samm

I really like the Stalwart village track But disagree on the IWD 2 comparison, because imo, a good soundtrack should not be compared to IWD 2 Zur's work failed spectacularly, to my ears at least: It annoyed me, or felt random at the best of times, and was mixed very badly: loud and clippy, no comparison to the nuanced work in the original IWD.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l5B1Fk3pUTc Certainly ideal as a source of much laughter by non metal heads. Saw the guy live. Impressive experience.

Went TN and replaced my *VA with a BenQ XL2730Z Also, replaced the HD 7970 with a Sapphire Fury

ooh yes, from that wonderfully strange movie Poor virgin Seargant Howie resisting temptation...

I interpreted that as Nvidia benefits little from DX12, because they have reached their potential in DX11. Do you know what a strawman is? Acting as though someone tried to make point A in order to refute that point A, while noone actually said A.

Interestingly enough, AMD might be the last to the game with Vulkan: Intel were the first with drivers promoted on the web, because their Vulkan driver development was outsourced to another company and that was used for much (all?) of the Valve Vulkan preview demos. nVidia are just now starting to promote their drivers to be ready with the first Vulkan releases. AMD has been silent so far, as far as I've read, about their Vulkan drivers. On DX12 vs. Mantle: http://nextgenapis.realtimerendering.com/ Check the second presentation (Next-Generation Graphics APIs: Similarities and Differences, by Tim Foley of nVidia). However, the comparison is still quite high level. I guess that many basic principles used in Engines with Mantles can be applied to the same engines using DX 12 or Vulkan, however there are differences in all the surrounding stuff. Take Vulkan's flexible layer architecture for example, or its shaders SPIR V which again can theoretically be compiled from any kind of source, even if there are only Open CL and GLSL compilers currently, as far as I'm aware.

Agreed. I'd bet that Pascal will close the gap in that respect, if not some driver fixes it for Maxwell before that, and then I'd bet, we'd read all over the web about the great innovation of async compute So you're implying here that Ashes uses an "unoptimized alt path" for nVidia? They don't - they use an alt path for that one feature for nVidia at nVidia's request: They leave out a feature that currently costs performance on their hardware in order to make the game run better. So you're implying here that someone said that "DX12 does nothing for Maxwell 2"? Strawman? Sure, the engine was designed with Mantle first, because it was the first low level API. Now it's ported to DX 12 - big deal? Probably not, as they even admit that async compute, which is the one feature in dispute currently, is used just for a few PP effects.

It does support it, in that it apparently executes the code. It just hurts performance to use it, because it seems that it is not actually (currently?) asynchronous but serialized with other workloads. Let's see if that's just some early woes of new features or an architectural problem. If it's the latter, they'll probably use it to push people to buy Pascal next year Also quite funny when thinking about the Anandtech article wrongly suggesting that Maxwell 2 is actually king of asynchronous computing by showing misleading numbers of "compute" capability for AMD here http://www.anandtech.com/show/9124/amd-dives-deep-on-asynchronous-shading and completely disregarding the facts shown in the article comments...

Submitted one bug report - I advise against changing resolution currently I also commented on the busy-ness (business?) of the portion of the outdoor area: There is too many disparate things going on imho. That also makes me wonder whether they can actually get much content done, because of the apparent effort put in that area. Lastly I still find the characters reacting far too slowly to movement orders because of the initial animations. I'm really looking forward to playing more of the game. Didn't expect an alpha to actually interest me for more than just seeing whether it runs on my system.

As their role in Fig is to oversee the company, and if at all anything beyond that, then at most being involved in the kickstarting process itself rather than development, I don't see Double Fine's invovlment as a liabilty at all. After all, their Broken Age kickstarter and the documentation of whole process were remarkably well done.

Oh yes! All these (A)D&D games on sale, there goes my game money for this month...

I don't know about Kaby Lake, but Pascal 10x faster? Yeah, sure :D 2x Perf/W would be nice, due to the shrink that is long, long overdue plus HBM. I'd not expect quite as much as 10x perf, in order to avoid being disappointed. (edited for English)

The hurdles to becoming an investor are pretty high though, and only really feasible for persons living in the USA.

10 AM PST on GOG, come on, I want to play some SRHK during the last days of my holiday

This is an alpha systems test. What I expected they'd test: Does the installation work on all hardware? Does the game start on all hardware? Are there fundamental glitches in the dialogue, sound or graphics engine? So I got more than I expected, as we already could give feedback on: What is the reaction to the text, to the GUI and to the animation style, all of which is already more than I'd see in other alpha tests. And I must say, I really liked it Niggles: * do the animated blue blobs on the GUI have a function later on? If not, animate them less. * movement feels way too indirect because of elaborate animations and speed based on clicking distance * horrible aliasing / too low res on shadows, reflections, in-game-items such as the bowl, and the inspect-icon * rendering speed is much too low, while the GUI feels okay-ish regarding its reaction time, though even that is slowed down due to fade-animations for dialogue-choices

They do, for this game at least that seems to use their hardware pretty well, while nVidia poured so many game specific optimization into their DX11 path that they don't gain much in this game unless very CPU bound. With DX12, optimal usage of resources is up to the engine devs. Previously, it was more of a trial and error process on the dev side because it was not very predictable how which GPU with which driver would react to their code, and driver optimization on the GPU side. [edit]For the more technically minded: Siggraph presentations about the new APIs, including practical examples from Oxide, Valve and Unity: http://nextgenapis.realtimerendering.com/

Fwiiw, my collector's box, sturdy by itself, was packaged well and arrived in good condition. The same is true for the even bigger and sturdier collector's box for a second kickstarter game. However the regular cardboard box of a third game I had backed on kickstarter arrived in pretty bad shape. Conclusion: Well... it's hit and miss with those long distance shipping items. If at all possible in your country, I'd even advice to get boxes at local retailers, but I know that a) in most non-European countries such retailers hardly exist anymore, b) the boxes they sell contain discs or keys for almost always Steam (or battle.net, or Ubi-thingie) platform based games, where the physical copy itself is not worth a thing because it's bound to some download platform anyway.

So I decided to not longer wait for OLED, and move down from a VA to a TN display and bought a BenQ XL2730Z. I'm actually positively surprised how easily the impact of 144 vs. 60 Hz and the performance of that gaming panel compared to the previous office monitor offset the impression of the only okay-ish black levels, even after years and years of VA panels at home and IPS at work. And until my graphics card arrives that allows for the use of Freesync, I enjoy the effect of the motion blur reduction in games. Unexpectedly very effective.

2033 Redux. Will get the second one if I like the first one, hopefully get around to playing it this weekend. Yes, I heard about the importance of saving ammunition - fits the story and my way of playing games

I finally own a Metro game now Enjoyed the books and looking forward to playing.

Agreed on the AMD-Ref-Coolers. Notable exceptions: 295x2 and the Fury X, as well as the lower tier cards. My trusty old 4770 with its humble reference cooler was really quiet Regarding the ATX specifications: I really wonder why no vendor designs cards in "upside down" with the hot parts on top, as well as their coolers (with the only exceptions I know of being some rare passively cooled ones). It does not serve any purpose under low load, as long as your monitor's resolution fits in the frame buffer. And that takes up a laughably small amout of memory. However, 2D applications as well as non-graphical applications can make use of the video ram, and the GPU's capabilities: GPU accelerated filters for movies, or Photoshop filters, or 2D games, or browser rendering, general GUI rendering in modern OS s* or password cracking software and other so called "GPGPU" (general purpose graphics processing unit) applications. Often found in high end super computer simulation applications, but more and more in desktop applications as well. *: how to correctly spell the plural of an acronym?

Nice, have fun Possible spoiler

mh-dap-dap-dap-mh

I don't know if Obsidian added achievements to GOG Galaxy, but yes, if playing via the Galaxy client, some games have achievements. Only seen that on Game of Thrones so far, but that's because I normally start the games directly.