Grand Theft Auto: Addict

I finally get it.
by AC - permalink

So I ran by the local Walmart on my way home from work this morning to pick up Halo PC. I intentionally left home with only 25 bucks in my wallet because I missed a couple days work this week with chronic migrains and I didn't want to tempt myself with the $40 Call of Duty 2 (see the comments to this post). But there were no more Halo's. Walmart was Halo-less. I wavered for a while, tempted to buy the United Offensive expansion pack for Call of Duty, but I've been dealing with some visual anomalies with Quake 3 Engine games lately, and I just didn't want to deal with that. So I picked up GTA: Vice City for ten bucks.

First things first. I stand by my stance that the GTA games look like shit on the consoles. I will never back off that point. On the PC, however, the visuals get upgraded to "mediocre." At 1280x1024x32, even the max draw distance is way too short, models are blocky, and buildings are all blurry and rectangular. But force AA to 6 and AF to 16, and things look up somewhat. The framerate stays at 60-plus on my box (AMD64 3500+, 1GB 3200 DDR, ATI X800 XL 256MB), gameplay is still tight and fluid. There are a lot of little things that annoy me about GTR, but I'm fucked if it still isn't pretty damned addictive. For the first couple hours I honestly didn't know what was going on or what, exactly, I was supposed to be doing, but it was still way too much fun.

I'm still planning on posting complete rundowns of how I've optimized performance for all those newer games on this midrange rig. I might save it for when that new Google pages web service goes live, because it should allow for about a hundred megs of free webspace for screenshots, etc.

Oh, and I picked up Troy used on DVD the other day. Not bad, but not great. Still worth owning for great scenes from Peter O'Toole. Also, General Veers is in it. Look for him, he's in there.

ATI, AMD, and the Doom 3 engine.

Finding the balance.
by AC - permalink

I think pretty soon I'll have to write up a detailed post on the performance I'm getting out of the Doom 3 engine on my box, and how I got there. I know it's the kind of thing that would have helped me a few weeks ago. I went ahead and picked up Quake IV Special Edition Tuesday morning, and I'm impressed with how well it's running. At the same detail settings in-game, and with nearly all the same config tweaks, Quake IV at 1152 is running as fast, maybe slightly faster than Doom 3 at 1280. I'll go into all the software and hardware details later.

I've run into two problems, though. Around 15 minutes in, the game started crashing to the desktop as soon as I tried to use the machine gun's secondary fire (zoom). It's still doing it, and I don't know why. It doesn't matter if it's bound to a key or a mouse button. Combing through the forums -- which I fucking hate doing, by the way -- it seems like others are having the same problem but I can't find a fix. Otherwise the game has run beautifully. It's snappy and responsive, though it's weird how it can be so smooth at 1152 and unplayable one step up at 1280.

Anyway, my other issue is with Quake II, which is half the reason I spent $40 for the DVD edition. I can't load savegames. Again, seems like virtually everyone has this problem with Quake II (and both the mission packs) under Windows XP. Apparetly this was just never fixed. The only answer seems to be using a source port. Great.

Gecko-based Mac browser Camino has reached version 1.0. It's a nice app, but I'm not sure who the target user is. Probably people like me who get bored using just Safari and Firefox. The again, I've gone back to using pretty much nothing but Opera on this old box here at work and Firefox at home. In fact, I've been using my old Duron PC exclusively for internet access for a while now; I don't think I've had my new rig online at all since finishing the Counter Strike: Source Steam update a few weeks ago. Partly that's because of laziness -- I have to physically move the line from one room to another. But mostly it's because I don't want to give Steam a chance to see that there might be a new update out there, so it can refuse to let me play CS or Half-Life 2 offline until I've finished some massive download via dial-up. I really hate that about Steam. If I don't want the patch, I shouldn't have to download the goddamn patch.

Hey, I wonder if that Quake II savegame thing will be a problem on my old PC. It's still running WinXP Pro SP2. My new one came with MCE. Bah, probably doesn't matter.

Power hungry.

The two-step guide to neglecting your blog.
by AC - permalink

No posts in a while, but I have an excuse: I work full time, and I've spent every minute off basking in the warm, comforting glow of my new video card. I added an ATI X800 XL to my new PC a couple weeks ago, and I haven't done much but play with it since. Sure, it's last-gen, but that's why it cost me just $250. And the specs are so good, why spend twice as much for a marginally faster X1800? I only have one PCI-e slot, so Crossfire capability does me no good, and the X800 series doesn't need a dedicated power connector, which would have forced me to upgrade my power supply. The X800 XL has 256MB GDDR3, 16 pipes, DX9.x/OGL2.0, DVI, etc. I spent over a week looking at benchmarks - which makes for a long fucking week - and decided this card is well matched with my box (Athlon 64 3500+ and 1GB 3200 DDR).

And damn if it isn't the best $250 I've spent in a long time. Call of Duty, which ran surprisingly badly under my onboard video compared to Quake III Arena and Medal of Honor, is absolutely crushed by this card. I'm running 1600x1200 with every single setting maxed out, and it's locked in at my monitor's 1600 refresh rate of 70fps. Benchmarks indicate it's moving at around 150fps gross. Only the first Stalingrad map show that the X800 is actually working, as the fps drops into the mid-thirties, which is better than the 4fps I was getting previously (no, really). Quake III and MoH run so fast - nearly 300fps at 1600 - that they're having trouble synching up with the refresh rate and chopping up somewhat. Dropping to 1280x1024 fixes that issue, and they're still gorgeous.

I'm finally able to run Doom 3 to it's potential, and I have to say that it's the best-looking game I've ever played. At 1280x1024, with all graphics turned up and with 4xAA and 4xAF, it's solid at the 70fps v-sync cap. Online benchmarks indicate that it should be worse than that, but it ain't. And Half-Life 2... what can I say. At the same settings as Doom 3 it runs even more smoothly (especially in a firefight), and I just end up sitting here in front of the greatest gaming experience I've ever had.

Ghost Recon is also running flat-out. With all settings turned up full, 1600x1200 is no problem at all, and enabling AA and AF via Catalyst doesn't slow it down a bit. Even the heavy GR: Island Thunder maps can't tax this vidcard in the slightest. This morning I picked up Far Cry (it was that or Halo, both $20), and it's running as well as any of my other games. Again, it seems to be well above the Far Cry benchmarks I've seen with the X800 XL on machines generally slightly faster than mine.

I'll update again after I've picked up Quake IV Special Edition and maybe Call of Duty 2... I know I won't be able to run it under DX9, but I can live with DX7 if it's even remotely as good as CoD 1.