Gaming.

So my newly upgraded PC has led me astray from LotRO and into other games that I didn't think I'd realistically be able to run... in my lifetime. My PC budget is basically $zero, so I was lucky to pick up our friend Haley's old PC for $150, which is more than $zero, but still a good buy. This PC killed not one, not two, but three hard drives, so I'm expecting a crash at any time, but I can live with that.

I actually gutted that computer, along with my old one and the lovely Jenny's, and used all the bits to cobble together two new computers. I'm now running an Intel Quad-core at 2.5GHz with, somehow, 3.25GB RAM and my ATI HD 4870. Jenny is now running, in a different case, basically what was my old rig. An AMD 4000+ with a Gig of RAM and the NVIDIA whatever-it-was video card from Haley's comp. I'm no good with NVIDIA. Dunno what it was, but it was a massive step up from the ATI 1350 she had before, as is the RAM and CPU.

So now I can finally run games like Assassin's Creed II and GTA IV, and she can finally play games like Spore and The Sims 3, and can max out LotRO. And let me tell you: Assassin's Creed II alone was worth the upgrade. Seriously, that game is fucking amazing. I'm pretty much done with it now, in that all that's left to 100% completion is finishing all the annoying races, and I'm thinking about starting a new game to play it all over again. I've been playing GTA IV at the same time, but fuck that game. So far, it's not as fun as GTA San Andreas. Massive disappointment. I mean, it's good, but nowhere near as good as I expected. Instead of diving into it after finishing AC2 before returning to LotRO, I'm probably going to go back to LotRO and keep playing GTA on the side. I miss my Champion...

Time well wasted.

Mini-vacations rule.
by AC - permalink

Fall break, aka five-day weekend, ended today. I had no assignments from any of my classes, other than to read two pages of the PERL intro and to start on a tutorial on tables in my HTML class -- both of which I finished last Thursday. So the break was pretty much just football, beer, and catching up on my gaming. I finally got around to playing the Prey demo, which I downloaded to my backup drive way back before my system restore, and I was really impressed. It's a solid, polished demo of what looks to be a much deeper game than I expected. While the art direction is very reminiscent of Doom 3 and Quake 4 -- not a great idea for only the third game, after those two, to use the Doom 3 engine -- it does have its own style of gameplay, with its much heralded (at the time) portals. They go way beyond just level-hopping, on one occasion delivering a truly fantastic, "What the hell just happened?" moment. I even like the Duke Nukem-ish way your avatar, Tommy, frequently speaks. Usually, it's just something like, "What the fuck is going on here?" but hey, whatever. The demo took me well over an hour to complete, which was a nice surprise.

On the other hand, we have the single-player demo of Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, which is more like 20 minutes long, but which left me so floored that I've decided to put off buying the Orange Box and save my money for this game. It's just spectacular. Even at fairly high in-game settings, it runs shockingly well on my rig. It appears to run on a modified version of the same engine powering CoD 2; i.e. a heavily modified Quake III engine. Even without the shader model 3 goodies, it looks amazing, and I love Infinity Ward for recognizing that backwards-compatibility is very important in PC games. That damned MoH: Airborne Assault demo turned out to be a wasted download, as it requires an SM3-compatible card to even install. Just when I start to forget why I hate EA, they give me another reason.

Anyway. I'm working slowly but surely towards 100% completion in GTA San Andreas. I'm at around 94% now, and all that worries me is beating multiple levels of Bloodring Banger, which I hate, those air races at the Venturas airport, and the NRG challenge, which I've never beaten before. We'll see. I'm also replaying Far Cry after installing the 1.4 patch for the first time. I've been wary about this patch for a while now, as the others have done more harm than good, but it seems to be working out well. Load times are significantly lower, those instant-reboot bugs are a no-show, and I haven't seen any rainbow shadows yet.

Speaking of which, I just finished downloading Radiohead's In Rainbows free and legally, though I feel a little guilty about entering a price of $0. In my defense, I don't have any money, and though I did pay for OK Computer once upon a time, I lost it a long while ago. I really like In Rainbows so far, "Bodysnatchers," "Weird Fishes/Arpeggi," "All I Need," and "Videotape" especially. I was disappointed by Kid A and Amnesiac, and while I did like parts of Hail to the Theif, I never got around to buying it. In Rainbows, though, hooked me immediately. I'm looking forward to burning it so I can listen to it on the long drive to and from school.

The San Andreas sweet spot.

I love it when hardware and software meet in the middle.
by AC - permalink

I think I may have finally found the perfect set-up for GTA San Andreas for my PC. Before upgrading my CPU, something about the way the game handled the in-game shadow and fog effects forced me to run with the "visual fx quality" set to low to get over 45 fps at any resolution. It's probably the 1MB L2 cache, but whatever the reason (and I don't really care), with my new 4000+ I can hover right around 60fps with any fx quality setting. Unfortunately, my cheap and rather shitty monitor can only manage a 60Hz refresh rate at 1280x1024, which makes enabling vertical sync, which I almost always do in all my games, not very effective, as the framerate keeps jumping back to 45.

But I found a lovely solution. In a game like San Andreas, with rather low-quality textures and low-poly models, dropping to 1152x864 makes no difference at all during gameplay. You do lose some clarity and aliasing becomes more pronounced, but the upside is my monitor can hit 75Hz at 1152, which means I can turn of v-sync and get very little noticeable tearing because the framerate, even with that visual fx setting turned all the way up to "very high," stays well over 60fps almost all the time now. The only slow-downs are in the middle of Las Venturas, for whatever reason, but even then it's only in the 45- to 60-fps range.

To sum up. In-game, all settings maxed, except resolution at 1152x864, and AA at "1," which means 2x. This is very low, obviously, but moving up to 4x doesn't look much better and it's dramatically slower. Hardware side, anisotropy is at 8x, and refresh rate forced to 75Hz (after checking that my monitor can support said refresh at said res). End result: seamless framerate way over 60 90% of the time with virtually no evident tearing, and no jarring fps switches from 60 to 45 to 30 and back, while the game looks damned good compared to the console versions. And keep in mind, high framerates means easier gameplay.

I should have bought a new CPU a long time ago.

Blogged with Flock

The low-rent San Andreas tweak guide.

Easiest post ever.
by AC - permalink

If you have Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas for the PC and you want it to run fast, here you go:

Step 1: Disable MIP mapping.
Step 2: Set Visual FX Quality to Low.

Congratulations, you've doubled your frame rate. I'll elaborate. The Visual FX Quality setting, like the MIP mapping setting, is under Options/Display Settings/Advanced. Raising it from low to medium will give you more translucent fog, which doesn't make it look much better but makes it easier to see where you're going in thick fog at night. Upping it to High or Very High will give you detailed shadows for player models and slightly increase the heat shimmer effect. But anything over low will dramatically affect your frame rate.

The MIP mapping setting is a bit mystifying. It never occurred to me to disable it before. As it turns out, disabling it does nothing whatsoever to the appearance of the game except give it a huge boost in framerate. I'm running San Andreas with anti-aliasing set in-game to 3, which I think means three passes, or 6X AA, and with anisotropic filtering hardware-forced at 16X, and even at 1280x1024 the game is rock-steady at 60fps. This is with Visual FX at Low. Any higher and the frame rate is halved, and it doesn't look any better sitting still.

I'm stumped on the MIP mapping thing because I have games like Doom 3 and Far Cry that rely heavily on it, and they run smooth as silk.

In fact, let me tell you about how I'm running Doom 3 these days. Doom 3 and Quake 4 are my only games that don't require any anti-aliasing to look good. I don't know what it is about them, but that engine just doesn't need it at all. That really helps performance, because I'm running Doom 3 now at 60fps at 1280x1024 with all in-game settings (except AA, of course) on max, and hardware-forcing 8X AF. This is on an ATi vidcard with an ancient set of drivers, and Doom 3 has always worked best on NVIDIA cards. And it looks fucking incredible.

The only wild-card here is "Truform," whatever that is. My vidcard's stock drivers give me the option of disabling it; the newer ones don't. I think that might be why I'm suddenly seeing these huge performance gains with no visual quality trade-offs. For the record, Doom 3 runs on OpenGL, so I'm also using triple-buffering. I wish more games used OpenGL over Direct3D because, I dunno, it's better.

Anyway, I finally beat San Andreas this week. I spent the next day or so moving across Los Santos systematically taking over every gang territory until I controlled the entire city. I can roam around San Andreas now spending my hard-earned $3 million without worrying about rival gangs trying to take over my territory, because all the rival gangs are fucking dead now. So I can wear my $10,000 tweed Didier-Sachs suit with green high-tops and a pink mohawk and nobody can say shit about it. How many games let you say something like that?

Overheated.

Another post, another Stargate episode.
by AC - permalink

I've been running into some weird graphics anomalies recently in a few games. Specifically, it's GTA San Andreas, Half-Life 2: Episode 1, and Far Cry. After over a week of merciless troubleshooting, I think I've nailed it down as video card overheating. Moving my box from its little tower cubbyhole to on top of my desk has helped, but the problem is still coming up occasionally in Far Cry. Taking off a panel only disrupts circulation and makes things worse, so I think I'll just need faster fans. But for that, I'll need a better power supply. I'm pushing mine as it is, which is probably part of the problem. Anyway.

Getting back to San Andreas, I've been taking a different approach this time. At the first opportunity, I went around collecting all 100 tags, then all fifty snapshots, then all fifty oysters. It's an easy way to boost a number of stats (and the extra 200 grand doesn't hurt) and getting those oysters has made dating so much easier that I've actually been able to get past date 1 with Michelle, who's driven me crazy on my first two plays. Staying fat as hell helped, too. I haven't tried that girl at the Ammunation in the backwoods yet (I forget her name), but I'm at 100% muscle and I might need to use the "skinny" cheat for her. In any case, without any money cheats, I've got over $700,000 at this point (just before the flight training mission) despite buying all but two available properties and without finishing even the first vehicle export list. Not really sure how I managed that, but I'm looking for cool shit to buy.

I'm having more fun than ever on my third Far Cry play-through. Yet another testament to that game's depth. Again, I've found routes I hadn't thought of before. You know that level early on where you have to get past the huts then make your way to the communications tower to destroy it? I finally managed to sneak around from the left to man that mounted grenade launcher without alerting the entire battalion below. I took a speedboat around to the little bay on the left and cut down the defenders from offshore. After that there was just one merc on patrol to take down with the silenced MP5 (hope you picked one up on the last level). Then I hugged the cliffside and got within spitting distance of the guys guarding the launcher. Killing them will alert a bunch of guys, but you can kill them and still have time to use the launcher to wipe out the camp below before all the mercs in it can rush you. The hardest part is getting to that launcher and killing that one merc when he's far enough from his buddies not to alert them.

Almost every level in Far Cry is like that, and that's why I love the game. That, and the fact that it looks incredible and still runs over 60fps at almost any resolution I throw at it. And Jolene Blalock just showed up on Stargate, blonde hair and all, which is another reason to love that show. Unfortunately, my old Duron box is the one by the TV, so I'm going to have to settle for some Quake III while I watch.