PC games

[TiefBlau]

All FPS's are instantly funner on the PC. Especially Team Fortress 2.

Besides that, Starcraft 2, Civilization 5, World of Goo, Uplink, The Orange Box (because really, it's worth mentioning), Audiosurf, Company of Heroes, I'll Come Up With Others Later.

 

[octafish]

snip.
I have a Phenom II x4 3.2GhZ, 6GB RAM, and a Raedon HD 5830. I have yet to come across a game that I can't run at maxed out settings, 1920x1080, 2xAA @ 60FPS. That includes Crysis. 8GB of RAM is overkill ATM, as is any quad or six core processor when rarely do current games even utilize two cores, really.

Just curious have you tried Metro 2033? That bastard chew up Crysis and spits it out. I have a 580 GTX (overkill I know) and I was hoping I could run it maxed out on my 1080 monitor with physx, but no.

 

[TheComedown]

http://svc.systemrequirementslab.com/CYRI/analysis.aspx This should help.

How will that help? Did you read OP? He was asking for game suggestions, not for hardware compatibility information.

 

[psychic psycho]

Batman: Arkham Asylum (recommend getting a wired 360 controller for games like these, roughly $20)

Actually, Batman: Arkham Asylum controls better with mouse + keyboard.
As opposed to Assassin's Creed 2, which doesn't.

Yeah, I'm gonna have to agree. Batman indeed plays better with the mouse and keyboard. Haven't played AC2 though because of the DRM. Still it's probably a good idea to get a controller at some point, maybe for racing games like Dirt.

More on Topic: It's already been mentioned, but Deus Ex is an awesome game. Perfect for someone who enjoys rpgs and fps. It's an older game though. Since you posted that you just got a new computer maybe your looking for newer games.

 

[Eclectic Dreck]

Cpu: amd phenom II
Gpu:gtx 460
Ram: 4gb

Yikes, that will be one under performing machine.

The Core i5 cpus are way down in price now that the i7 is out, I'd take that over any similarly priced Phenom chipset.

Put at least 8 GB of RAM in it as well, Vista and 7 use quite a bit, and so will everything else on it once you get going (Anti-virus, etc.)
Aside from that, ensure that you get an 800 / 900 watt power supply or it will be under performing because it doesn't have the juice it needs.


Edit: Sorry, I thought you were looking for rig suggestions when I first glanced.
Take whatever money you were going to spend on a game and put it into RAM, and a power supply if it's below 700 watt.

Then go for Oblivion with mods from TesNexus and Fallout NV with mods from NVNexus.
Mount & Blade: Warband is also a good time.

Em isn't 8 gbs a bit excessive at the moment?

FPS: Battlefield games and CoD(maybe preferably older ones), TF2, CS, L4D games and Red Faction, Orange Box(which has TF2), Killing Floor.
RPG: Knights of the Old Republic, Deus Ex, Baldur's Gate games, Divine Divinity, Guild Wars(is online but heavily instanced), Titan Quest, Mass Effect games Morrowind and Oblivion.
RTS: Dawn of War series and Company of Heroes series, Battle for Middle Earth games, Age of games, Dragonshard(isn't that good compared to others) Startcraft and Command and Conquer. Total War series is good but quite different style to others mentioned while DoW2 is similar to others focuses heavily on actual territory control and unit micro.
Others: Puzzle Quest games, Beyond Good and Evil, Hawx(for cheap), DMC 3 & 4 and PoP games.

Yes, 8 gb is excessive. With 4 gb RAM and 1.5 gb VRAM, I find I still have memory free when running any modern game I've cared to try. Of course, because ram is so cheap, there isn't really a compelling argument to not have more - I just have not found myself needing it. And it isn't like I'm shutting down unnecessary applications before I play games either. I tend to have a dozen tabs open in my browser, iTunes is never closed, Steam and a number of instant messengers are always running and during the school year I'm usually running an IDE of some kind and a CAS program.

 

[thekindofcornyoueat]

I'm a bit weird about games, but my favourites are:

Team Fortress 2, Half Life 2, Portal (just the best three games ever.)
Devil May Cry 4 (for some reason it completely captured me)
Saint's Row 2 (I haven't played it but it's supposedly reeeaaally awesome)
Just Cause 2 (just cause-.- no actually i thought it was quite fun)
Left 4 Dead 2 (all these games are part two's...)
Beyond Good and Evil (supposedly incredibly good)
Call of Duty Modern Warfare 1 and 2 (because they're pretty much the best a realistic fps can get)
Guild Wars 2 when it's out (seriously that game is going to be so damn awesome)
I Am Alive (ZOMGWTFBBQ i can't wait for that game)
Crysis 1&2 when it's out (graphics graphics graphics)
If there has to be a Strategy gae in this list I'd say...
Civilization 4 was fun but 5 sucks cow nipples
and
R.U.S.E. is pretty good too i think.

 

[Danceofmasks]

Saint's Row 2 (I haven't played it but it's supposedly reeeaaally awesome)

It's an amazing game, but ... one of the worst PC ports in the history of gaming.
Seriously, I get horrible framerates on my high end PC, where ANY 360 game really should be running at over 300 FPS due to the discrepancy in raw hardware power.

 

[e2density]

Get the Valve Complete Pack on Steam once Portal 2 comes out

Thank me later.

 

[tahrey]

Well, you can never have too much RAM (...unless you're running Win98 of course). But unless you can easily afford the upgrade I'm wondering WTF would justify 8Gb right now. Having run various machines with reasonably demanding non-game software, there's not much difference between 1gb and 4gb (on a 32bit system), and nothing discernable between 2gb and 4gb (= 4 and 8 on a 64). I know games tend to use a bit more, but has the gulf opened that wide between them and serious productivity software? I know that if my RAM-in-use goes over 2000mb, I'm really punishing it. CPU and GPU cycles are still usually what are most in demand, and sometimes disk transfer.

All that said, if you can afford the upgrade, go for it. There's nothing so inevitable as apps eventually demanding all the memory in your system, regardless of how much you have. It might just not need that much *yet*. It'll save you from having to bother with it later. Sure, it'll be cheaper "then", but it'll ALWAYS be cheaper "a bit later". Sooner or later you will have to buy.

Oh and as far as game suggestions go... I dunno... Solitare? Minesweeper? Given that your system is apparently so underpowered?
Or 500 virtual machines all running a copy of Doom.

 

[mindlesspuppet]

Hey guys im getting my first custom built gaming pc and i was wondering what games would be great to get.
Single player and multiplayer are both ok and i do prefer rpgs and fps but im open to suggestions

FPS: TF2
RPG: Oblivion (even if you played it on console, it's worth buying for the mods.)
RPG: The Witcher
WTF: Minecraft
RTS: StarCraft 2 (because it's pretty much mandatory.)

 

[oplinger]

Well, you can never have too much RAM

Sadly it is true that you can have too much RAM. 8GB however is not excessive. It's a lot yes, but not excessive.

I also haven't seen anyone mention most games are 32-bit, they can't allocate more than 4GB of RAM either. just like a 32-bit OS can't address more than ~4GB of RAM. But having 4GBs of RAM myself, I can tell you a couple things. It's just barely enough. WoW at max uses a ton of RAM by itself (someone mentioned the minimum requirements......they aren't the same anymore.) Then you stack on a web broswer streaming video (go go youtube.) the side bar if you use it. anti-virus, and other stuff in the background. You will fill up 4 gigs no problem, even if you cut corners.

OT: Get Rome: Total War
World in Conflict

and for shits and giggles, try out Nexus: The Jupiter Incident, and Star Trek Bridge Commander, or Elite Force 2

 

[tahrey]

But having 4GBs of RAM myself, I can tell you a couple things. It's just barely enough. WoW at max uses a ton of RAM by itself (someone mentioned the minimum requirements......they aren't the same anymore.) Then you stack on a web broswer streaming video (go go youtube.) the side bar if you use it. anti-virus, and other stuff in the background. You will fill up 4 gigs no problem, even if you cut corners.

I think we must come from worlds each other would mutually not understand. Why have you got youtube up at the same time as WoW? Or your AV doing anything over and above on-access scanning? (Which mine could do admirably in a fraction of a gig)

Warcraft must have bloated to take up a shit-ton of memory these days then, as if my browser uses a gig even with a bazillion tabs open it's a sign to me that it's got a memory leak and i should probably restart it to stop it going supercritical (just keeps eating more and more and you can't shut it down because the OS is swapping so hard; normally i can keep it in the 400~900mb range even when on a major session), and the first time I saw WoW running in the flesh was on a 1Gb system that was managing it quite happily. We're missing at least a gig and a half here.

 

[oplinger]

But having 4GBs of RAM myself, I can tell you a couple things. It's just barely enough. WoW at max uses a ton of RAM by itself (someone mentioned the minimum requirements......they aren't the same anymore.) Then you stack on a web broswer streaming video (go go youtube.) the side bar if you use it. anti-virus, and other stuff in the background. You will fill up 4 gigs no problem, even if you cut corners.

I think we must come from worlds each other would mutually not understand. Why have you got youtube up at the same time as WoW? Or your AV doing anything over and above on-access scanning? (Which mine could do admirably in a fraction of a gig)

Warcraft must have bloated to take up a shit-ton of memory these days then, as if my browser uses a gig even with a bazillion tabs open it's a sign to me that it's got a memory leak and i should probably restart it to stop it going supercritical (just keeps eating more and more and you can't shut it down because the OS is swapping so hard; normally i can keep it in the 400~900mb range even when on a major session), and the first time I saw WoW running in the flesh was on a 1Gb system that was managing it quite happily. We're missing at least a gig and a half here.

...What silly questions. It was an example. 1. youtube and WoW (or frequently any MMO) is very common. as grinding gets to be boring. Not to mention all the other youtube like sites (blip.TV is much worse than youtube, but the quality standard is also higher) It also depends what i'm watching as buffering is what takes up the RAM, not the website. (so having a million tabs means about dick, as many things on a typical website are small, unless you google 10MP pictures and open them all in new tabs.)

2. AV needs to be loaded. which takes up RAM. which runs in the background so it would be on top of WoW, and on top of whatever i'm loading or streaming. And it would be scanning all incoming traffic. On top of all that, there's the web browser itself that needs to be loaded, all of windows 7s junk, driver tools, and of course if you use it, the sidebar, which depending on what gadgets and how many can use plenty of RAM, not to mention some gadgets are prone to memory leaks, or excess caching.

3. from when you saw it, WoW was probably back in classic, you know...3 expansions ago. When the minimum specs were absolutely nothing. It was ramped up to 1 gig minimum for BC. but that's just for lowest settings and all to run at 60 frames with no skipping. in BC they also upped the view distance. in wrath, they doubled -that- and added more appealing visual effects, later adding high resolution textures to player models, then shadows, about 400 times more particle effects, tons more ground clutter. and then cata hit, added high resolution textures to all the new stuff they added. aliased the shadows, added normal mapped water, with full world reflections, sun shafts, increased the view distance -again- updated all the trees to use even more sprites, used more particle effects to make things look better, added thousands of little objects. And they did most of that on an engine that's almost 9 years old now. So it's not the most -efficient- thing out there either. All of that needs to be loaded into RAM. On top of everything in the background, and windows 7 itself which uses almost 2 gigs -alone-. On a bad day out in the world, WoW can use almost 1.5 gigs of RAM. that's 3.5 gigs -right there- other things i can mention, FO:NV with very little modding takes over a gig of RAM, so does L4D2 maxed out.

Just so with games using 1 gig of RAM you're already down to 3 just with the OS and the game. Now if we factor in spikes in RAM due to audio endpoint builder (which really is very poorly done.) Prolonged use of your computer with things going on can make it take almost half a gig.

Like i said, 4 gigs most of the time, for a gamer? It's barely enough. It'll get you by, but more would be much better. 8 is not excessive. >>

 

[Assassin Xaero]

Cpu: amd phenom II
Gpu:gtx 460
Ram: 4gb

Yikes, that will be one under performing machine.

The Core i5 cpus are way down in price now that the i7 is out, I'd take that over any similarly priced Phenom chipset.

Put at least 8 GB of RAM in it as well, Vista and 7 use quite a bit, and so will everything else on it once you get going (Anti-virus, etc.)
Aside from that, ensure that you get an 800 / 900 watt power supply or it will be under performing because it doesn't have the juice it needs.


Edit: Sorry, I thought you were looking for rig suggestions when I first glanced.
Take whatever money you were going to spend on a game and put it into RAM, and a power supply if it's below 700 watt.

Then go for Oblivion with mods from TesNexus and Fallout NV with mods from NVNexus.
Mount & Blade: Warband is also a good time.

I have a 470, 4gb ram, and an amd quad core and it runs both Metro 2033 and Crysis on max settings, at 1680x1050, with no lag...

OT: Painkiller. One of the greatest games ever made.

 

[lacktheknack]

Secondly, given that my rig occasionally gets busy with 8GB under certain circumstances and at max settings I call shenanigans on the claim that yours does just fine at with "newer games" at 4 GB... unless of course they're not run at anywhere near max settings / res.

I have 4 GB, and run all the new stuff on max... (GTX 280 and i7 somethingorother).

Of course, I'm such a graphics snob (and worked with an Aptiva for so long) that I can stand 15 FPS with little issue. This helps a lot.

 

[gmaverick019_v1legacy]

.....and an older GPU (nvidia 260)

OP that rig as long as it's dual core and up will run games just nicely. You might need to turn down the AA a bit but you'll be fine, don't let people talk smack about you having an AMD processor. They are awesome.

8gb is overkill. I can run a web browser with multiple tabs open,2 instances of wow, windows media player streaming videos from my server all on 3 monitors at the same time without any noticeable lag in performance. I cap out at around 75% ram usage with just 4 GB.

Not wishing to be confrontational, but there is a distinct smell of 'something rotten in Denmark' coming from this post.....

... firstly, using a game released in 2004 with a minimum RAM requirement of 512k and GPU RAM of 32MB as a benchmark is hardly useful when someone is purchasing a PC for gaming in 2011.

Secondly, given that my rig occasionally gets busy with 8GB under certain circumstances and at max settings I call shenanigans on the claim that yours does just fine at with "newer games" at 4 GB... unless of course they're not run at anywhere near max settings / res.

Thirdly, and perhaps most tellingly, a 260 can only run two monitors at once. I'll let everyone draw their own conclusions from that.

Bottom line is, if you're going through the trouble to build it, build it right so that it will run next year's games, not just games from 2004. It will be marginally more expensive and generally more pleasant to use.

ehh ill have to back him up on this one, before i got my new quad core phenom a few weeks ago i was using a 3.0 dual core amd phenom and i was able to run anything and everything i touched at max settings in 1080 and i only had 4 gigs of ram at the time while running on windows 7, so i have to call shenanigans on the whole having to buy i5-i7 and needing 8 gigs of memory, honestly its not needed. (sure if you have the money then i would definitely say upgrade but it doesn't seem like he is dealing with a huge budget, so for now i'd say he is just fine for the next year or two at least)

 

[tahrey]

I'm sorry man, I'll take on board that the game may have bloated, and you have other stuff going on, but this just doesn't add up.

...What silly questions. It was an example.

Fair enough, it doesn't pay to be too pedantic, but the problem with examples if you're trying to use them to illustrate a thing is that they must be illustrative of that thing.

1. youtube and WoW (or frequently any MMO) is very common. as grinding gets to be boring.

I will try my hardest to refrain from making this another "mutually incomprehensible" point of discussion, i.e. is it still a game if it bores you so much you start doing other stuff in the background of it? (Apart from this little aside, of course)
I mean ... isn't the point of it to be entertained? Otherwise it's, well, a job or chore.
I've never been too sorely tempted to get on with MMORPGs yet, so that one's admittedly a bit of a surprise.

It also depends what i'm watching as buffering is what takes up the RAM, not the website. (so having a million tabs means about dick, as many things on a typical website are small, unless you google 10MP pictures and open them all in new tabs.)

Hey, you think I don't use youtube or any graphics heavy site myself? Even massively buffering the average YT video wouldn't eat more than a few tens of megs... unless you're trying to watch 1080p material on a barely-sufficient connection or something? (In which case, sure, get the extra RAM, might as well).
I go on all kinds of fairly multimedia heavy pages and the browser still keeps its shit together quite well on a 1Gb system. Hell, having been on the web since 8mb was a common RAM spec and browsers were far less efficient, I'd be rather upset if it didn't.
Remember that the browser has to decompress the pictures in order to display them... so a regular 1024x768 background texture on a 32bit display will need 3mb all by itself (plus whatever it's been compressed to).

2. AV needs to be loaded. which takes up RAM. which runs in the background so it would be on top of WoW, and on top of whatever i'm loading or streaming. And it would be scanning all incoming traffic.

Mmmmmyeah I think I already accounted for that, if you weren't listening

On top of all that, there's the web browser itself that needs to be loaded, all of windows 7s junk, driver tools, and of course if you use it, the sidebar, which depending on what gadgets and how many can use plenty of RAM, not to mention some gadgets are prone to memory leaks, or excess caching.

...and I was assuming all the regular OS stuff would also be in place, including in my case email, system monitor utilities, MSN, tablet PC tools, etc etc etc. This stuff is irrelevant to the argument. Win 7 will take up a bit more than my XP, for sure, but not massively so, and not as much as Vista either.

3. from when you saw it, WoW was probably back in classic, you know...3 expansions ago. When the minimum specs were absolutely nothing. It was ramped up to 1 gig minimum for BC.

Well ... OK then. But that'll be 1gig including all the other stuff (well, maybe not the web browser). So, 2Gb will see you alright there.

in BC they also upped the view distance. in wrath, they doubled -that- and added more appealing visual effects, later adding high resolution textures to player models, then shadows, about 400 times more particle effects, tons more ground clutter. and then cata hit, added high resolution textures to all the new stuff they added. aliased the shadows, added normal mapped water, with full world reflections, sun shafts, increased the view distance -again- updated all the trees to use even more sprites, used more particle effects to make things look better, added thousands of little objects.

Christ ... alright then! That'll take up some more RAM. Though half the stuff you mentioned will have very negligble hit on the system RAM, just demanding more video card memory (or simply more capable GPU hardware), the extra sprites, particles etc need to be kept track of. Question is, just how much? It might be as little as a few megs (if they take a few leaves from the old democoder books), or a whole extra gig, depending on how these additions have been administered.

And they did most of that on an engine that's almost 9 years old now. So it's not the most -efficient- thing out there either.

Hang on now, you can't harp on about how it's been massively remade down various versions, then turn around and blame the inefficiencies on an ancient game engine. Won't they have updated THAT as well?

All of that needs to be loaded into RAM. On top of everything in the background, and windows 7 itself which uses almost 2 gigs -alone-.

Wait, what...? Win 7... 2 gigs... hahaha...snkkk.... HAHAHAHA.
*phew*
Haha... ok, go tell that to the guys in one of the offices I have to give tech support to who are running Win7 on a ONE GIG laptop*. OK, it's not terribly quick, but I have a feeling that's something to do with the chronically shite CPU & GPU it has. It doesn't seem to thrash the disk much (...unlike the slower'n all hell 512mb Vista ones we had).
Seriously if you boot your Win 7 up clean and it's taking up 2Gb RAM, either something's badly wrong with it, or you're misreading the memory chart. Or, you're trying to tweak the figures so you can run up against the 32bit limit in your next sentence...
Honestly, if you were releasing an OS that on first boot needed more than 50% of the available memory in a typical 32bit system, would you even bother with non-64bit versions? That also represents a 4x increase over a HEAVY installation of XP... 8-10x over a typical one.

On a bad day out in the world, WoW can use almost 1.5 gigs of RAM. that's 3.5 gigs -right there- other things i can mention, FO:NV with very little modding takes over a gig of RAM, so does L4D2 maxed out.

If we're to be a bit more realistic about the OS and browser, but take you at your word about the above stuff, that adds up to 3.5Gb total if you're pushing it. So we're apparently JUST out of space. This, however, is assuming every process is sharing the same virtual space, and nothing ever pages out to disk, both of which are false. 32bit OSes can make use of more than 4Gb of space by leveraging virtual memory techniques and sending unused data (or all-zero areas of memory, allocated but not yet filled) to disk. My 1Gb system only properly starts to thrash when the allocated memory figure pushes beyond 1.5Gb, as then stuff that's actively in use has to be swapped to disk as well... and for reasons best known to itself, it recommends that I have a 2Gb swapfile and then says to expand it when that 1.5 point is reached. Presumably not all of what it's actually using is being reported.

Plus you would have no hope, ever, of doing this stuff on a 32bit system, if we were hard limited to that figure, because you'd hit 1+1+1.5gb and things would start overflowing, but there'd be no space left to even generate an error message.

Now if we factor in spikes in RAM due to audio endpoint builder (which really is very poorly done.) Prolonged use of your computer with things going on can make it take almost half a gig.

Without going to google it, I'll assume that's some kind of VOIP thing, and you don't have any other less-buggy, more streamlined alternatives.

Like i said, 4 gigs most of the time, for a gamer? It's barely enough. It'll get you by, but more would be much better. 8 is not excessive. >>

Hmmmmmmm.... "OK then". I'll let this go as I'm not really in the mood for any kind of flamewar, but I do really get the feeling you're massaging the figures there. Unless you actually meant the 64 bit versions but didn't make it plain? That might explain the "2Gb for Win7" thing, and the fairly high demands for the other games (though not so much the browser - 64bit programs will only need extra space for the code, not the data, and a browser with no page loaded doesn't take up much RAM at all). Definitely feel more inclined to go with the guy saying he's hosting a couple instances smoothly within 4Gb...

But whatever. 4 sticks each of 2Gb gamer-spec RAM costs like £80 these days. It's not a massively expensive spec upgrade** vs 4Gb. A night out drinking, or a tank of gas. You may as well have the extra space, if your board allows it. (If it's one of those troublesome 3-stick mobos, split the difference and have 6Gb... everybody happy)

* I think it was actually delivered with the x64 version installed, too, and they downgraded... not because it was performing super-poorly, but because one of the niche programs they needed to run was ia32-only!
** Not when within the lifetime of some of the files I have on my backup drive, the value of that ram has fallen about 1000-fold