Be Excellent To Each Other

Unless there are some absolutely compelling platform exclusives I'm not sure what the attraction of either an XBox One or PS4 is, since outside of those exclusives they're basically going to be cross-platform with PC.

That's why a Wii U has found itself a home underneath the big telly in our house! (It's there for Nintendo first party games and nothing else.)

While I remember can I just point out that frame rate evangelist / whore / obsessive Hearthly was challenged to show me a super pretty game on his "rig" when I was at his house.

He showed me Battlefield 4 which has lots of bells and whistles but fuck me it tore more than the Hulk's shirt after he's caught his finger in a door frame.

Hearthly's immune to it but all I could see was massive distracting tears all over the shop but he was all "But the frame rate man, the frame rate - I just turn vsync off"

So he fails to understand how people can cope with a 30fps game yet he's got a complete blind spot for tearing.

Hmmmm....

Ha! Busted!

It's almost like different things bother different people different amounts...

I'm with you though, screen-tearing bugs the shit out of me and I find it massively distracting. I played some of a game called Magrunner: Dark Pulse the other day and the PC version was a straight port of the XBLA game so didn't have any real gfx options; including no vsync. It ran nice and smooth on my machine but the screen tearing was fucking horrendous and it never completely stopped bothering me even once I'd got a bit used to it.

For me V-Sync and 30FPS are two sides of the same coin, both of them equal input lag, which in a First Person Shooter just isn't on.

But yeah it's true, tearing just doesn't bother me at all. That said, if the game I'm playing doesn't need absolute twitch-perfect controls, I'll happily turn V-Sync on for visual fidelity, Grid Autosport for example, I play with V-Sync turned on. (And most single player FPS games I'll run with V-Sync turned on, it's just multiplayer FPS games where I notice the input lag from V-Sync far more than I do screen tearing.)

I can't say screen tearing has ever bothered me. In fact, I wasn't even aware of it as a concept until someone pointed it out. Even then I couldn't really see it.

I have to run everything with v-sync on, screen tearing drives me insane.

Some games are much worse than others though so maybe you've just never played something for any length of time that was particularly bad. I defy anyone not to notice it in the PC version of that Magrunner for instance, but that's the first time in a while I've been bothered by it.

Screen tearing annoys me but only with emulated games. There's a Megadrive emulator for my GP2X Wiz that suffers with it quite badly.

I don't know what screen tearing is but I'm going to troll AE about it now.

Screen tearing is when everything looks really sad, as if you are looking through a salty sheen.

Thanks to Mr Dave, I'm always looking through a salty sheen.

What did I do this time?

In case you are interested (I know you aren't, but just in case):

Example image: http://zoneitastuces.com/wp-content/upl ... earing.png

It happens if drawing buffers are switched while the monitor is still painting the current buffer, instead of at the bottom of the screen (waiting for the monitor to "reach the bottom" before switching is what is known as vsync).

Sorry to change the subject a bit but is anyone else eyeing up a 4K gaming PC?

For starters 4K is a bit of a misnomer as the monitors actually display 3840x2160 pixels, so not even quite 4K on the x-axis, let alone the y-axis which is how we generally understand 720, 1080 etc.

That aside though, it's a monstrously gorgeous resolution and decent 4K monitors are now down in the £500-£600 range, whereas they debuted last year at £3000!

The major problem is getting a graphics card that can shift that many pixels around, and there aren't really any single GPU cards on the market at the moment that can consistently handle top settings on modern games and sustain 60FPS or close to it. The Radeon 290X and GeForce 780Ti are within shouting distance though.

I thinking early next year, Intel's next generation CPU architecture should be out, Nvidia should have their next line of graphics cards on the loose, and the monitors are only going to get cheaper (although I'm amazed they're down at £500 already).

Obviously games are going to be irresistibly gorgeous at that resolution, but you also get a load of extra screen real estate just in Windows as well (which never goes amiss).

Make no mistake it'll be a substantial cash investment, I'm thinking probably in the region of £2000-£2500 for the full setup (PC and monitor), but my current PC really is cracking on a bit now (the mobo/CPU/RAM I bought second hand and they're pushing up towards six years old!) and I've had a very good run out of it.

I'd be looking at the new PC lasting me 3-4 years at least, which makes the cost reasonable if you think about it.

*thinks about it*

Nope.

Yeah, the whole thing would still be far too rich for my blood; maybe on the upgrade after my next upgrade; which puts it at something like seven years in the future given current Bamba-trends. So probably around the time they stop making games for the last gen consoles and start properly taking advantage of the PS4 hardware.

Yeah, too rich for my blood, and I buy any old shit.

Oculus Rift (and the required graphics card to drive it) will be my next serious outlay I expect

I would have to try it first, because I don't always respond well to stereoscopic 3D, but I am also thinking along these lines.

You could do what I did. Buy a DK1 on ebay, try it for a couple of weeks, sell it on ebay for the same price you bought it for.

Fine I'll go 4K all by myself and screw you guys!

Yes it's a lot of cash but then again I basically live on my PC (and Wii U) so I may as well have a nice one.

Oculus Rift I'm a lot less convinced by.

The cheap monitors are well under £500 now. The reason they're cheap is that they're TN panels instead of newer IPS or DGZA things - the expensive Dell ones are much better monitors.

I want one pretty bad, but have to save up. For a graphics card too, but just SLIGHTLY different priorities - I need a low-profile, low-power, single slot one to go in my HP Microserver. I just want a 4k desktop because 1080p isnt enough. I've got a pair of 1080p screens at work and that's not enough either.

Cheapest I've found so far is an amd R5 250 eyefinity for about £90.

Just get something like this: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Icy-Box-IB-864- ... 405&sr=8-1

Thanks Grim.. But there's no headphone socket on that. That is kind of a deal breaker for the thing.

Allow me to add that to the search term for you.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/aw/d/B00CEPB ... 38&sr=8-1#

So this does appear to be the graphics card I have been waiting for...

It's a stunning card, the bangs per buck are off the scale, although it doesn't represent any sort of substantial improvement over the performance of the current high-end cards, it does make them completely redundant at their price point and power consumption.

Do bear in mind though that unless you actually desired GTX780/780Ti/R290/R290X performance to start with, £260 may still well be more than you need to spend.

You could even argue that the 970 is overkill for 1920x1080, 2560x1440 would be a far better resolution match for it, unless you really do want to run Crysis3 ultra-ed out at 1080p.

I've certainly got my eye on it, but even a rabid PC cock-stroker such as myself can't justify it when all I really play in anger is Hearthstone and a weekly session on BF3 which my venerable 670 can handle at 2560x1440 at juicy detail settings across the board.

The PC release of GTAV may change things a bit though....

Actually, what I have really been waiting for is a £150 GTX 960 to replace my trusty GTX 460, but such a card could still be half a year away or more, and this does tempt me something awful. I don't need a new card right this instant, though, so I can still wait a bit and see what else is coming.

Well you can get a 760 for £145 or a 770 for about £185, both of these are very capable cards, are a perfect match for 1080p, and even 1440p except in the more demanding titles at very high detail settings. (And either would be a massive upgrade from a 460.)

I mean, what do you actually need a new card to do?

I read that article on the 970, but I couldn't find out how many heads it could drive. Anyone know?

Is a 'head' a screen? If so that'll be four, I believe.

Being able to do Elite: Dangerous with an Oculus Rift might come in handy. Also just generally being able to last me a long time.

Current thinking is to get a 970 and keep one of the 250's to use as a physics card.

This one: http://www.ebuyer.com/663848-msi-gtx-97 ... -gaming-4g

Although I still can't quite get why there are so many different types.

I don't think there's a reference design for the 970 (there is for the 980) so each card producer is left to choose their own cooling solution, which leads to five million variations on the same basic card.

As a general rule of thumb you're usually safe just picking the cheapest one.

I expect the 970 will be the "oculus rift" card of choice next year.

Bethesda warns: You should have 4GB of VRAM to play The Evil Within on PC.

Jeepers, this is a bit mad. They recommend an i7 as well. I really don't think it brings much over an i5 with 4 cores, but please correct me if I'm wrong.

I'm glad I waited and didn't buy a GTX 760 or 770 with 2GB, though.

Not gaming still, but there are low profile single slot gtx 630s and gtx 640s with displayport for under £80, and they support 4k@60 in either stream mode. Hurrah!

I have no idea what the crack is there. For starters an i5 is basically an i7 without hyper-threading, unless they're trying to say they need the extra hyper-threaded 'cores'?

I think the 4GB of VRAM is bollocks too, especially at 1080p. There's probably some MEGA HYPER ULTRA texture setting that will eat that much VRAM, (and wouldn't even be discernible at 1080p), but you just turn it down a notch and it'll be fine.

do i7s have more cache as well? mostly they're saying 'we haven't optimised this because if the rush' though aren't they?

Stuff like avx2 is a generation thing rather than tier, right?

There are a few differences between i7s and i5s but if you look at their performance in games there's really nothing in it. A higher-clocked i5 will usually outpace a slower-clocked i7 in games, and the general consensus seems to be that i7 is overkill for games. (The tweak guide for BF4 actually recommends turning off hyper-threading in your BIOS to prevent judders ingame.)

AVX2 as I understand it right across the Intel range, from Celerons upwards, and has been for years. So yes it's a processor generation addition rather than a tier.

Bethesda have historically been pretty shit at PC ports so yes, it's probably a rush job....

Just built mine.

Intel 3970x @ 4.7ghz
16gb Corsair Dominator Platinum @ 1866
Nvidia GTX Titan Black SLI
MSI Big Bang Xpower II
Corsair H110
Cooler Master Cosmos II
Intel 320 80GB
Corsair Nova 60gb SSD X 4 RAID 0
EVGA G1000
Soundblaster XFI Pro 5.1 (USB)





AKA "The Big Purple Monster".

It replaced (this now belongs to my fiancée) The Dark Carnival.





Which is...

AMD FX 8320 @ 4.9ghz
Mushkin Blackline 2x4gb @ 1600mhz
Asus Crosshair V Formula Z
AMD Radeon 7990
Bitfenix Colossus
Corsair RM 750
OCZ Revodrive 120gb
Corsair H100

I've not bought a 4k screen yet (though have the money set to one side) because they're either arse TN or crap refresh rate (30hz... yeah right !) or they're honkingly expensive. So I'll just play the waiting game for now and see what Hannspree and so on do into the future. Gotta say it is quite hilarious watching games eating on that 6gb frame buffer. Good old console ports eh?

Hi JC!

That's not JC, it's Marzsyndrome (or whatever he used to be called)

Malc

It is JC.

That's some full on disco PC.

Sticking with the Blackpool theme, it was trams but now it's the illuminations.

RE - VRAM.

4gb is barely enough now. Watchdogs eats closing in on 4gb on my cards and that's 1080p (I bought a 27" 3D thing as a stop gap). Middle earth will use over 4gb with the texture pack installed and adding 8XMSAA to any recent title (I'm using it to offset the fact I'm at 1080p) will see them all use in excess of 3GB.

IIRC the consoles have 8GB, 2GB of which is "system reserved" the other 6GB appears to be fair game. That is why I bought Titan Blacks. I was going to get 6GB 780s but Nvidia made sure no one made them with the stock Titan coolers on, meaning lots of heat circulating in the case. My last GPU subsystem (670s) caused me all sorts of issues. The top card used to hit 96c which for a Kepler was madness.

Nvidia have always been really tight with VRAM, so the new Maxwell cards have 4gb which is just about enough for now. They want you coming back, and if you want more you gotta pay for it. IIRC I paid £690 each for my TBs about three months back.

Also, the 970 and 980 have a crippled memory bus, so when you reach 4k cards such as AMD's 290 series come out the victor. I don't quite get this release tbh. They're fast enough to be 4k cards, yet Nvidia have crippled the memory pipeline so they don't quite cut it at 4k. Sadly the 780 and 780ti (which are now tumbling in price) only have 3gb which is already being over ran.

Take a look over this, paying close attention to the 4k scores. The 295x2 comes out the victor in pretty much everything.

http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/NVID ... X_970_SLI/

And these are now dropping like stones.

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showprodu ... ubcat=1515

So I would wait until they drop another £100 and use that for 4k.

Oh, and congrats on the fiancee dude

Oh, and...



Fucking hell!

Thanks.