angshuman

Personally, I don't like the idea of gaming laptops. They... are heavy, run hot, are ridiculously expensive, usually perform lower than similarly-specced desktops because of thermal and power restrictions, provide little-to-no opportunity for overclocking due to the same restrictions, have slow and relatively failure-prone hard drives, and have small(er) and usually low-quality LCD displays. The display issue, as well as the keyboard/mouse discomfort can be resolved by using a docking station, but the tradeoffs between mobility and capability will always be there. I prefer small, light, silent, cool laptops and huge, noisy, uber-powerful desktops. Of course, if you do need/desire a mobile gaming solution (and I can understand why many people do), there isn't any other alternative.

You know, I betcha if Black-Isle or Bioware was doing this game you'd be saying "Yeah, the graphics aren't the absolute cutting edge, but they are adequate enough and its the gameplay that comes through in the end." The situation is no different here. Personally I think they look at least as good as Oblivion. And honestly I am glad I am not discerning enough to look at a picture and tell if its got anistrophic filtering on or off. I would go crazy nit-picking over graphics all the time. Remember folks, this is not just some action game with RPG-light elements. Its a full-blown RPG with a huge world, tons of spoken dialogue and actual choices. And NO LOADING ZONES. At least cut it a bit of slack in the graphics department. And even then I think the graphics are pretty good. No, I wouldn't have said anything different had the game been made by BIS or Bioware or Obsidian or Stellar Stone. An ugly screenshot is an ugly screenshot is an ugly screenshot. Also, I never talked about the game engine itself. We have seen good-looking renders from that engine on these very forums. My comment was on those screenshots (or video-caps), they were pretty ugly. "Oblivion running on a GeForce3" is the first thing that came to mind. I'm sure the engine itself is good, it's just that whoever took that video ran the engine at its lowest possible settings.

They didn't seem to be video caps at all (how/why on earth would you vid-cap a game anyway?). They looked like plain old screenshots, and pretty ugly ones at that. They seem to have been taken on a low-end system. Low-res textures, horrible texture-filtering (not anisotropic), and no anti-aliasing to boot. I don't think these screens do the game engine any justice. They look like something out of the Half-Life 1 era, only with teh Bloom.

True, and I think so aswell. You guys are probably right... but I just *can't* convince myself unless I see results showing exactly where the bottleneck lies. The Aegia folks have some really clever people with them (I know of at least one). It's hard for me to imagine that they would bring out a product that is not very good at doing exactly what it was designed to do. But then again, products like that Killer NIC come out time and again, and shatter all my delusions about Mankind's competence.

There are a bunch of guides and forum posts on the internet about how to adjust the display DPI so that your fonts look okay. I've tweaked and re-tweaked them, but I'm still not 100% happy with the results. Try typing "nvidia", "linux", "fonts" and "DPI" into google and see where that gets you.

Bok, are you sure it's the PhysX itself that is getting saturated? Couldn't it be that your GeForce is getting overloaded with all the polygons the PhysX is churning out?

I have no doubt that this thing is going to make zero perceptible difference to gameplay (unless the Windows IP stack has some ghastly inefficiencies). As Alan said, router delays dominate over internal CPU delays by such a huge margin it's not even funny. Rough calculation: My guess is it takes a few 100's of instructions to process a UDP packet. A typical ping is 20ms. A Conroe can execute roughly 100 *million* instructions in that much time. Even more ironic is the fact that the embedded CPU on the card is probably several hundred times slower than a Conroe!! (although it wouldn't suffer from many of the OS and communication overheads that your main CPU suffers from.) I do however have to admit that the thing is pretty darned cool. It really is a full computer running Linux (so are a bunch of high-end server NICs these days, but I don't think they are as "affordable"). You can log on to the Linux system inside and play around. It actually has a USB port where you can plug in a device, and run drivers for that device on the card's CPU. Very cool. Way too expensive for me to consider buying it even as a toy, though.

http://www.woot.com - PCI Express - 7 vertex pipes, 20 pixel pipes @450MHz - 256MB GDDR3 @1320MHz Specs are similar to the 7800GT, but clocks are faster for this thing. Seems like a really good deal, but Woot's offerings run out real fast.

http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=713073 I'm not an audiophile by any stretch, but this stuff appears to be quite impressive. I don't know if any existing consumer-grade hardware or software does anything like this. +1 to Vista. Now, if only they could fix the mess called DXVA...

Corsair's "Value" range for has worked well for me (without overclocking, of course). I've only used DDR1, I don't know if they have an equivalent for DDR2. In general, you should be fine with brands like Corsair, Crucial, Kingston and OCZ. Take a look at the RAM timing numbers (e.g., 2-2-2-5) for the value-priced sticks from these brands, and buy the sticks with the lowest latencies that you can afford.

Wow, this video looks like it's from an entirely different game :D. Much nicer than the previous video (from a cosmetic point of view at least).

LostStraw's suggestion should work. If it doesn't (i.e., Windows' Disk Management tool can't find the un-allocated space), you could try using a Linux install CD to get into a recovery console and use fdisk to create the new partition. I can walk you through the steps. Fdisk is a bit tricky to use, but for a task as simple as this it should be fairly straightforward. EDIT: I was refering to LostStraw's first suggestion to create two partitions. You can't use fdisk to merge partitions, I'm afraid.

I wanna learn too... I'm not sure how it works, but don't think you have a choice on how to play or whether to play at all... you're ALWAYS playing TOMBS, and there's nothing you can do about it... :ph34r:

Sure, sure, I wouldn't argue with that. Your previous comment was a lot stronger. :D

Wait, is he talking about simply an OS update to support the DX10 abstractions, or a physical hardware upgrade to support DX10 primitives? In case it's simply an OS patch, it's a good thing, though somewhat insignificant (it's a friggin patch, what's the big deal). A hardware upgrade, on the other hand, would make a lot of existing X360 customers very, very annoyed unless MS offered a free exchange program or the magical ability to download the new GPU via Xbox Live.

Why is there so much interest in a post-apocalyptic setting? Is it primarily Fallout nostalgia? Or is it that the common-guy-becomes-hero phenomenon is much more plausible in such a setting, which makes for a more believable plot and more roleplaying opportunities than the usual Chosen-One fare? Not that I'm complaining, it'd be a welcome change from the huge number of medieval-fantasy themed games.

A lot of folks wouldn't agree, but to each his own.

What's stupid about Hot Coffee? Huh? HUH???

Wow, good find. Their response was beautiful: "real cause is still unknown". I can't believe they get away with business practices like this. In fact, I can't understand why well-established companies like MSI, ASUS and Pixelview have to resort to such unscrupulous business practices at all.

What's that GRUB bug you were talking about? I really hate having to mess with bootloaders. I was planning to upgrade to FC5 sometime (currently using FC4). By the way, are you using the x86-64 version or the x86 version? I tried the 64-bit distribution for FC4 when it was released and X11 just plain didn't work... neither the default DRI drivers nor the Nvidia proprietary ones, and I tried a bunch of different kernels and Xorg releases. Decided to stick to 32-bit for the time being.

"I sue dead people..."

Now, THIS is what I call ridiculous. It seems if you listen to a piece of music, transcribe it by ear and post your interpretation of the piece in the form of a tabulature or arrangement, you are violating a copyright. I can perhaps understand if, due to the way the copyright is defined, something like this becomes technically unavoidably illegal. I never really expected them to go after online sites and shut them down. This is really, really low. http://yro.slashdot.org/yro/06/08/13/1256224.shtml Come to think of it, this is probably good for me personally. I'll now have to focus on my ear training instead of getting a free ride off of online tabulatures. "

That sounds exactly like Hades.

This is genuinely good news .

I think you misread me . My comment on atmospheric neutrons wasn't meant to be an attempt to downplay the existence or seriousness of the crosstalk issue... those damn neutrons are seriously becoming a pain (just like crosstalk is). I mentioned Denver because the neutron flux there is among the highest in the continental US (you'll see the city being mentioned in a lot of literature on neutron-induced bit-flips).