Metro 2033 and other PC games which can only be maxed out with hardware from the distant future.

[Griffolion]

Physx will drop performance by about 10%, besides, even if the physx calculations are taken off the GPU, they're only ever being put on the CPU so another component somewhere else is getting bombed by it.

Meh just thought it may have been worth a shot. If he's tried everything else, he may as well try that too. If the other users with thier AMD GPU's and thier dual core machines can handle the physics calculations I'm sure his i7 EE can too.

That reminds me, what was the official architecture name for the E Intel CPUs?
Example: E7400
Sorry if that wasn't clear.

It was simply called the 'Core' Architecture. The Codename for the particular family of chips that E7400 belonged to is 'Wolfdale'.

 

[Joe Deadman]

I've been playing metro 2033 on the highest settings fine.
i7 920 @ 2.67Ghz, GTS 250 and 6GB of RAM.
... so yes hello from the future!

That being said I do get a bit of slowdown when staring directly at a surface exit in the stations what with all the fancy lighting and particle effects.

 

[Griffolion]

Physx will drop performance by about 10%, besides, even if the physx calculations are taken off the GPU, they're only ever being put on the CPU so another component somewhere else is getting bombed by it.

Meh just thought it may have been worth a shot. If he's tried everything else, he may as well try that too. If the other users with thier AMD GPU's and thier dual core machines can handle the physics calculations I'm sure his i7 EE can too.

That reminds me, what was the official architecture name for the E Intel CPUs?
Example: E7400
Sorry if that wasn't clear.

It was simply called the 'Core' Architecture. The Codename for the particular family of chips that E7400 belonged to is 'Penryn'.

Not too imaginative on that one! Well anything is better than the innuendo of "Sandy Bridge". Hasn't stopped me buying a Core i5 2400 though.

Haha, Sandy Balls reference?

Yeah, i'm going to be in the market for one in the coming year, though i might wait for Ivy Bridge in the fall. I want a K series one though for better overclocking.

For now though my I5 rocks.

 

[Woodsey]

I can run Metro 2033 on DX11 with the highest settings (bar one DX11 specific effect that really chews up the frame rate) at a great frame rate

So clearly not full visual settings then, eh?

Highest settings BAR ONE.

Are you just trying to prove that you can read (in which case, congratulations) or did you have an actual point?

 

[RobfromtheGulag]

I like the fact that they push the envelope. Since I'm not in the 'wait in line on opening day' guys anymore I don't mind too much.

On a bit of a side note, FarCry and Crysis are awesome games I've beaten probably 50 times each. I wish the same could be said of Metro 2033. You'd have to pay me to beat that a second time.

 

[Stoogie]

Lapping honestly won't do a great deal because the thermal paste (when properly applied) is supposed to do what lapping does (even out the contact surface, leaving as few crags and gaps as possible) and if you say you got the paste applied right then it would be wasted effort.

man well that took ages, im using the latest Opera browser and u cant highlight text cause it randomly stops highlight and drags cut and paste the text while u still have the left mouse click held down its hell. took me like 30 mins to cut ur quote, but yea i just copied the whole thing in notepad before it cut paste spammed then edited it there. anyway back to wat i was saying.

Lapping reduces the amount of metal between the heatsink and the actual cpu aswell as smoothing the surface out, it also reduces temps by up to 10C.

 

[Tyrant T100]

Stalker Clear Sky gets a mention from me.

I'm running a GTX460 with 4GB of Ram and a 2.5ghz Quad core duo and yet it still is clunky in areas.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZgC5E9sKkB4&hd=1
As you can see from the video it stutters quite alot. (Although Fraps is taking my FPS down a notch)

 

[Griffolion]

Lapping honestly won't do a great deal because the thermal paste (when properly applied) is supposed to do what lapping does (even out the contact surface, leaving as few crags and gaps as possible) and if you say you got the paste applied right then it would be wasted effort.

man well that took ages, im using the latest Opera browser and u cant highlight text cause it randomly stops highlight and drags cut and paste the text while u still have the left mouse click held down its hell. took me like 30 mins to cut ur quote, but yea i just copied the whole thing in notepad before it cut paste spammed then edited it there. anyway back to wat i was saying.

Lapping reduces the amount of metal between the heatsink and the actual cpu aswell as smoothing the surface out, it also reduces temps by up to 10C.

If you think it will help then you should go for it, but you're merely treating the symptoms and not the cause which is possibly a bad CPU. See what your warranty says about such things.

 

[Stoogie]

Lapping honestly won't do a great deal because the thermal paste (when properly applied) is supposed to do what lapping does (even out the contact surface, leaving as few crags and gaps as possible) and if you say you got the paste applied right then it would be wasted effort.

man well that took ages, im using the latest Opera browser and u cant highlight text cause it randomly stops highlight and drags cut and paste the text while u still have the left mouse click held down its hell. took me like 30 mins to cut ur quote, but yea i just copied the whole thing in notepad before it cut paste spammed then edited it there. anyway back to wat i was saying.

Lapping reduces the amount of metal between the heatsink and the actual cpu aswell as smoothing the surface out, it also reduces temps by up to 10C.

If you think it will help then you should go for it, but you're merely treating the symptoms and not the cause which is possibly a bad CPU. See what your warranty says about such things.

i never keep warrenty for anything lol. i baught it from pccasegear in aus, my fav site. its good enuff for the time being. if it fails ill just buy another one. cause i can.

 

[Griffolion]

Lapping honestly won't do a great deal because the thermal paste (when properly applied) is supposed to do what lapping does (even out the contact surface, leaving as few crags and gaps as possible) and if you say you got the paste applied right then it would be wasted effort.

man well that took ages, im using the latest Opera browser and u cant highlight text cause it randomly stops highlight and drags cut and paste the text while u still have the left mouse click held down its hell. took me like 30 mins to cut ur quote, but yea i just copied the whole thing in notepad before it cut paste spammed then edited it there. anyway back to wat i was saying.

Lapping reduces the amount of metal between the heatsink and the actual cpu aswell as smoothing the surface out, it also reduces temps by up to 10C.

If you think it will help then you should go for it, but you're merely treating the symptoms and not the cause which is possibly a bad CPU. See what your warranty says about such things.

i never keep warrenty for anything lol. i baught it from pccasegear in aus, my fav site. its good enuff for the time being. if it fails ill just buy another one. cause i can.

Haha fair enough then

 

[ph0b0s123]

Wow this thread has exploded. Thanks again for chimming in.

Off topic, but for those asking here is the full spec to answer your questions:

Intel Core I7 1366 960 @ 3.8Ghz
Thermalright Ultra 120 Extreme Cooler
6GB RAM @ 1333 Mhz
DFI X58 T3eH8 Ultra SLI Certified Motherboard
2 x Nvidia GTX 580 @ stock
Intel X25M G2 160GB SDD
Enermax Revoluton 1050 Watt PSU
On-board Realtek ACL 889 7.1 Soundcard
Win 7 Home Prem X64

There is no throttling happening. Apart from Stalker COP eveything else DX 11 is perfectly smooth, so I doubt any major system issues.

And I can tell it is the game being too fast for the GPU's as Msi afterbuner gives GPU load stats and when the framerate goes rubbish both GPU's are at nearly 100% utilisation.

And yes I am running physx. And no I don't won't to turn it off. My whole point is I should not have to. Also ths games is a ***** to tweak the settings on as i game you have only 3 options 'low, high, very high'. If you want anything in between you have to mess in multiple config files, because it is a steam titles. Just add insult to injury.

I still think developers hurth themselves as I think people may well stay away from a game that they know they cannot play fully at launch. I did this with a few games, Crysis included. Was great for me as I got the game at a bargin. Not so great for developers who get less sales at launch when the price is high.

 

[MrJoyless]

I wanted to talk about PC games that you can only play at full visual settings with hardware that comes out many years after the game is first released.

We have had a break from these types of games for a while due to the whole consoles being stuck on DirectX 9 thing. But I brought Metro 2033 to go with the 2 new Nvidia 580's I brought. It runs like a dog even on 2 top of the range GPU's that are a generation or two above what was around when the game was released. And this makes me ask of this of other members of the forum. What were the developers thinking?

Crysis was guilty of this years ago as well where it was only finally playable with everything turned up full about 3 years after its release. There are countless others back through PC gaming history. I think there was Far Cry before that, etc

I have a love hate relationship with these games as first they show of what a PC can do, but at the same time seem to be designed for hardware that will existing year in the future if at all. Which just seems so dumb as I won't play them until they are playable. Crysis I did not buy until I had hardware that could play it fully.

This is one of the many reasons that turned me off of PC gaming...i want the best its just how i am and not being able to have the best, graphical settings or RAM or the next gen video card, is amazingly frustrating.

I think the biggest issue i have with this is how the pricing works, you can buy an ALMOST as good as the newest piece of hardware for damn near half of what the current release is. It just seems to me that prices normalize a little too fast for comfort to not raise my suspicions.

I guess this leads to a second issue of performance advancement, i remember from 1990 to around 2004 you were able to see HUGE leaps in performance from one year to the next, now its kind of MEH...yes there are improvements but having a dual core 3.1Ghz processor vs a quad core 2.4Ghz processor isnt a big leap unless you like running power point 30 browser tabs and world of warcraft while watching blu rays on itunes.

the laptop i have had since 2004 (no it wasnt some 5000$ monster packed with the best of everything when i got it) can still run everything smoothly that is coming out now, albeit without max settings in some cases. Try and do that in 1995 to 2000 and you would see a system that could maybe crawl through some games...maybe.

 

[ph0b0s123]

I still think developers hurth themselves as I think people may well stay away from a game that they know they cannot play fully at launch. I did this with a few games, Crysis included. Was great for me as I got the game at a bargin. Not so great for developers who get less sales at launch when the price is high.

I don't care too much, I prefer a playable frame rate. If I have to turn PhysX off then I will. Sometimes I get confused by too many effects being used and put them on low so I can understand what's going on. I do that in League of Legends to better understand teamfights. If I can't max out a game's settings that doesn't mean I will abandon all that gameplay and premise just because of some anti-aliasing or filtering. That just seems like a waste to me.

Also, you have the most Australian moherboard I have ever seen. GREEN AND GOLD TRIPLE CHANNELLING. EVERYWHERE!

When I am midway way through or towards the end of my PC's upgrade cycle I will live with it and turn stuff down without complaint. But just after upgrading I get pissed, if I have to turn anything off.

And yes you are right, the motherboard has the worst color scheme ever. But makes up for it in other clever thing it can do....

 

[Paragon Fury]

Its because PC games are on a never-ending quest to complete one thing; a game so powerful, so demanding that even attempting to install it to less than $6,000 custom built, top of the line Cybertronian PC will cause the PC to explode.

 

[Sn1P3r M98]

That's a load of bollocks

Indeed it is! I run it on Medium-High on a Nvidia 9800GT 1GB.

EDIT: Scratch that, I just ran it on Very High when the RAM wasn't being used by anything else (but I'm still on DX9 due to Windows XP).

 

[Wicky_42]

I wanted to talk about PC games that you can only play at full visual settings with hardware that comes out many years after the game is first released.

Ah yes, Farcry 1 - so far ahead of its time, and yet combined its graphical genius with great gameplay. Metro seems to be the same idea - awesome engine plus nice gameplay (any funky end sequence!). Both scaled pretty damn well - I was running Metro on a 4-5 year old mid-range rig on medium with few issues and no knock to enjoyability.

Graphics aren't everything, kids. They're fun, but you don't NEED max settings to properly enjoy a game. Well, other than Crysis needing physics above 'low' - that made a titanic difference to gameplay. But yeah, point stands.

 

[Nutcase]

Was trying to keep this as a thread about over the PC games. Metro 2033 is just the latest example.

-snip-

That's an utterly retarded attitude. You want to remove one of the strengths of the open platform PC is, for no gain whatsoever.

Current situation: we can play the game at a certain level of graphic fidelity (say, "medium"), and then in a few years we have the option of going to "highest" and getting even better graphics.
What you'd apparently want: developers rename the current "medium" to "highest". The game never looks better than "medium" until the end of time.

I understand what you are saying but publishers doing that is risky as sometimes to make things faster for the next GPU gen instead of using raw processing power, some new way of doing the graphics is done. This happened a few year ago when hardware transform lighting came in. Games that supported T&L were faster on later GPU's. Games that were already slow and did not support T&L did not get any faster with new GPU's. This is always the concern when developers put out a games that on max settings is not playable on current hardware.

GPUs have always improved in brute strength in addition to possibly receiving additional features. Your argument is invalid.

As I said before if the developers have been given early video cards that will be coming out after the game is released to equate max settings to then OK. But assuming that later generations of GPU will be able to play a game you are making is just wrong.

No, it's perfectly reasonable and one of the platform's key strengths. What you are asking for is strictly worse graphics across the board.

Also how can you properly bug max settings in a game when the hardware does not exist to play it properly. Effectively you are running beta / untested settings.

False again. A game thoroughly tested while it runs at 5fps is still thoroughly tested.
Besides, even if there was a few percent chance of a bug sneaking in which only manifests on those maxed settings, it would still be preferable that the game takes the chance and tries to offer better settings than that it does not even try.