Favorite PC Game

[Ropey]

After doing a bit of digging I found out my cpu wasn't adequate. With my motherboard there really wasn't much room for improvement so I bought a new pc & it runs Witcher 2 flawlessly.
Asus - Essentio Desktop - Intel Core i7 - 12GB Memory - 2TB Hard Drive - M51AD-B05 - Best Buy

One question though. A couple of games make the pc run loud. The Witcher 2 & Divinity Original Sin.

Any idea why that would be?

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 760 card as OEM might have a different fan system. Check and see if you have control of the fan with that card.

NVIDIA Control Panel ? Performance Group | NVIDIA

If you do, then follow the instructions to slow the fan down and see if the fan is causing the noise. If you slow it down and play the game and don't find the noise, then you need to play with the temperature drop delta of your card and create a personal profile that allows you to game at high performance with a lower fan speed.

The tools will allow you to see the temperatures and modify the fan for your card instead of the default fan control for all the cards.

You may have a cooler running card (in comparison to others) right out of the box.

 

[Uncensored2008]

I just picked up a copy of Metro, Last Light. I don't think it's on a par with the Stalker series depicting the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant disaster. What ruins the game for me is its choppiness. I turned down all the graphics to low or turned things off, but it doesn't help.

Now, years ago when Return to Castle Wolfenstein came out, I experienced the same choppiness so built a new PC and got rid of those problems. Maybe it's time. Yet, when searching for other folks who had similar problems to mine, I found quite a few, who were sporting some heavy hitting systems, Core I7, 16 to 32 Gigs of DDR3 RAM, SLI and Crossfire graphics cards. Even they were complaining about the choppiness of the game.

Way way different games. Metro is a linear shooter, Stalker was an open world sandbox.

I had no trouble with Metro Last Light.

A good friend of mine plays his on Xbox 360 and hasn't experienced any of my same problems. I have all the latest graphics card drivers and Steam forced me to download all updates for the game. I was surprised at how quickly I received updates, which shows me that the game manufacturers have probably given up support for this game. I'm glad I didn't spend a lot of money for this game. Even if I could play without the choppy dropped frames, the gameplay isn't too impressive. When you're outside, it's hard to figure out where to go next. I guess I'm spoiled having all the maps and guides in Skyrim.

Bear in mind the 360 runs an equivalent 1280X720 at medium. Turn things down to that level, and even the embedded graphics of an I7 will run the game fine.

 

[Uncensored2008]

Okay, a Steam forum gave some good advice about clearing up the choppiness of Metro, Last Light. Just go into Game Options and turn off Advanced PhysX. It worked for me. So I just cranked up the graphics to very high and played it. It doesn't matter, though because the atmosphere is pretty dreary, though. I guess it would be after an atomic war. Still I'm not too impressed with the game.

That's a great point.

Unless you have a newer Nvidia card ALWAYS turn PhysX off. It is a technology dependent on Nvidia architecture and will degrade performance on any other card.

 

[Uncensored2008]

After doing a bit of digging I found out my cpu wasn't adequate. With my motherboard there really wasn't much room for improvement so I bought a new pc & it runs Witcher 2 flawlessly.
Asus - Essentio Desktop - Intel Core i7 - 12GB Memory - 2TB Hard Drive - M51AD-B05 - Best Buy

One question though. A couple of games make the pc run loud. The Witcher 2 & Divinity Original Sin.

Any idea why that would be?

Yeah,

Modern PC's alter the speed of internal fans based on the load placed on the computer. What you're hearing is your fans spinning up.

The stock I7 fan has a range of 2400 RPM up to 6000 RPM - as the processor gets hot, the fan spins faster. The same thing on the Nvidia card - not sure the ranges, but as the card gets hotter, the fan spins faster to cool it. Do NOT be tempted to adjust it manually unless you are running speed fan to monitor temperature and really know what you're doing. The fan spins up for a reason, to keep your CPU and GPU from burning up.

One of the reasons I went to a liquid cooled machine was to reduce fan noise.

 

[Bleipriester]

Okay, a Steam forum gave some good advice about clearing up the choppiness of Metro, Last Light. Just go into Game Options and turn off Advanced PhysX. It worked for me. So I just cranked up the graphics to very high and played it. It doesn't matter, though because the atmosphere is pretty dreary, though. I guess it would be after an atomic war. Still I'm not too impressed with the game.

That's a great point.

Unless you have a newer Nvidia card ALWAYS turn PhysX off. It is a technology dependent on Nvidia architecture and will degrade performance on any other card.

If your graphics card has no integrated PhysX Chip, the CPU will do the work. As Nvidia bought Ageia only Nvida graphics cards have a PhysX chip.

 

[Uncensored2008]

Okay, a Steam forum gave some good advice about clearing up the choppiness of Metro, Last Light. Just go into Game Options and turn off Advanced PhysX. It worked for me. So I just cranked up the graphics to very high and played it. It doesn't matter, though because the atmosphere is pretty dreary, though. I guess it would be after an atomic war. Still I'm not too impressed with the game.

That's a great point.

Unless you have a newer Nvidia card ALWAYS turn PhysX off. It is a technology dependent on Nvidia architecture and will degrade performance on any other card.

If your graphics card has no integrated PhysX Chip, the CPU will do the work. As Nvidia bought Ageia only Nvida graphics cards have a PhysX chip.

That's what Nvidia claims, but Tom's Hardware did extensive testing and found that the software based PhysX destroys performance every time. Nvidia was trying to shaft AMD with this, but only managed to marginalize PhysX.

 

[Bleipriester]

That's a great point.

Unless you have a newer Nvidia card ALWAYS turn PhysX off. It is a technology dependent on Nvidia architecture and will degrade performance on any other card.

If your graphics card has no integrated PhysX Chip, the CPU will do the work. As Nvidia bought Ageia only Nvida graphics cards have a PhysX chip.

That's what Nvidia claims, but Tom's Hardware did extensive testing and found that the software based PhysX destroys performance every time. Nvidia was trying to shaft AMD with this, but only managed to marginalize PhysX.

"software based" means that the CPU does the work as the technology lacks of own hardware which would be a PhysX chip in this case.

 

[Uncensored2008]

If your graphics card has no integrated PhysX Chip, the CPU will do the work. As Nvidia bought Ageia only Nvida graphics cards have a PhysX chip.

That's what Nvidia claims, but Tom's Hardware did extensive testing and found that the software based PhysX destroys performance every time. Nvidia was trying to shaft AMD with this, but only managed to marginalize PhysX.

"software based" means that the CPU does the work as the technology lacks of own hardware which would be a PhysX chip in this case.

Yes, but the driver is so poorly written that is slams the CPU and causes poor performance.

 

[Bleipriester]

That's what Nvidia claims, but Tom's Hardware did extensive testing and found that the software based PhysX destroys performance every time. Nvidia was trying to shaft AMD with this, but only managed to marginalize PhysX.

"software based" means that the CPU does the work as the technology lacks of own hardware which would be a PhysX chip in this case.

Yes, but the driver is so poorly written that is slams the CPU and causes poor performance.

I had no problems so far.

 

[Uncensored2008]

"software based" means that the CPU does the work as the technology lacks of own hardware which would be a PhysX chip in this case.

Yes, but the driver is so poorly written that is slams the CPU and causes poor performance.

I had no problems so far.

Do you have an Nvidia GPU?

Why Won?t ATI Support CUDA and PhysX? | ExtremeTech

 

[Bleipriester]

Yes, but the driver is so poorly written that is slams the CPU and causes poor performance.

I had no problems so far.

Do you have an Nvidia GPU?

Why Won?t ATI Support CUDA and PhysX? | ExtremeTech

No. This is why I can say I had no problems so far.
List of configurations since 2008:
AMD Sempron 3200+, Ati HD 2400 Pro
AMD Athlon 4800+ X2, MSI RX2600XT, AMD HD 3870
AMD Athlon 6000+ X2, AMD HD 3870/4870
AMD Phenom II X4 965, AMD HD 6870
AMD A10-5800K, AMD HD 7850
Intel Core i3-370M, ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5650

 

[Remodeling Maidiac]

"software based" means that the CPU does the work as the technology lacks of own hardware which would be a PhysX chip in this case.

Yes, but the driver is so poorly written that is slams the CPU and causes poor performance.

I had no problems so far.

Yeah, even my old pc ran Metro LL without trouble. May be time for him to upgrade some parts.

 

[Uncensored2008]

Most modern games detect an AMD card and disable PhysX by default, but if there is an option, I always turn it off.

 

[Remodeling Maidiac]

Most modern games detect an AMD card and disable PhysX by default, but if there is an option, I always turn it off.

It was weird cause on my old pc it ran great then I started it yesterday on my new one and it killed my eyes till I turned off the physics option. What is that option even for?

 

[Remodeling Maidiac]

By the way, if any of you want to hook up on steam or origin to play my id is grampamurkedu.

I'm just now really gettin into pc gaming. Just bought bf4 and may get Sniper elite 3 too. I also have a bunch of other games

 

[Bleipriester]

By the way, if any of you want to hook up on steam or origin to play my id is grampamurkedu.

I'm just now really gettin into pc gaming. Just bought bf4 and may get Sniper elite 3 too. I also have a bunch of other games

I need to get a new computer before I can play proper again.

 

[CorvusRexus]

Hi guys..i mostly play these games on my pc..Battlefield 3. Need for speed, tekken 3 and vice city....Tell me guys...which game are you playing on your pc.?

Age of Empires 2: The Forgotten or just Age of Empires 2: The Conquerors Expansion. Greatest game ever, I swear.

 

[Uncensored2008]

Most modern games detect an AMD card and disable PhysX by default, but if there is an option, I always turn it off.

It was weird cause on my old pc it ran great then I started it yesterday on my new one and it killed my eyes till I turned off the physics option. What is that option even for?

There was a company in the 90's called Ageia who put out a discrete physics processing card, to calculate how items react in 3D games. The card was expensive and had very little support in games. So the whole thing flopped. In the mid-2000's, Nvidia bought the technology and put it on their video cards, making it free to Nvidia customers. The problem was that game developers were not going to support something that cut out 60% of their market.

So Nvidia wrote a driver to handle calls to the PhysX engine in software. Right away this is a disconnect. PhysX exists to offload the need to calculate physics operations from the CPU, obviously using software puts the burden right back on the CPU. The further muck things up, the software based PhysX driver was not optimized for multi-core use, so it tended to peg a single core, creating far worse performance than just letting the CPU calculate it in the first place - Nvidia claims this is fixed now. Even so, using a driver to intercept the calls will never yield better performance than the CPU natively offers. In the end, this is a ploy by Nvidia to gain market share that has not done well. Not only does AMD outsell Nvidia on the PC front, they supply the GPU for both the PS4 and Xbox One - which means PhysX will never gain dominance, because it would interfere with the Console side of the market.

 

[Uncensored2008]

By the way, if any of you want to hook up on steam or origin to play my id is grampamurkedu.

I'm just now really gettin into pc gaming. Just bought bf4 and may get Sniper elite 3 too. I also have a bunch of other games

I'm Geforce25

 

[XPostFacto]

I just picked up a copy of Metro, Last Light. I don't think it's on a par with the Stalker series depicting the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant disaster. What ruins the game for me is its choppiness. I turned down all the graphics to low or turned things off, but it doesn't help.

Now, years ago when Return to Castle Wolfenstein came out, I experienced the same choppiness so built a new PC and got rid of those problems. Maybe it's time. Yet, when searching for other folks who had similar problems to mine, I found quite a few, who were sporting some heavy hitting systems, Core I7, 16 to 32 Gigs of DDR3 RAM, SLI and Crossfire graphics cards. Even they were complaining about the choppiness of the game.

Way way different games. Metro is a linear shooter, Stalker was an open world sandbox.

I had no trouble with Metro Last Light.

A good friend of mine plays his on Xbox 360 and hasn't experienced any of my same problems. I have all the latest graphics card drivers and Steam forced me to download all updates for the game. I was surprised at how quickly I received updates, which shows me that the game manufacturers have probably given up support for this game. I'm glad I didn't spend a lot of money for this game. Even if I could play without the choppy dropped frames, the gameplay isn't too impressive. When you're outside, it's hard to figure out where to go next. I guess I'm spoiled having all the maps and guides in Skyrim.

Bear in mind the 360 runs an equivalent 1280X720 at medium. Turn things down to that level, and even the embedded graphics of an I7 will run the game fine.

Well, Stalker was an open environment, provided you had the radiation suits before you could go there, or you had to do some task for Duty before they would open the gates for you. It was only open world toward the end of the game when you had the requisite gear to traverse the outreaches. I have played all 3 over and over, just loved the genre. Metro LL leaves a lot to be desired, not to mention it's way too short. I'm in the process of going through a second time, trying not to kill anybody, well, at least too much. You don't always have a choice in that game.