>>>     <sniff> Don't do that to me. I'm sad now... <sniff>  :/

>> Heh. Well, yours is a 6-series. Then they made the 7-series. After that 
>> came the 8-series. Then there was the 9-series (which is really just 
>> rebadged versions of the 8-series - hence unpopular). Now we have the 
>> 200-series. And... according to the numbers above, it's "only" 8x faster. 
>> 2004 for the 6-series, 2008 for the 200-series. So in 4 years, it's "only" 
>> got 8x faster. Ho hum!
> 
>       Well, that's ok.

LOL!

>> Well, I guess if I feel rich enough I could always add a second GTX260 at 
>> some point... I *do* have an SLI motherboard. >:-D
> 
>       I was going to suggest that but people seem to have problems running 
> it.

In the majority of benchmarks I've seen, SLI is either the same speed, 
or *slower* than a single GPU. (!!) o_O

However, with more recent benchmarks that seems to be changing. In the 
very latest benchmarks, 2-way and 3-way (and even 4-way) SLI does 
actually come out (sometimes a lot) faster. I have no idea why this 
would be the case; maybe until now games tended to be CPU-bound? Or 
maybe it's a bandwidth issue somewhere?

Anyway, I only have 2-way SLI available, so... ;-)

(And as I say, I'd sooner build a new PC then run two GPUs. Probably 
much bigger return on investment there!)

>>>     You won't be disappointed! :)

>> I ****ing will if it doesn't work with my motherboard! o_O
>>
>> (The card is PCI Express 2.0 - and I'm not sure that my motherboard is.)
> 
>     I found these quotes just now:
> 
>  "It doesn't matter, PCI-E 2.0 cards will work on PCI-E 1.x systems as well. 
> The PCI-E 2.0 spec is a fairly new one (Jan 2007). Currently, only the X38 
> chipset from Intel and the nForce 7 from NVIDIA support PCI-E 2.0."

Well that's nice to know. :-}

Seriously, Tom's Hardware is great for figuring out the latest 
up-to-the-minute trends. But if you haven't been following this stuff 
for a while, it's really hard to find a good overview for quickly 
getting up to speed again...

>> I bought it using the super-hyper-ultra-mega-saver delivery option. So... 
>> next week? Maybe?
>>
>> (It's daft really; if you want it tomorrow, gotta pay lots of money. But 
>> if you go with the cheap delivery option, often it arrives the next day 
>> *anyway*! :-P But we'll see...)
> 
>       You'll get it tomorrow then.

Heh. Actually this time it looks like they're going to purposely not put 
it in the mail until Friday. Presumably this is a ploy to force more 
people to hand over extra cash. :-P

Post a reply to this message

Orchid XP v8 wrote:
> OK, so I've wondered about this before... If I were to install Crysis on 
> my PC, would I actually be able to play it? Or would my PC melt into a 
> pile of liquid metal?

New idea for case material: Gallium. Then it most definitely would melt 
into a pile of liquid metal. XD

> 
> My current graphics card is an nVidia GeForce 7900GT, but it's dying. 
> I've just ordered an nVidia GeForce GTX 260, but it hasn't arrived yet.
> 
> The official Crysis website *claims* that anything better than a GeForce 
> 6800GT should work - but it that like M$ telling us that Vista will 
> "work" with a Pentium III? What do you need for the game to play 
> *properly*?
> 

I would think it would run acceptably, but I haven't messed with Crysis, 
so I don't really know from a practical standpoint.

-- 
~Mike

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Invisible <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
> - I lose count of how many alien creatures you have to do battle with. 

  Really? You lose count quite easily, then.

  Let's see, the non-boss enemies are: The headcrab, the zombie, vortigaunts,
the barnacle, the houndeye, the bullsquid, the alien grunt, the soldier and
the alien controller. That's 9. Plus the bosses.

  In HL2 we have 3 different types of headcrab (regular, fast and poison),
3 different types of zombie (regular, fast and poison), the barnacle, the
antlion, 3 types of combine soldiers (metrocops, combine soldier and
combine elite), turrets, combine gunships and striders. That's about 14,
depending on how you want to count them.

> - Weapons? Again, a pistol, an SMG, a shotgun, a rocket launcher, and 
> that's about it. (Oh, and the very cool but mostly useless gravity gun.)

  HL has 14 weapons, HL2 has 11 (plus various fixed weapons here and
there).

-- 
                                                          - Warp

Post a reply to this message

Warp wrote:
> Invisible <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
>> - I lose count of how many alien creatures you have to do battle with. 
> 
>   Really? You lose count quite easily, then.

You noticed? :-P

>   Let's see, the non-boss enemies are: The headcrab, the zombie, vortigaunts,
> the barnacle, the houndeye, the bullsquid, the alien grunt, the soldier and
> the alien controller. That's 9. Plus the bosses.
> 
>   In HL2 we have 3 different types of headcrab (regular, fast and poison),
> 3 different types of zombie (regular, fast and poison), the barnacle, the
> antlion, 3 types of combine soldiers (metrocops, combine soldier and
> combine elite), turrets, combine gunships and striders. That's about 14,
> depending on how you want to count them.

Maybe that's just it - there are several slightly different versions of 
enemy, but the numer of actual enemies is quite small. And of those, 
only the antlions really have that "other-worldly" feel to them that was 
so awesome about HL1.

Post a reply to this message

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Invisible [mailto:voi### [at] devnull]
> Also, I wonder: Will games ever reach the stage where textures are
> sufficiently high resolution that you can actually read the writing on
> stuff?? Will we ever get believable character animation?

If you mean read the writing on walls, then they're already there in a
lot of games.

As for "believable character animation," the answer is yes.  Many
current generation games use motion tracking for the animation,
resulting in quite realistic movement.

...Ben Chambers
www.pacificwebguy.com

Post a reply to this message

>> Also, I wonder: Will games ever reach the stage where textures are
>> sufficiently high resolution that you can actually read the writing on
>> stuff?? Will we ever get believable character animation?
> 
> If you mean read the writing on walls, then they're already there in a
> lot of games.

OK. I guess I just haven't played any of them yet. (Hey hey, I'm 
probably gonna try Crysis in a little while... heh.)

> As for "believable character animation," the answer is yes.  Many
> current generation games use motion tracking for the animation,
> resulting in quite realistic movement.

Hmm. That's not actually what I meant. Perhaps I should have said 
"believable character performance". Lots of the dialogue sequences I see 
still look scripted and static.

Post a reply to this message

Chambers <ben### [at] pacificwebguycom> wrote:
> If you mean read the writing on walls, then they're already there in a
> lot of games.

> As for "believable character animation," the answer is yes.  Many
> current generation games use motion tracking for the animation,
> resulting in quite realistic movement.

  One trend in gaming which seems to be becoming popular is to try to make
the games as immersive as possible.

  First-person shooters are pictured from the point of view of the
character itself, but still the vast majority of FPS games fail to be
*really* immersive, like you *really* were there, rather than feeling
that you are simply watching the TV.

  Some games are slowly making the way to more immersiveness. There was
a game demo, which name I now fail to remember, about some kind of soldier
in a heated battlefield, which was awesomely immersive. I don't know if it
was just a pre-rendered demo or real-time, but at least it could have been
real-time.

  Another game which succeeds pretty well in immersiveness is Mirror's Edge.
I was so impressed by the demo that I had to buy the game.

  Mirror's Edge also has a rather peculiar style. Rather than aim for
absolute realism in how the environments are rendered, there's a mixture
of realistic models and stylistic texturing. The texturing may not be
realistic, but more artistic, but it works surprisingly well.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

Post a reply to this message

Warp wrote:

>   One trend in gaming which seems to be becoming popular is to try to make
> the games as immersive as possible.
> 
>   First-person shooters are pictured from the point of view of the
> character itself, but still the vast majority of FPS games fail to be
> *really* immersive, like you *really* were there, rather than feeling
> that you are simply watching the TV.

Yeah, I definitely get that.

On the other hand... it's pretty hard to devise a game that's really, 
truly immersive. Part of the problem is that today we have real-looking 
humans like Alyx Vance, but they still don't behave in a particularly 
real way yet. [Because simulating the human brain, or even some vast 
simplification of it, is still a theoretical research project, not a 
real-world possibility.]

Actually, just the other day I was playing CSS (yes, I realise that's 
pretty ancient by now) and I was struck by just how stupid the 
computer-controlled players are:

- On one hand, a bot runs along a belcony, jumps down in front of where 
I'm hiding, instantly notices me hidden in the corner and kills me with 
a single shot to the head. Very few humans could ever do that. On the 
other hand, that's because bots don't "see" the way a human does. They 
*know* exactly where you are, and have random time delays and random 
mis-aim factors added in.

- The bots have absurd difficulty navigating obsticles. I watched one 
bot spend 150 seconds trying to get past a pillar in the middle of the 
room. A single step either to the left or the right would have instantly 
solved the problem, and yet the bot stood there, his face half burried 
in the wall, jumping up and down and trying to shoot the wall out of the 
way.

- The bots have a ludicrous lack of tactical awareness:

   + Oh no! There's an enemy shooting me! Let me just stand still in 
front of him while I casually reload...

   + Oh no! All my teamates at bomsite B have just died, and now the 
bomb has been planted! Well, I've been stood at bomsite A since the 
start of the round, and I haven't seen or heard a thing, but I guess I 
should spent a few minutes checking that the bomb isn't here. Rather 
than, say, run to the other bombsite in time to actually defuse the bomb...

   + Oh no! All my teamates are dead! I should continue sitting here 
guarding this empty alleyway. Rather than, say, go attempt to complete 
the objective or something before the timelimit runs out...

   + My personal favourit: The whole team gets mowed down in one corner 
of the map. The one remaining bot in the team goes "where could they be?"

It strikes me that an ant typically has no problem navigating around 
obsticles. I wonder how big an ant's brain is? Or how good its eyesight 
is, for that matter. I don't know if this is just because CSS sucks 
(it's quite old now) or whether people still haven't figured out a way 
to fix this kind of thing.

Actually, to be honest, I have no clue how you even implement something 
like a bot for an FPS in the first place. The CSS bots are better than 
anything *I* could implement! o_O

Post a reply to this message

"Invisible" <voi### [at] devnull> wrote in message 
news:497dd513$1@news.povray.org...

 > (Hey hey, I'm probably gonna try Crysis in a little while... heh.)

      Are you going to install the patches first?

       ~Steve~

Post a reply to this message

Invisible wrote:
> you to run around, flicking the occasional switch,

That was the other thing. The keys to progress were all different. It wasn't 
like Quake, for example, where you're running around looking for *keys*, or 
Doom3 which (as far as I can see from what I know of it) you get thru doors 
by finding PDAs and passwords and such.  You had mortar rounds, fan buttons, 
jet engines, train gates, etc etc etc you had to figure out, and they all 
made sense.

> The physics feature was also pretty neat - and, AFAIK, brand new in 
> gaming at that time. (Of course, today seemingly *all* games in this 
> class feature it.)

Even Thief3, except they don't use it for anything, as far as I've found. :-)

> Also, I wonder: Will games ever reach the stage where textures are 
> sufficiently high resolution that you can actually read the writing on 
> stuff?? 

In games where it matters, yes. The Myst series, for example, has all kinds 
of clues in books (being a story about magical books, you see), so you have 
to be able to read them.



-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   "Ouch ouch ouch!"
   "What's wrong? Noodles too hot?"
   "No, I have Chopstick Tunnel Syndrome."

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