On 24/01/2012 13:42, Invisible wrote:
> On 24/01/2012 01:39 PM, Francois Labreque wrote:

>>> Usually this indicates the system paging data back in from disk. Except
>>> that this is impossible. My PC has an insane EIGHT GIGABYTES OF RAM!
>>> (Yes, I know it's excessive, but it was surprisingly cheap.) The entire
>>> game is only 6GB. I don't even *need* a harddrive; THE ENTIRE GAME FITS
>>> IN RAM! Even though it's Crysis! Amazing, but true. So... WTF is pausing
>>> it?!
>>
>> Win32 apps can only use 2GB of memory (three with OS tweaking). Having
>> 8GB only means it shouldn't swap the game out to run an OS function
>> because something triggered an interupt.
>
> I'm actually running a 64-bit edition of Windows. However, I would
> assume that Crysis is a 32-bit application, so I guess your assessment
> stands.

On further reflection... Crysis can use only 2GB of RAM, but surely the 
OS can use all that cavernous space to cache disk files?

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On 24/01/2012 18:18, Warp wrote:
> Invisible<voi### [at] devnull>  wrote:
>> On the other hand, if an Xbox breaks, the manufacturer can charge you
>> arbitrary amounts of money to fix it. If a PC breaks, you can just
>> replace the offending part, available from a bazillion sources. ;-)
>
>    Do you have any actual figures how much it costs to repair an Xbox 360
> after the warranty has been expired?

No. But I imagine it's cheaper to buy an entire new Xbox.

This is based on my observations of what happens with laptops. Typically 

is obviously absurd. The manufacturers are simply preying on the fact 
that nobody else can supply this part.



would actually pay for...

It's news to me that the Xbox comes with a warranty. Usually MS products 
come with a disclaimer of liability. :-P

>    Anyways, advantages of PC gaming over console gaming:
>
> - Keyboard and mouse. I can't stress this enough.

Granted.

> - As time passes, graphics hardware and graphics get better, while consoles
> are stagnant.

Again, agreed.

> - Many gamers appreciate the ability to mod games, and to download and
> install such mods. This is just not possible in consoles. (Well, not
> unless you want to physically hack your console and get banned from the
> console's online server system and stop being able to do anything online
> and receive upgrades to anything.)

Well, it /could/ be possible, if the makers allowed it. But they don't, 
so that's merely a technicallity.

>    Disadvantages of PC gaming:
>
> - Crashes. From all the PC games I own, *at least* 50% have presented
> crashes in one form or another.

My experience differs.

Granted I've only played Quake 2, HalfLife (and Opposing Force, and Blue 
Shift, and Gunman), HalfLife 2 (plus EP1 and EP2), CounterStrike: 
Source, Portal, Portal 2, Team Fortress 2, Call of Duty 4: Modern 
Warfare, Modern Warefare II, Alieans vs Predator (the old one), 
Oddworld: Abe's Oddysee, Oddworld: Abe's Exodus, Bastion, Braid, Batman: 
Arkham Assylum, Crysis, Crysis: Warhead, Cryostasis, Assassin's Creed, 
Assassin's Creed II and a handful of other PC games. (That's over 20 so 
far, if you're counting.) Almost all of these have been entirely 
crash-free the vast majority of the time.

> - Games tend to be optimized for top-of-the-line PCs, often making them a
> pain to play with older PCs.

Again, I'm not sure about that.

People complained about, say, HalfLife 2, but in fact it turns out to 
have surprisingly modest requirements. It played perfectly well for me 



> - Game availability. Many game houses do not port their games for the PC,

Many PC games are not available on consoles. If you have console X, many 
games on console Y are just not available.

I would say that the PC probably has the largest catelogue of games of 
any platform. There may be a few notable titles available only on one 
console, but that aside, there's a fair bit to choose from.

>    Advantages of consoles:
>
> - Plug&play. Really. You just buy a game, put the disk in, and start
> playing. That's it.

I put my new PC together, installed Windows 7, installed the Steam 
client, waited 15 minutes for Crysis to download over the Internet, and 
then I was playing Crysis. That easy.

I take your point though; sometimes things do /not/ go so smoothly. 
Sometimes you really have to bugger around with things to get a game to 
work.

One problem that doesn't seem to exist on consoles is stupid DRM. For 
example, I cannot play Crysis if Process Explorer is running, since it 
is classed as a "hacker tool" (which it obviously isn't).

> - Did I mention no crashes?

Try "fewer crashes". Although, again, I /have/ seen a console crash 
(despite not actually owning one, so I haven't mad much exposure). And 
my PC games don't crash all that often. (With a few titles being 
irritating exceptions.)

> - Games are optimized for the console, so they will usually look as good
> as the console allows, while having a good framerate. This even if you have
> a huge HD TV or LCD monitor.

Quite. There's no fiddling with quality settings to get just the right 
balance of quality and performance. It just *works*.

>    Disadvantages of consoles:
>
> - The controller.
> - Aging hardware.

Indeed.

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On Tue, 24 Jan 2012 20:12:40 +0000, Orchid Win7 v1 wrote:

> This is based on my observations of what happens with laptops. Typically
> if you buy, say, a £300 laptop, a replacement battery costs £280 - which
> is obviously absurd.

If you buy from the manufacturer, it is.

I bought a replacement battery for a Dell D610 (my old laptop) about 8 
months ago, and it cost me about $50 IIRC.

Bought it through Amazon.

Jim

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On Tue, 24 Jan 2012 20:12:40 +0000, Orchid Win7 v1 wrote:

> People complained about, say, HalfLife 2, but in fact it turns out to
> have surprisingly modest requirements. It played perfectly well for me
> on a lowly £60 graphics card. And when you consider that the
> top-of-the-line cards are usually £300 or so, £60 isn't exactly pricey.

"Surprisingly modest requirements" by today's standards.

8 years ago when it was released, the requirements weren't particularly 
modest.

Jim

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On Tue, 24 Jan 2012 16:22:58 -0500, Jim Henderson wrote:

> On Tue, 24 Jan 2012 20:12:40 +0000, Orchid Win7 v1 wrote:
> 
>> People complained about, say, HalfLife 2, but in fact it turns out to
>> have surprisingly modest requirements. It played perfectly well for me
>> on a lowly £60 graphics card. And when you consider that the
>> top-of-the-line cards are usually £300 or so, £60 isn't exactly pricey.
> 
> "Surprisingly modest requirements" by today's standards.
> 
> 8 years ago when it was released, the requirements weren't particularly
> modest.

For example, the entry-level video card they recommended was the GeForce 
FX 5700, which had a street price at the end of 2003 of US$199.  The 
recommended GeForce 6800 was sub-$300 when it came out.

Back in 2004, that was a considerable expense for a video card.

Jim

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>>> People complained about, say, HalfLife 2, but in fact it turns out to
>>> have surprisingly modest requirements. It played perfectly well for me
>>> on a lowly £60 graphics card. And when you consider that the
>>> top-of-the-line cards are usually £300 or so, £60 isn't exactly pricey.
>>
>> "Surprisingly modest requirements" by today's standards.
>>
>> 8 years ago when it was released, the requirements weren't particularly
>> modest.
>
> For example, the entry-level video card they recommended was the GeForce
> FX 5700, which had a street price at the end of 2003 of US$199.  The
> recommended GeForce 6800 was sub-$300 when it came out.
>
> Back in 2004, that was a considerable expense for a video card.

Worked just fine with my GeForce 6600, which was about £60.

(That's not GeForce 6600 GT or 6600 Ultra, just a vanilla 6600.)

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On Tue, 24 Jan 2012 22:04:12 +0000, Orchid Win7 v1 wrote:

>>>> People complained about, say, HalfLife 2, but in fact it turns out to
>>>> have surprisingly modest requirements. It played perfectly well for
>>>> me on a lowly £60 graphics card. And when you consider that the
>>>> top-of-the-line cards are usually £300 or so, £60 isn't exactly
>>>> pricey.
>>>
>>> "Surprisingly modest requirements" by today's standards.
>>>
>>> 8 years ago when it was released, the requirements weren't
>>> particularly modest.
>>
>> For example, the entry-level video card they recommended was the
>> GeForce FX 5700, which had a street price at the end of 2003 of US$199.
>>  The recommended GeForce 6800 was sub-$300 when it came out.
>>
>> Back in 2004, that was a considerable expense for a video card.
> 
> Worked just fine with my GeForce 6600, which was about £60.
> 
> (That's not GeForce 6600 GT or 6600 Ultra, just a vanilla 6600.)

In 2004 when the game was released?

The minimum and recommended configurations for the PC version as 
originally released are on the Wikipedia entry for HL2.

Memory cost 4x-8x as much then as now per GB (you can today get 4 GB of 
memory for what 512 MB-1GB cost then).

Jim

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On 1/24/2012 9:49 AM, Warp wrote:
> Invisible<voi### [at] devnull>  wrote:
>> While playing through Core, I tried to shoot one of the enemies, and the
>> screen turned bright green and my headphones nearly blasted my hears off
>> with a loud buzzing tone. I had to reboot the PC to get it to respond
>> again. Putting the pain back into crashing, eh?
>
>> Best of all, when I loaded up the game again, all of the game saves from
>> the last two hours were gone.
>
>    That's the downside of PC gaming. No such problems on the consoles.
> (Ok, there are similar problems with console games as well, but they
> are way, way more rare. Perhaps in 1% of all games, while the same figure
> on the PC side is more like 50%.)
>
Wow.. Except for things just not wanting to install, or maybe 1-2 games 
that actually have crashed, and I had a fair idea why (like low memory 
resources, or the like), I literally haven't seen any of this stuff... o.O

Ok, actually there was one case, with some of the Red Faction games 
where a "known" glitch existed. Seems when the video-sync was not on 
(its off by default), on faster machines you could end up having the 
graphics engine de-synch from what ever the GPU was doing, or something, 
and somehow that left you with your mini-sub a smoking wreck. lol 
Turning on VSync fixed it.

When playing Arkham Asylum I was running on a machine that was "below 
spec", so a lot of the animation was slower than normal, in some places, 
so that "could" potentially cause the same sync issue, on a machine that 
is on/over-spec.

Only other major one I had was trying to run Halo 2 on an XP machine, 
using a trick that emulated some systems calls that are missing in the 
older DirectX. At one point one of the cut scenes does some *major* disk 
swapping, and this tries to trigger the Win Vista/7 extended disk 
caching, or something, which loads bigger chunks, much faster, but XP 
couldn't do that. So, the solution was to run a background program, for 
system diagnostics, which somehow forced the machine to use the older XP 
file fetch system, instead of trying to use the advanced, and missing, 
one. This got you past the crash, but the diagnostic thing was brain 
damaged, and kept eating up memory, with more and more data on what your 
system was doing at the time. So, if you forgot to shut it down, after 
you got past the problem, it would crash anyway, and memory was consumed 
by the other "diagnostic" process... lol

Generally, the problems, when they exist, fall into some category of 
some bit of hardware not liking how fast/slow/etc. the stuff you are 
using is, and simply changing resolution may not be the problem, but 
some other thing, like the VSync (which normally isn't at all 
necessary). Sometimes its a conflict you can't fix "at all". Telltale 
Games, for example, seem to especially have problem with mouse control, 
under anything higher than XP, for no damn sane reason. They don't track 
its movement like they should, but drag the cursor *slowly*... Who the 
heck knows why.

And, yeah, console is nice, but that is just one more piece of hardware 
that can break, it can't do what a PC can, in some cases, and they are 
always trying to stop you doing things like you could for Neverwinter, 
or others, where you can create your own content, official or otherwise. 
And, frankly, getting stuck slogging two rifles at a time, for example, 
in something like one of the STALKER games, to get money, to upgrade 
equipment, without any way to "over muscle" my inventory, would make the 
game play way longer, far more boring, and a massive pain in the ass. 
lol Better to have something like that on a PC (no idea if they ever 
made it for console though), where I can make "adjustments". ;)

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On 1/24/2012 1:12 PM, Orchid Win7 v1 wrote:
> On 24/01/2012 18:18, Warp wrote:
>> Invisible<voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
>>> On the other hand, if an Xbox breaks, the manufacturer can charge you
>>> arbitrary amounts of money to fix it. If a PC breaks, you can just
>>> replace the offending part, available from a bazillion sources. ;-)
>>
>> Do you have any actual figures how much it costs to repair an Xbox 360
>> after the warranty has been expired?
>
> No. But I imagine it's cheaper to buy an entire new Xbox.
>
> This is based on my observations of what happens with laptops. Typically

> is obviously absurd. The manufacturers are simply preying on the fact
> that nobody else can supply this part.
>
That is because, usually, by the time the battery needs replacing, 
nothing uses it any more, so keeping them in stock isn't cost effective, 
but your laptop is now, itself, worth $100. lol

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>> This is based on my observations of what happens with laptops. Typically

>> is obviously absurd. The manufacturers are simply preying on the fact
>> that nobody else can supply this part.
>>
> That is because, usually, by the time the battery needs replacing,
> nothing uses it any more, so keeping them in stock isn't cost effective,
> but your laptop is now, itself, worth $100. lol

I'm pretty sure as soon as you tear open the seal on the shipping 
container the laptop came in, its value plummets to about 5% of the 
original purchase price. I mean, who would buy a second hand laptop that 
may or may not work, when you can just buy a new one?

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