Widescreen Gaming Forum

not that much on pc at the moment, only have venetica installed (german made "very" casual action rpg with great story, but lack of difficulty) at the moment. but on my ps3 i play a lot lately, mostly because importing games from the uk makes them dirt cheap - even at release costing 50% or less then over here.
about time id say 1-2hours/day as an average, spikes like new games take it way higher - im currently frightened of my time in front of my desk when aion starts on sunday XD

edit: just had the idea, maybe im going to make a dr on venetica, although it sucks the shit out pretty much every system in existence ... it works fine in surround so far and looks pretty good, but damn what a framerate drop - unplayable :p

I am kind of a dichotomy on this. The games I play and love are all games for serious gamers. But I only play them as often as a casual gamer. On average I get in maybe three to four hours of gaming per week in. I hate having a life D:

According to Steam I played 5 hours in the last 2 weeks. I probably played an hour or two of scribblenauts on my ds. It's not that i wouldn't like to play them; but I have alot of homework and need to practice for my piano lessons and stuff.

I guess I'll get left 4 dead 2 and modern warfare 2, but it doesn't look like they have any innovation. I question if both me and my friends will find time to play them together anyways.

I guess I'll get left 4 dead 2 and modern warfare 2, but it doesn't look like they have any innovation.

But but but... I thought sequels fueled innovation?!

http://kotaku.com/5360216/activision-sequels-offer-road-map-for-innovation

Honestly I find so many games to be exciting and amazing looking right now, it's hard for me to understand a gamer saying "meh, nothing coming out looks good."

Agreed, I am always on the edge of my seat to wait for the next generation of games.

Well right now I'm between swearing off PC gaming and hoping my next rig will at least play the friggin things. Turns out both Shift and RE 5, two of the most anticipated titles this year, won't play on most ATI based rigs. In this case I don't blame ATI, after all, Nvidia is doing their best to make devs write a lot of games in biased fashion, but hey, ATI aren't exactly brilliant and the driver end either. Whether you go Nvidia for thinking they're superior or for their dominance in swaying developers, it seems the logical thing to do.

Well right now I'm between swearing off PC gaming and hoping my next rig will at least play the friggin things. Turns out both Shift and RE 5, two of the most anticipated titles this year, won't play on most ATI based rigs. In this case I don't blame ATI, after all, Nvidia is doing their best to make devs write a lot of games in biased fashion, but hey, ATI aren't exactly brilliant and the driver end either. Whether you go Nvidia for thinking they're superior or for their dominance in swaying developers, it seems the logical thing to do.

To be even more fairer to ATI, arn't you running a 4 year old card?

Yeah, I think saying "most ATI based rigs" is a bit deceptive...

I'm running an X1950Pro, but this is happening with even 4000 series ATI cards. Check the official forums for both games and you'll see dozens of posts about it. If you'd read up on it you'd know it's not deceit, intentional or otherwise. RE 5's demo wasn't even working with a lot of ATI cards, so Capcom has known about this for some time.

On supported cards? Or on cards not officially supported?

Stated in Shift min reqs is the X1800, in RE 5 the 2400, which is actually a slower card than my X1950. If you're doubting the validity of what I'm saying though, check out the comments on the forums I mentioned regarding even 3000 and 4000 series cards. If you continue to speculate on my integrity after that, I guess there won't be much point arguing the subject.

And btw, for you die hard ATI fans out there, RE 5 is yet another game like Riddick Assault on Dark Athena that has a 2400 on min reqs for ATI, and the two gen older 6800 for Nvidia. ATI doesn't do squat driver wise for cards that are physically capable but older. They'll never get another dime out of me and I don't care what smoke is being blown up their behinds about the 5870.

Don't take my comments personally, I just see so many issues and complaints on Steam threads and the like and people tend to blow things out of proportion. Someone has a crashing problem and they make a thread called "X Game Doesn't Work on Windows 7!!!!" when it has nothing to do with Windows 7.

I assume people saying "Doesn't Work With ATI 48XX!!!" are doing a similar thing... really if even one of those cards runs the game, it is not the hardware at fault.

In any case, I have said before I support nVidia because I consider their drivers to be much better. They seem to run old games better, come out with more optimizations for new games, and generally are just easier to use... plus physx and other special things, and nHancer.

That's me though.

From everything I've read, Shift is a buggy POS anyway (it's like EA are trying to stop me spending money!) but RE5 is an odd one... DMC4 did so well on ATi hardware, so it's strange than RE5 should do so poorly.

From everything I've read, Shift is a buggy POS anyway (it's like EA are trying to stop me spending money!) but RE5 is an odd one... DMC4 did so well on ATi hardware, so it's strange than RE5 should do so poorly.

I haven't heard many complaints about Shift on my forums... a lot of sim gamers feeling it is still arcadey, but not tech issues. The demo ran perfectly for me.

I'm gonna whip the demo out and see how it behaves, because I've had a couple of friends comment on how buggy it is on 360 and PS3. None of them have a good enough PC to game on, so don't bother with PC games.

PS has got a firm grasp of the situation it sounds. What the heck do you mean by "your forums"? Have you even been on EA's and Capcom's forums for Shift and RE 5? You make it sound like I don't have enough credibility to look at the nature of the threads and how many people are having issues vs just reading the title, looking at the number of thread pages and assuming lots of people share the same problem. What irks me most is this is finally a RE title that was developed on PC, yet it is already showing signs of very lazy beta testing like crap port jobs.

This typically happens when a developer communicates only with one GPU camp on a big title, esp if the other camp is off spending lots of time and money on their latest greatest project instead of holding down the fort with solid driver support. So naturally it happens to ATI way more often than Nvidia. A lot of people blame this kind of thing on Nvidia wining and dining developers, but truth is they know Nvidia does things more responsibly, so they'd rather work with them. ATI has dug this hole for themselves, and I hope Nvidia's 300 series hits them even harder because at this point it wouldn't bother me a bit if it were Nvidia and Intel making GPUs instead of Nvidia and ATI.

Again, please don't take it personal. My point was simple: it's not a hardware problem if even one person can run it. To say "the game doesn't work with ATI cards" is a generalized statement that is more than likely more misleading than helpful.

My only point is we see these kinds of generalizations all the time, and should try to avoid them if at all possible.

I am sure there is a chance ATI drivers are conflicting with certain OS configurations or something with RE5, or any number of other similar problems. I'll check in on the Steam forums when I get a chance... I post there rarely because it is almost all tech support quetions. What I mean by "my forums" is the forums I visit on a regular basis, like nvnews for example. I haven't read any tech complaints on Shift, and very few on RE5.

Well, I don't have the 'bouncy cars' exhibited by some folk, but...

Oh. My. God.

4870X2. Core i7 @3.8GHz.

Shift is smooth as silk as long as I:

Don't get near opponents
Don't get near walls
Don't go on gravel
Don't go on grass

I suspect that it's something to do with the PhysX implementation, given that all of those link back into the physics in the game.

If I do any of those four things, the game turns into a slideshow and it's really hard to drive.

I actually managed to win the London race (came first) by slipping inside on turns and sitting behind the leader until the final three-turn narrow chicane, where (more through luck than judgement) managed to whip round him on the outside, at which point the AI in the other car slammed the breaks on. If he hadn't done that, he'd probably still have just beaten me.

I can't help but feel that even the AI couldn't cope too well with the PhysX framerate drops, as I saw two cars go smack into walls when there really shouldn't have been a problem with the turn. It happened both times when the framerate nosedived.

The graphics are OK, but not jawdropping, considering that this is, what, two years newer than GRID? I'd say they were about on par, but GRID overdoes the HDR lighting. TripleHead/EyeFinity will be amazing with this game, IMO. I'm gonna end up getting EyeFinity just for racing games, I can tell...

Really it's just the ridiculous performance variation that kills it for me. If Most Wanted supported a wheel properly, I think I'd go back to that.

Toooooo many games to play and no time between a full-time job...

I want to play:

Batman:AA
NFS:Shift
RE5
Darkest of Days
KOTOR (in anticipation of the Old Republic)
Baldur's Gate (started playing it in anticipation of DA:O but got distracted)

Instead i've been playing:

TF2
CSS
Prototype
Evil Genius
The Path
Fallout 2

And it's not going to get better. I keep a little .txt file with all the games that i want to play lying around on my desktop to remind me to finish games off and not to miss out on old games that i forget to play...

Sorry SV, you are wrong to think that one person having luck running it on an ATI card means there are no problems in general running it on ATI. You are not factoring in that some ATI cards use different software than others, like Avivo, and some even use features of CCC differently. Some of the discussion on the forums I mentioned has indicated that workarounds can vary from turning off Catalyst AI, setting Avivo to "Use application settings, and downloading d3d9.dll and placing it in the game's directory. None of the above have worked for me, at best a handful of people claim it works.

Others have said making sure your monitor drivers are installed vs using a generic MS plug and play driver works. My monitor driver is installed and showing in Device Manager. I also agree with what some have said on the RE 5 forum that a monitor driver shouldn't be the problem, yet a few have claimed it works to fix the problem. I worry and have stated on the forum that some of the claimed solutions may make Capcom lazy about fixing the problem, esp since they only seem intent on talking with Nvidia.

I also noticed a peculiar thing with the intro vids in RE 5. Since many with ATI cards are having issues not being able to see the cutscenes, I tried playing them straight through WMP with the game not running. They play but show in split screen with faint audio that does not play the voices in the center channel. This has me wondering if a lot of ATI cards are having problems with the game's coop scripting conflicting with full screen D3D rendering. D3DERR is the most common error with ATI cards.

As PS also mentioned, there are serious performance issues with Shift even on high end systems. There appears to be a PhysX and AI performance hit, and I've also noticed graphic corruption. When I started having problems not being able to run any race without a BSOD, it was right after the car gauges turned to a red/green blur instead of showing a dial with a needle and numbers.

I'm not surprised PS got Shift running on a dual GPU ATI card though, as those and Crossfire setups seem to have a much greater chance of it. Since some have said Intel/ATI combos cause problems, I wonder if it's something to do with Intel's crossfire capability in their chipset somehow overriding the API, and working only with dual GPU setups.