angshuman

2 new classes, Assassin (critical-strikes, ability to teleport) and Ritualist (sort of like an evil Monk).

Guild Wars' second chapter is being named "Factions", and a free preview event is going to be held from January 20-22. Key(s) and the client program will be available on their website on January 13, and from what I've read said key(s) will not be in short supply. You do not have to have an existing Guild Wars account to play this Chapter 2 preview. The event is expected to be primarily PvP focused, but there were hints about some PvE content as well. Linkie.

That was pretty impressive for a rush job.

Talk about irresponsible reporting. Edit: Anyway, it's IGN, so who cares about what they "believe".

QFT.

Vole.

Advance Wars. (w00t)

I agree wholeheartedly. In fact, even for people who do not have up-to-date PC's, the X360 probably does not appear very attractive now simply because of the lack of good games, but that does not mean it is a failed product. My point was that technically, the console itself has achieved what it had set out to do (significant performance improvement over the previous generation Xbox, at par with modern PC's), and now it is up to the games to ensure profitability -- as has always been the story with consoles. There's absolutely nothing wrong with the product (except maybe those PSU related problems which will likely be fixed in the next revision).

I think the X360 has more or less delivered on what it promised -- better graphics, a more seamless integration with its Live service, and a less ugly console box. You can't really complain about its technological prowess, at $400, it gives you performance that is more or less at par with a contemporary $2000 gaming rig (I don't think the HDTV price is relevant). I don't know *what* people were expecting from its graphics, but from the screenshots of PGR3 and NFSMW that I've seen, they're pretty darn nice. Of course, it will fall behind pretty soon, but that's how it's always been for consoles. In fact, I look at that as a positive aspect -- you're not forced to upgrade your graphics card every year in order to be able to play the latest games. Games themselves are a hit-and-miss affair. Personally, I don't see a single game as of today that will make me buy the console, but hopefully that will change. Right now, though, yeah the selection is pretty crappy. But isn't that what this thread was about to begin with? What are the games we'd *like* to see on the X360, games that would make us want to buy the console?

I recently read an interesting article that gave a very intuitive explanation on why all these digital "copyright protection" systems just cannot work. It was actually an excerpt from a talk an EFF lawyer gave to some MS executives. Security algorithms usually work under the following framework: Alice wants to send a message to Bob, but Charlie is waiting to intercept the message and use it for his own malicious purposes. Pretty much all solutions to the problem boil down to using some form of a key that only Alice and Bob know about and that can be used to encrypt or decrypt the message using some algorithm (it's a simplification, but that's the basic idea). Although everyone knows the algorithms, only Alice and Bob know the key, so the message is safe from Charlie. In DRM systems, the primary problem is that Bob and Charlie are the same person -- the consumer! The publisher (Alice) wants to sell you some content, they want you to be able to use it (otherwise you wouldn't have paid for it), but they don't want you to be able to freely use it as you please. The content is therefore encrypted using a "key". However, without the key, the consumer cannot access the content. Therefore, the publisher has no choice but to actually supply the consumer with the key (in the form of the decoding hardware/software inside your DVD player or Xbox) and then threaten to sue the consumer's ass if they attempt to actually discover what the key is. Supplying the key to Charlie makes a mockery of the years of research in security theories and invalidates the very basis of all traditional security algorithms. If publishers come up with some new fantastic fundamental security theories, fine, but until then DRM systems will continue to fail.

Who cares about pirated games?!?? I want to install Linux on an X360

That's a slightly tricky process. Before you attempt it, you should know that in order to re-install it, you'll need some thermal material remover, and some fresh thermal interface (such as Arctic Silver). In case you have this stuff, you'll first have to unlock the heatsink, then twist it clockwise and counterclockwise slightly until it disengages from the CPU, pull it up and out of the way, and finally unlock and remove the CPU.

The fact that you're not hearing any beeps seems to indicate that the machine power-up sequence is not completing successfully. I'm assuming you are using single-card mode. Have you tried each of your cards in each 16x slot (all 4 combinations)? Edit: If that doesn't work, I'd suggest registering at the Nvnews forums (http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin) and posting there, the guys there have a huge amount of experience with troubleshooting stuff and are usually very helpful.

1. First, as mkreku suggested, try booting the machine in single-card mode. Your single card needs to be in the "primary" PCIe slot, so you might need to try both in case it's not obvious which one is the primary (it often isn't, and the manual isn't always correct). 2. As long as your card is seated firmly, that white piece of plastic shouldn't matter too much (I might be wrong about this though), my guess is it's job is only to hold the card in place. 3. For SLI to work, you need to connect the two cards using a bridge that should have been supplied with your motherboard. Did you connect the cards? 4. The best way to power the cards is without using any of those weird converter dongles, if your PSU has a male connector that can plug directly into your graphics card. If your PSU does not have that specialized connector, you will need to use the adapters you mentioned. I don't know why your adapter has 2 inputs ... at any rate, don't supply power into both, one should be good enough. 5. The LED's are probably not working because the polarity might be reversed. Motherboard manufacturers often screw up the diagrams in the manuals.

You're telling me... it's a freaking nightmare. You would have thought they would come up with a better solution at least for routing power from the PSU to the devices... Hopefully, data cables will become less of an issue as more devices switch to SATA. A roomy case definitely helps. However, the most painful step in assembling a machine for me is making the case-to-motherboard connections: USB, Firewire, fans, sound, etc. Ugh.

It's not necessarily about the size of the flat panel, it's about its "native" resolution (usually the highest resolution the panel can support). Any resolution other than the native resolution looks like azz on a flat panel.

That, my friend, looks like one *beautiful* power supply unit. In which case, it is also quite likely that the manufacturers have actually been conservative with the wattage rating. You should be fine. And congratulations on your new card. IMHO, it is the best you can buy today at that price range.

Commissar, if you're going to be plugging in a 7800 or X1800 class card into your machine, simply the peak "wattage" of your Power Supply is not going to give you an indication of whether it can handle your card. A lot of el-cheapo power supplies have massive peak wattages (500W) but are extremely crappy since they cannot supply adequate current (amperage) on their 12V rails. When you open up your box, apart from the peak power rating, also take a look at how many Amps it gives on the +12V rail. There should be a table of sorts on the PSU giving the amperage of the different rails. Look for a row or column that says something like +12 : 18A. This means your PSU can output 18 amps on the +12V rail. In order to run a 7800GTX or X1800XT or even an X850XT class graphics card, you want at least 24-26 amps on the +12V. Some modern PSU's have "dual" 12V rails, with, for example, 18A on each rail (for a total of 36A), and these should also be good. To give you an idea of how important this rating is, consider this: you can probably buy a 500W PSU for $20 that puts out 10A on the 12V rail. I don't think you'll even be able to successfully boot your machine with this, if you're using one of these high-power cards.

What he said.

Aha! But Figure 3 is a zoomed-in image, and it is supposed to look that way, simply because there is not sufficient information available about the frame at that high a resolution. Given an ideal "picture" and a final target resolution, AA attempts to create the perfect digitization of said "picture" at that target resolution. If you blow it up, it will look weird. But at exactly the target resolution, an infinite-X antialiased image should look *exactly* as perfect as is possible for a continuous-space "picture" to look at that resolution, and 16x SSAA gets bloody close to that.

Absolutely, FPS comes first and foremost. Aliasing might make the game look horrible, but a slideshow makes it unplayable. However, once you see that your system is maintaining your desired FPS (the comfort level varies from person to person, of course), that's when you can start bumping up the resolution/AA/AF while keeping the fps within your constraints. That varies from game to game and scene to scene. I'm not completely sure about what factors exactly affect this, but I'll go out on a limb and say that with MSAA, if your scene has a lot of polygon edges, you'll probably see a more significant performance degradation due to MSAA than with resolution bumping.

I don't mean to sound like a smartass, but that is completely incorrect. In its simplest (and most inefficient) form, antialiasing is accomplished by Supersampling (SSAA). Here, the frame is rendered at a much larger resolution than the actual output resolution. Then, every target output pixel for the final image is generated by a weighted averaging of several pixels in that region in the larger image. This filtering operation is *very* different from a Blur operation. Blurring results in detail loss, as you correctly mentioned. There is *no* loss in detail due to antialiasing, mathematically or visually. Most modern cards use multi-sampling (MSAA), which I don't understand completely, but I know that it involves rotating points along polygon edges according to a fixed grid, and supersampling only these points. But the basic principle is still the same -- rendering multiple pixels for the same point, and then filtering those into the final pixel. Antialiasing always involves aggregating an *excess* of information (which is where the performance hit comes from) into a single unit, and there is no loss of detail in the process, not within polygons, not at polygon edges, not anywhere.

Yes and No. Pretty much all LCD displays completely suck at non-native resolutions. They also suck at color reproduction (except S-IPS panels and to a certain extent PVA/MVA panels), and have poor response times. Their only advantage over CRT's is desk space and weight. Much more noticeable than on a CRT, at least IMO.

Agreed, and I do play on a 1280-native flat panel. Also, I absolutely cannot tolerate even the slightest amount of aliasing. I don't know why. It just gets on my nerves. Any resolution other than the native 1280 looks like garbage on my monitor, so I'm stuck at that resolution. In fact, when I was hunting for a monitor, the only reason I chose my 19" PVA to a superior 20" S-IPS was because the 20" had a 1600 native resolution, and I was sure I couldn't get a lot of games games to run smooth at that resolution with any amount of AA.

Can't comment on FEAR's gameplay since I gave up on the game pretty quick. I liked HL2 and Halo's gameplay though (hated Quake 4), so I think I might have enjoyed FEAR's too. As far as FEAR's graphics engine is concerned, I have serious complaints. If I have a $600 video card (that's how much a 7800GTX 256 used to cost when I bought mine) living in a $2000 machine, I have the right to demand to play any game at 1280x1024 with 4xAA/8xAF at 60fps, at least a game that claims to be a class-A title. It's not about how many shader effects you put into the graphics engine. Clearly, FEAR's engine was too bloated with crazy shaders that even ridiculously expensive hardware available when the game was launched couldn't handle. This, in my opinion, was a flaw in the design decisions that the engine developers made. They should have cut down on the features of the engine. And if such a cutting down resulted in the game looking horrid, then the engine was crappy to begin with. The souped-up Doom 3 engine used for Quake 4 is great-looking. Subjectively speaking, IMHO overall it looks better than FEAR. And subjectively speaking, Source beats the living daylights out of all of all of these. Unified lighting be damned, real-time shadows be damned, parallax mapping be damned. Give me a game that looks gorgeous and plays smooth. Half Life 2 accomplishes both. FEAR accomplishes neither.