OT: Video Games VI

[g00n]

I've been down on EA for a while. Keep giving them a chance every few years. Only consistent purchase has been FIFA and have hardly played '21 because meh.

Not sure if FIFA 22 has anything worthwhile other than a few token improvements and a roster update. IOW the usual.

 

[HTFN]

If I were going to try again I guess the move to frostbite would be one to look out for, but...

I just know EA and usually that means they cut out half of the features added in the last 4 years to "streamline" the transition, so I'll still have to wait and make sure it's not a stripped down version where we're just supposed to be happy they made it to the current generation.

 

[ChaosLord]

Just a health question: have any of you experienced insomnia as a result of playing video games?
Lately, I have had to cut back on playing AC Valhalla because its given me insomnia for two consecutive evenings.

If any of you have experienced insomnia and have take succesful steps to address it (eg. new monitor, light blocking glasses,
etc) please let me know.

 

[usiel]

Just a health question: have any of you experienced insomnia as a result of playing video games?
Lately, I have had to cut back on playing AC Valhalla because its given me insomnia for two consecutive evenings.

If any of you have experienced insomnia and have take succesful steps to address it (eg. new monitor, light blocking glasses,
etc) please let me know.

Like how many hours in a day? I only experienced a bit of insomnia back in the Quake 3 competitive CTF days where I would get home from work and starting playing from 6pm to 2AM during the week and on Saturdays could hit 14 hours of playtime at the top end. And even when I got to sleep the dreams would take on some of the video game qualities, heh.

Now I have gotten a bit more OCD later in life with some games like Civilization or single player rpg but even then can't match the Q3 days. Just for eye strain only the chrome browser hax to force dark mode has really helped even though there are some websites that look screwy. My insomnia would be predominantly just getting to sleep because the brain hard drive live keeps munching.

The whole blue light stuff with monitors never had the problems they purportedly can cause.

 

[Hivemind]

I don’t think Civilization causes insomnia so much as you never actually even try to go to sleep because it’s always “one more turn”

 

[usiel]

I don’t think Civilization causes insomnia so much as you never actually even try to go to sleep because it’s always “one more turn”

Oh for sure and me insisting on playing marathon mode plus the last third of the game the AI calculating each of the other npc turns would take forever. Admittedly mostly played civ beyond earth towards the end of my civ binging. Still have not really given Civ 6 a shot. Playing eve online has sort of taken over in the last year and a half though I will pick up BF 2042.

 

[ChaosLord]

The whole blue light stuff with monitors never had the problems they purportedly can cause.

I think its that right there. Going to look into some blue light filtering glasses. Thanks for the reply

 

[usiel]

I think its that right there. Going to look into some blue light filtering glasses. Thanks for the reply

I mean hey if someone has some issues with extended 'in front of a computer" issue I wouldn't rule anything out.

I'm about to be surrounded on 3 sides three traditional monitors and one Oled ( 2-1-1/left middle right).

Picked up a couple ergotron desk monitor arms which are excellent just wished they didn't cost as much.

 

[Drake1588]

I mean hey if someone has some issues with extended 'in front of a computer" issue I wouldn't rule anything out.

I'm about to be surrounded on 3 sides three traditional monitors and one Oled ( 2-1-1/left middle right).

Picked up a couple ergotron desk monitor arms which are excellent just wished they didn't cost as much.

Fleet Command is online.

 

[usiel]

Fleet Command is online.

Had to reply to see that picture. So after a couple of days of stalling finally got the lg oled 55" in place. Had to some Maguyver esque procedures to get the base on (not having enough space to lay it down flat like the instructions said and lifting it into a tight fitting space a little unnerving trying not to bend the screen. Only fired up Eve Online which was over course glorious. I do have that metro enhanced edition with dlss that I will check out.

 

[Drake1588]

Had to reply to see that picture. So after a couple of days of stalling finally got the lg oled 55" in place. Had to some Maguyver esque procedures to get the base on (not having enough space to lay it down flat like the instructions said and lifting it into a tight fitting space a little unnerving trying not to bend the screen. Only fired up Eve Online which was over course glorious. I do have that metro enhanced edition with dlss that I will check out.

I stared at an EVGA 3080 TI FTW3 Ultra Gaming card for a good three hours today. It's just sitting there in my cart. Tapping its foot. Waiting.

At just $400 over MSRP, how bad is it really? Sure, the MSRP itself was jacked up, but... moar pixels and cuda cores and stuff. I don't actually truly know what cuda cores are, of course, but it sounds really impressive and ray tracing loves 'em. Bah...

 

[usiel]

Tough one. Especially heading towards fall and myself not really hearing much about the 4080 if that release is more modest or not. If one is doing 4k HDR gaming a worthy purchase.

 

[Drake1588]

Tough one. Especially heading towards fall and myself not really hearing much about the 4080 if that release is more modest or not. If one is doing 4k HDR gaming a worthy purchase.

Oh, the 4080 is likely not coming until Fall 2022. Next year, second-generation AMD ray tracing might be really good. Intel is coming out with new gamer-class GPUs as well. If only to keep nVidia honest, that's all good news.

There's still time for nVidia to put out a 3080 Super in the spring or thereabouts, though. Better than 3080, a step below 3080 TI. That may be what I end up getting to pair with my x570 platform and AMD 5800X CPU.

Right now, this card would cost what I spent on my entire 9700K / 2080 Super gaming PC's components. I'm not against spending money, but that's a stretch. I think I'll hold out. I've yet to find a game unplayable on my 2080 Super, or at frame rates that I can't accept. Almost all new titles are at 100fps+ and it's hard to complain about that. Maybe this fall's titles tilt the scales, but right now this card is holding its own. I've got FOMO bad, is all.

 

[usiel]

Oh, the 4080 is likely not coming until Fall 2022. Next year, second-generation AMD ray tracing might be really good. Intel is coming out with new gamer-class GPUs as well. If only to keep nVidia honest, that's all good news.

There's still time for nVidia to put out a 3080 Super in the spring or thereabouts, though. Better than 3080, a step below 3080 TI. That may be what I end up getting to pair with my x570 platform and AMD 5800X CPU.

Right now, this card would cost what I spent on my entire 9700K / 2080 Super gaming PC's components. I'm not against spending money, but that's a stretch. I think I'll hold out. I've yet to find a game unplayable on my 2080 Super, or at frame rates that I can't accept. Almost all new titles are at 100fps+ and it's hard to complain about that. Maybe this fall's titles tilt the scales, but right now this card is holding its own. I've got FOMO bad, is all.

Heh. Unless you are planning on like picking up that new LG 48" monitor (that is 500 bucks more than the lg 55" c1 I just bought) that is coming out this fall and want to be maxing out 4k with good FPS/max IQ settings probably not a need. I fully understand looking at something in the cart trying to hit the buy button on something that does MOAR but is not really needed.

 

[Drake1588]

Heh. Unless you are planning on like picking up that new LG 48" monitor (that is 500 bucks more than the lg 55" c1 I just bought) that is coming out this fall and want to be maxing out 4k with good FPS/max IQ settings probably not a need. I fully understand looking at something in the cart trying to hit the buy button on something that does MOAR but is not really needed.

It's true. What they say is that the 4K benefits to going from the 20xx series to the 30xx series are immense, like 50 percent plus gains, but that those gains are more like 1/3 for 1440p and less still when you're playing at 1080p. Granted, that's as much about the standard baseline titles they use for testing, which are somewhat dated.

The difference between gaming at 300 fps today on an older game versus getting slightly higher fps with a new card is not such a big deal. Yet the difference between 4K ray tracing at high refresh rates can see you jump from 30 fps with ray tracing last generation to 80+ fps this generation. That's an incredible difference.

I'm probably getting set to play a lot of Amazon's New World this fall. I've played a lot of the beta and my current card runs well with that title (which is reasonably graphically impressive for a MMO). RDR2 already runs at 100 fps on my gaming rig at 1440p and 144 Hz. That's still really good for my needs. I can delay jumping to 30xx until the spring for a Super or stretch it until I can get a 40xx card next fall.

If the prices come down or I get lucky, I'll jump on an nVidia card for MSRP (I'm not interested in AMD this generation. Its ray tracing isn't good enough yet). For now, though, I'll hold off on playing much Cyberpunk until I get a new card. It runs fine, but that game undoubtedly wants a 30xx series card to show off its ray tracing.

 

[Cush]

Still rocking a 1080ti (1440p). Don't play a lot of "heavy hitters", so it's adequate for now.

 

[usiel]

I'll be flat out honest my 1070 was good enough playing through my UW wide monitor at max resolution before I decided to go with a new system with a 30 series and monitor upgrade. That said somewhat prescient my 1070 system has a cpu cooling issue looks like the water cooler might have died so it is a no go until I yank the box out and investigate.

 

[Cappy76]

I just recently built my first and went with that 3060TI that's been great paired with the Ultra Wide MSI 34'' monitor. 3440x1440 100FPS for most titles that I've ran on it. Granted I don't know that I've really pushed it much with anything that I've played other than maybe HZD.

 

[AlexModvechkin8]

Downloaded Ghost of Tsushima again and enjoying it a lot more the second time around. Took me a while to get the feel of the controls back and to remember storylines and characters, long enough actually that I almost restarted the game, but I’m digging it a lot more than before when I was burned out on the genre. Playing it on a PS5 on a 65” OLED… chef’s kiss.

 

[Drake1588]

I'll be flat out honest my 1070 was good enough playing through my UW wide monitor at max resolution before I decided to go with a new system with a 30 series and monitor upgrade. That said somewhat prescient my 1070 system has a cpu cooling issue looks like the water cooler might have died so it is a no go until I yank the box out and investigate.

Hah, I have a 7700K machine with a four-year old liquid cooler than I don't really trust anymore either. I picked up a beQuiet Dark Rock Pro 4 to install in its place. I'm going to try to get around to that this weekend.

 

[Drake1588]

Persistence pays off. I just snagged a Zotac 3080 TI AMP Holo card for MSRP, directly from Zotac, which I purchased on the Zotac store. The card isn't cheap, but it's overclocked to just a hair under a 3090 and it has a really good cooler, the same one they developed to cool their 3090s. I didn't get a huge bargain, but I didn't pay scalpers or third-party sellers either. Screw 'em.

Those YouTube channels that have rolling trackers for availability are a handy way to keep tabs on stock, and the competition on the demand side thins out late at night.

 

[Devil Dancer]

Persistence pays off. I just snagged a Zotac 3080 TI AMP Holo card for MSRP, directly from Zotac, which I purchased on the Zotac store.

Congrats Drake, that's awesome.

What's the current showcase game for high end PCs? Cyberpunk, now that the biggest bugs have been patched out? Or is there something on the radar for the fall?

 

[Drake1588]

The bear for older graphics cards is ray tracing technology, so I would say that Cyberpunk probably is the one that uses it most, yes. Control too. Watch Dogs Legion seems to use it quite a bit too.

You can also play some dedicated ray tracing games/demos, like RTX Quake and Minecraft with RTX, which features very heavy ray tracing implementation. First generation ray tracing on the 6xxx cards from AMD is no good, but will no doubt improve considerably next generation. Ray tracing taxes but can be decent/playable on the higher nVidia RTX 20xx cards.

Most games from here on out are expected to implement a lot of it, though. So this fall's games and beyond should have it, optionally. If you turn it off, you won't notice it, but it's yet another bell and whistle, as were the raft of anti-aliasing approaches so many years back. Most gamers, per Steam statistics, still play on nVidia 10xx series cards. There are a lot of 1080s and 1070s out there. So most games still make sure they look good on that hardware.

The key for Cyberpunk is that it doesn't really work that well on older hardware. You want a 30xx series card and if you don't have one, it chugs. That's unusual for developers. They usually want to appeal to the lowest common denominator. This is more like the Wing Commander games, which pushed gaming hardware with each release because they immediately made older hardware obsolete at the bleeding edge. The difference is that not everyone can get that new hardware, due to the shortages, so CD Projekt Red faced a lot of blowback. They also left themselves open to criticism that they didn't fine tune the game well enough to run on older hardware.

 

[Devil Dancer]

Good point, it turns out the RT capabilities of the 20XX cards were overblown.

Somehow Control ran pretty well on my 2060m (40-50 fps in combat with RT), but I had to turn RT off for Cyberpunk.

Legion on XSX was locked at 30, and that system is basically a 2080.

There's never really a good time to launch a console and lock in hardware specs for years at a time, but another year could have made RT a lot more feasible this generation.

 

[Drake1588]

I'd add Shadow of the Tomb Raider, Metro Exodus, Wolfenstein Youngblood, and Battlefield V to the list of titles that make heavy use of ray tracing. Some do it better than others, and most still look great with RT turned off. I'm pretty sure that The Ascent implements ray tracing as well. That's a sweet game.