The Videogames Tab

I might have gifted you it, can't remember. Was looking around to see if I had a spare key but I guess it's been used up already.

EDIT - Aaanyway. FTL's one of my favourite games, period.

People have said that the randomness makes it unfair but I say it's just character building for your next run. It's basically the world's best Captain Kirk simulator.

__________________
"Critics are like eunuchs in a harem; they know how the Tatty 100 is done, they've seen it done every day, but they're unable to do it themselves." - Brendan Behan

People are just constantly showering me with gifts and fanning me with palm fronds. I can't possibly be expected to acknowledge everyone's generosity.

They're just showing their frondness for you...

Oh yeah. FTL's one of the few games where you have my blessing to use Easy Mode.

Normal is brutal.

I hope I'll not regret this but ... boom!



New graphics card should be here circa Wednesday.

It's an MSI Nvidia GTX 780, purchased in the main because it comes recommended as extremely quiet for a high end card but also because, at 266mm, it's the shortest non-reference 780 I could find.

It was discounted by £50 for a week on Overclockers.co.uk (where I've bought a lot of stuff in the past) which sealed the deal. The upcoming 880 will definitely be more powerful and may well be cheaper than the 780 was at launch but it won't be anywhere close to the price of this card.

Future-proofing is a suspect term when it comes to tech but I'm expecting this GPU to get me through at least the PS4/Xbox One generation at higher detail, resolution and framerate than the consoles at a cheaper price. Looking at it like that - Yep, I'm justifying my way through a slight case of buyer's remorse! - it's good value.

Looks like I'm getting Borderlands the Pre-Sequel as part of the Nvidia free games offer, which is fair enough. Not something I'd have bought at full price but I thought I was going to get Watch Dogs - Nvidia must have changed their promotion.

A single copy of Watch Dogs is one too many.

You're a bad, bad man. But I'd pay a fifth of the price just for the dragon on the box. I think buyer's remorse is inevitable for anything in this price range that isn't strictly necessary. But I do know that with things like this, if they work as advertised it's hard not to be happy with them once you're actually enjoying them. An admittedly wonky example is the wife and I replacing the washer when it broke down recently: we hemmed and hawed about whether or not to spend more on a nicer one, but once it got here and was running like a dream, it got really hard to regret the decision.

I was going to say "let us know how it runs," but I think we all know already it'll be fantastic. Cool stuff.

It's going to be interesting seeing how much of a performance advantage it gives me. It's probably going to be noticeable in the next few years (EDIT - First big test will be GTA5) although I'll re-install (yep, it's not even on my system any more) Watch Dogs to see how it copes. Seeing as TotalBiscuit couldn't get stable framerates running twin Titans I suspect it won't cope any better than the old card, just a lot quieter.

Comparing a GPU to a washing machine is pretty smart - We spent a lot more on ours than this 780 and it's still purring away 12 years later. My cheap dishwasher packed up after 3 or 4 years.

Yep, no buyer's remorse here!

A PS4 challenging gaming PC for $380? Step this way:



That new Pentium CPU looks a total cracker for the price, and I've got a friend who runs a 750ti graphics card - He's very happy with it.

Good video. Seems like people should be building there own PCs.

Played Shovel Knight and, all in all, It's a fun game. The platforming has an addictive quality and a few of the boss fights are very well done. What it does better than anything else, however, is too often try your patience. Too many times I had to repeat areas which became old very fast. In quite a few spots, enjoyment solely becomes a case of relief at surmounting an annoying stage. The ending put a good cap on things so I did leave the game feeling the experience was worth it.

Nearly ready to launch me new 'game'. Trailer up

__________________
Virtual Reality chatter on a movie site? Got endless amounts of it here. Reviews over here

Back from vacation and back into Divinity. I am well into the second area at this point.

__________________

Out with the old:



In with the new!



Any concerns I had about the new card's dimensions were nullified as soon as I tried to fit it - It's shorter than the old one!

I then booted up Unigine's Valley benchmark (try it, it's free and gorgeous), not expecting a huge difference between the 7950 (which was AMD's second most powerful card a couple of years ago) and the 780.

Wrong! Nearly double the framerate.

Old card:



New card, with the same settings in the benchmark:



And it was practically silent while doing it, and that benchmark is hard on GPUs.

Buyer's remorse averted.

Nice.

I was gonna say "new hotness," but hopefully it's running cool.

I'm jelly!

I am similarly gelatinous.

It was running 64C at full load, the old card was hitting 70 and sounding like a hoover while doing it.

The 7950's hitting eBay at the weekend. Amazingly, used examples are still commanding £100+ - Bitcoin mining, apparently. AMD cards are supposed to be really good at it.

Whatever 'it' is...

I'm sure everyone who's ever swapped a GPU or bought/built a new gaming PC has done the same thing as me yesterday - Play 30+ games for 2 minutes each going "Coo, ain't they purty?" as if talking about a newborn.

I did that, but with numbers!

Sleeping Dogs benchmark - Old GPU: 76.2 (everything on Ultra) New GPU: 122 (same)
Tomb Raider benchmark - Old: 75.4 (Ultra) New: 122.6

Here's the weird thing about the above two games - They were both ported to PC by the same devs (almost sure ) and gave me figures almost completely similar over two different GPUs. Same engine, I guess.

EDIT - Oops, this is why I wanted to post.



Looks amazingly pretty. Amazingly pretty.

Awful title, awful voice acting/script but it's not due out til 2015 so I'm guessing a lot of that will change.

Reminds me a bit of Eidolon, which I really like.

Hadn't played Skyrim since I got my new monitor, so gave it a crack tonight. Boy, what a difference!





EDIT - Nvidia Shadowplay is great! I'll need to tweak the quality settings but I can record in 1080p/60 with no noticeable loss of performance.

Carmageddon 2 - Ohhhhhhhhhhh, I feel I'm 10 yo again!