed from such companies, but from what I hear they've improved in quality and support over the last couple years. Both my brother and I have had very good experiences with CyberPowerpc in particular. Here are some options: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16883229334 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16883227408 (Looking at the performance/cost ratio and the reviews, this is probably the best choice of the 3 options I listed.) http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16883229333

I'm glad I decided not to buy Assassin's Creed: Revelations... That would have been the first Ubisoft game on my PC.

The good news is that I have some money now. These hours really add up, I actually just bought a nice 1080p led monitor. It should look much better than my 1440x900 lcd vga monitor. I'm not going to have time to actually use it until I quit the job and get one with fewer hours for college though.

I constructed new box art for Dark Souls, as I wanted to get rid of the lore-breaking esrb rating, GFWL banner, and that other stuff. It's not a remake of the original Prepare to Die Edition box art; it's based around a desktop wallpaper for Dark Souls, and on the back there's the poem/phrase that you hear at the beginning of the game. It's about 6.5mb, so I can't post it in the thread directly, but here's a link to the deviantart page.

I never played it, but I remember thinking that MGS4 graphics were mind-blowing when I first saw them. I agree with the comment on Resistance 2; parts of it, especially the Chimeran architecture and the character models looked very good, but some places (Bryce Canyon) looked so bad it was like they were from a whole different game. It's difficult to rate a game's graphics objectively because parts of them can be so different. On another topic, I was going to buy a better graphics card. Looking at the upcoming games though, I don't think I'd really play them as much as older ones like The Killing Floor or Oblivion, or otherwise lower-spec ones like Dark Souls and Borderlands. I'll probably just replace my 1440x900 vga monitor. It was a good deal, but given the price I shouldn't have expected much. I have minor banding across the screen, very subtle blur, a merely average contrast ratio, and sometimes it freaks out and throws up noise on the screen for a few seconds. If I get a good 1080p monitor with a good contrast ratio and a good response time that should enhance all my games, even the old ones, for way less than the cost of a 680. That, and I'd like to play Dark Souls on as high of a quality as possible and its maxed resolution is 1080p. I'd also be able to use a monitor like that for my PS3, seeing as it would have an hdmi port. There aren't a lot of games I still want to play on it, but a few like Killzone 3 don't have PC versions, and I don't want to buy the PC version of Sacred 2 because it could break my PhysX drivers. Idk if I'll actually play any PS3 games again, but the option would be there at least. I'd have leftover money then to upgrade my RAM as well... I think I just talked myself into it, I'll order a new monitor tomorrow. It's not as if I'm going to have much time to play anything anyway though, with 12 hour shifts 7 days a week. Even my mods are all on hold. Conveniently, Dark Souls: Prepare to Die Edition releases exactly one day before I quit this job for college, two weeks before classes start. That's going to be 2 weeks of solid Dark Souls on a new monitor.

Here's a couple not-too-common trailers for the original Dark Souls. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bciLdZnU1Ag http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=he7AS_h5QlA&feature=relmfu

I can't tell. If you could record like 10 or 15 seconds of flicker with Fraps and stick it on Youtube that would probably help people diagnose your problem. I haven't seen a problem like what you're describing, but it's going to be really hard for anyone to help without a video or several in-sequence images or something.

I generally keep it on normal (50%?), and if the game gets too easy on normal it doesn't bother me much because I always play Oblivion more for the exploration than the combat.

1 (snowy scene with the burning tree)=Uncharted 2 (Ruined town with the flipped vehicle and the brightly colored banners)=Uncharted 3 (giant tooth vagina monster)=Dark Souls 4 (large blue dragon)=Dark Souls 5 (guy in green shirt with a guy in a red shirt behind him)=Uncharted 6 (guy on a bridge about to shoot another dude)=Uncharted 7 (No Hot Linking) 8 (guy in a gas mask getting kicked in the delicates)=Uncharted 9 (roots with a red glow over them)=Dark Souls 10 (guy with an AK on his back in a burning building)=Uncharted And a few more... 1 (giant glowy roots/trees and a guy with a sword)=Dark Souls 2 (pretty ruins with trees on the left)=Uncharted 3 (jello blob eating a guy)=Dark Souls 4 (dude pushing a green vehicle)=Uncharted 5 (angry dude about to punch another dude, with fire in the background)=Uncharted 6 (giant city with sunbeams)=Dark Souls 7 (Furry horned monster about to pancake a glowing guy with no hair)=Dark Souls 8 (zombie guys which are coated in dark magical flame, with a pile of bricks and an armored dude up front)=Dark Souls

Fixed.

I've compiled a few images of Halo ODST and Dark Souls. I was going to use Halo 3, but decided that as ODST is newer it must have the more impressive graphics on the 360. I've rated each image on a 10 point scale with no half-points allowed, and I looked for: -polygon density -texture resolution and texture stretching -texture filtering (trilinear, anisotropic, etc) -antialiasing and jaggies -optimization skill -overall scene style -shadow detail, filtering, and quantity -light source counts and quality -other gfx such as dof, water and fire, particles, reflections, etc I don't address each point on each image, and I generally only point out a specific feature if it's extremely good or extremely bad. I attempted to be unbiased, but obviously I'm a fan of Dark Souls. In some cases, even given high polygon counts, meshes can look bad. The same applies for texture resolution. If a texture was HD or a mesh was high poly, yet it looked out of place or bad, I rated down the image accordingly. As this is a Dark Souls thread, the majority of the images are from Dark Souls. I cut Uncharted 3 since Aegrus covered screens of that and I was over the image limit. All images are a mixture of random shots and press releases, though in every case I have only used images with vanilla gameplay gfx, no in-game video shots were allowed unless they used only standard gameplay effects. I urge you not to use my scores as the final grades of the images. Look at each one and decide for yourself which game looks graphically better; my scores are opinions influenced by my interest in dark fantasy. Note that graphics in games are inconsistent at times; there are some areas in Dark Souls that look great, while others look barren when taken on their own. Most games follow this pattern, and it's inaccurate to assume that every moment in-game looks as good or as bad as these screens. Halo ODST: The graphics are certainly... crisp. The lack of Anisotropic Filtering, Antialiasing, and object self shadowing is very noticeable though. 4/10 http://bluestarblues.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/H3ODST.jpg Halo ODST: I can't say anything nice about this one. It looks like it was ported from an original Xbox game, with visible texture stretching at the neck and noticeably absent lighting effects. Moving on... 2/10 http://xboxoz360.files.wordpress.com/2009/09/halo-odst-oxcgn-37.jpg Halo ODST: This image has reasonable amounts of clutter and solid lighting, but the complete lack of Antialiasing, the near absence of texture filtering of any kind, and the scarcity of landscape shadows heavily degrades the quality. I struggled to decide whether to give this a 7 or an 8, but ultimately decided that a score of 8 would not be fair compared to similarly rated images from Dark Souls. 7/10 http://www.platformnation.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/I-CAN-SEE-YOUR-HALOOO-HALOOOOO.jpg Uncharted 3: Sorry, I removed this because Aegrus already has pics of Uncharted up and I'm over the image limit per post. Dark Souls: The statue texture and the belt pouch texture are blurred, but aside from that you have a very cinematic image. Metal reflections are good and the scene has a nice dark feel. The statue texture is so low resolution despite being a centerpiece of the scene I'm taking off 2 points for it. 8/10 http://media1.gameinformer.com/imagefeed/screenshots/DarkSouls/g.jpg Dark Souls: While this is technically not gameplay footage, the graphical effects are identical to actual gameplay. The sky has noticeable banding from light to dark, but the ivy and scattered weaponry is high poly and the overall scene is very well done. Sif's fur looks downright fluffy. 9/10 http://news.tgn.tv/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/dark_souls_screen6.jpg Dark Souls: This is about as pretty as you'll see PS3 or 360 graphics. You'll notice the torch flames in the background look very realistic. The boss itself is very well done, and even at such close range the character model holds up very well. The only complaint I have is the low-poly center of the character's forearm, and I don't think that's big enough to be worth a point deduction on its own. 10/10 http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-2toE38AUpaU/TwvYri4RZGI/AAAAAAAABXk/EiLJaYLiad8/s1600/Dark+Souls.jpg Dark Souls: This displays the water and again the fire, and both are extremely impressive for a console game, which is no doubt why they cause slowdown. The water has splash decals, character reflections, and motion deformation, all of which most console games lack. The background textures are crisp, though the rat's nose could use a few more polygons and the soft fur effect is heavy handed at this close range. 9/10 http://www.pixeljumpers.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/Demons-Souls-Multiplayer.jpg Dark Souls: Though the subject matter here is amusing I can't add points for that. The scene is barren and the chains are very clearly flat meshes. They're helped somewhat by the triple-layering of the meshes, which adds a 3d effect on the more distant chains, but they're still not great. The textures are of a middling resolution, and though there is still no texture stretching evident, the character model clearly has few polygons that are visible from this unexpected angle. 4/10 http://splitkick.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/trap_traproad048.jpg Dark Souls: This is a non-scenic capture of basic gameplay. The scene is sparse, but what's present is well done. The mangy fur on the cat/rat thing is beyond reproach, as is the style and mesh. The character model holds up well, but you can see that the bend in the knees is supported by only a single line of polygons. The textures are good, but the fact that the character carries a light source eliminates the possibility of shadows at this range and degrades the image. 7/10 http://www.d22-zone.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/Dark-Souls-3.jpg Dark Souls: This is quite a good combat screen, though the player seems to have forgotten the lock-on button. The skeleton cracked apart into many havok'd pieces, which is impressive. The tombstones are well used and add a degree of polygon lavishness not normally seen in console games. Antialiasing does its job well, and reflection effects on the metal are top-notch. However, the dead trees have noticeable sharp bends in the branches due to low polygon counts. 9/10 http://www.preparetodie.com/images/gallery/screenshot-e3-06.jpg

You could buy a laptop cooling pad, but at least check for dust and dirt first. As bben46 said, that can easily cause laptops to overheat. You may want to check your active windows Power Plan as well. If it's set to high performance that can raise cpu frequency, among other things, and can cause more overheating problems.

Try getting a registry cleaner and check for registery errors. Those don't cause strange sounds, but for me they can easily cause random hang-ups and theoretically any hang-up or freeze could mess up your sounds. IObit has a free trial on Advanced Systemcare, which you could try.

Sorry for the double post instead of an edit of my previous post, but people will definitely want this tidbit of bad news and my last post was on a completely different part of DkS. I looked on the Steam page for Dark Souls, and 3rd party DRM is listed as "Microsoft". This means that it's now certain that even the Steam version of Dark Souls will use GFWL. I'm still buying it, but that DRM makes me nervous.

In order to use Gimp to edit Oblivion textures, you either need the Gimp .dds Plugin, or you need a free image converter like Paint.NET. Paint.NET isn't just regular Paint, btw, it has a lot more features and can convert almost any image type. You'll want to convert Oblivion's textures into .png images to edit them, because that's one of the few standard image types that allow transparent textures. Make sure to always convert the images at the highest quality possible, or after multiple edits the texture will degrade noticeably. You can use a free program called Nifskope to make minor edits to Oblivion meshes. For example, you could use it to change the texture path on a set of armor, so you'd be able to make a set of steel armor with a unique texture without replacing all steel armor textures. That's just an example ofc. As for simple mods, there are a lot of possibilities for simple easy-to-make mods that expand the game in a meaningful way. I'm not saying you have to seriously consider these quick ideas, but even a novice modder could add "new" weapons like +2 Iron Longsword or +1 Fine Steel Dagger to levelled spawns for people who like lower-level weapons but can't use them because of the stats. Almost anyone could make it possible to enter houses through windows for thieving characters. Anyone could add exterior ruins and interesting features underwater for Argonians and people with water breathing spells or gear to explore. You could put hidden loot around the Oblivion towns on rooftops etc, to make exploring the towns and abusing the acrobatics skill more useful.

I just checked that out on the UESP, and it's true. I think that knowing that small detail makes the Inn of Ill Omen so much more amazing. Oh god, I use nude mods. That's going to look extra special. 88. Many modders probably know this, but non-modders probably don't. In vanilla Oblivion, male and female npcs use the exact same head mesh. That's why the npcs are potato-heads. The face is one-size-fits-all.

From a style point of view, it's one of the best looking games on the market. Looking purely at the polygon quantity, texture resolutions, etc, it doesn't look very good. It looks better than Skyrim, but compared to, say, Uncharted 2, it's not great looking. Having said that, the art direction is almost perfect and each screenshot could almost be a very good painting. The performance drop is because of a few things. Firstly, it saves almost constantly in the background, which is a cpu killer. Second, the game is open-world with almost no loading and extremely high quality distance structures, which consoles can't really handle. The open-world nature of the game and the almost constant background saving with almost no loading is what makes the game run and look worse than KZ3 etc. Being open world, it can't use many of the huge performance tricks that totally linear games like KZ3 or Uncharted use. There's a reason those games leave a tiny hallway for you to run along... Agreed. In addition, DkS was made to be run at 30fps, unlike most PC games, and as a result a capped 30 fps in DkS should actually look smoother than it does in most other pc games.