Obsidian can brag on this one...;)

[waltc]

What a super game. It's rare when I get to really gush about a game, but this one is one of those!  The content, the graphics, the controls, the story is a real gem. Might even say "magnificent."  In the 1.0.6.0 version, It all works together beautifully. They took what they did in the first game, which was a good one, and markedly improved on virtually every aspect of the first one. At 120Hz 4k with ray tracing options and HDR tuned on, and the IQ options maxed out, the game is gorgeous--likely the best-rendered game I own...;)  I cannot recommend this game enough as it is first-rate entertainment. (This is partly because of my new 42" Envia OLED monitor, which greatly improves the rendering universally, but the game itself is spectacular.)

Yesterday I played for ~7-8 hours straight and saw only a single Arkansas crash the entire time, Freesync Premium OFF. I tried to stop sooner several times--but I couldn't...;)  For 9070XT owners like myself, I want to make the following suggestion. Uninstall your previous drivers using the updated AMD cleanup utility (it works well and is newer than the last version I had installed, which didn't work so well with the latest Win11 builds), and then be careful to install the recommended Win11 Adrenalin 25.12.1 driver from the AMD site--the ~991mb version, the "b" version--(not the 1.64GB version, the "c" version).  If you were having trouble with frequent driver timeouts, that's what mostly ended them for me.  I was very pleasantly surprised!  Also, one other thing that I did was to turn Freesync Premium OFF--something there seems to be interfering with the game engine and was causing driver timeouts every 10 minutes to an hour when I had mistakenly installed the "c" drivers.)  I'm going to test Freesync Premium with the current drivers today to see if I get similar results, or whether the "b" driver fixes that particular problem.) I'll return to this post and edit in the results.

EDIT: The culprit seems to be the VRR setting as I'm running under HDMI 2.1. With VRR on, whether Freesync Premium is on or off, Arkansas crashes seem far more frequent. The VRR setting is only found in Global GPU settings as it is not supported in the individual game profiles. So I turn it off globally and then I turn off Freesync Premium in the individual game profile, and the Arkansas crashes are much further apart.  I'm going to try the game running with DP 1.4, since that's what my monitor supports, to see if this situation can be alleviated--I'm surprised it's taken me so long to do that...;)  I'll be back later when I reach a conclusion.

EDIT #2:  First, I want to state that switching to DP 1.4 from HDMI 2.1 has pretty much stopped the driver timeouts for me, I'm guessing because DP1.4 doesn't expressly support VRR.  I used the HDMI connection simply because the raw bandwidth numbers look better for HDMI 2.1, but the fact for me is that DP 1.4 looks just as good if not better--and I can play for hours without the driver timeouts I was getting before using an HDMI port!     

I wanted to add this next comment, which I meant to include in my description of how much I like this game, but forgot.  This is the first game I've played in which Spacebar/Jump actually initiates a movement I'd call an authentic jump...;)  Most if not all games provide a jump that is good for maybe six inches high unless it's something germane to the plot of the game.  This jump command actually initiates a real jump, for a very pleasant change. And I'm not counting the personal thrusters

 

Edited 23 hours ago by waltc
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