What are you playing?

[lexluthermiester]

Try fallout 4 New California from Nexus mods, is very good

BTW for those wondering and not wanting to use NexusMods, ModDB has it hosted there as well.

Fallout: New California mod

Fallout: New California adds an all new story around a new player character, an adopted resident of Vault 18, embarking on a journey through the wastelands of the New California Republic's Cajon Pass. An unofficial prequel to New Vegas, FPB adds hours...

www.moddb.com

The link states Project Brazil, but it's New Cali.

 

[Splinterdog]

Thanks for reminding about MW3 on Game Pass. I really enjoyed the original, so I'll give that a go.
What are the main improvements, by the way?
Yikes!
View attachment 364419

For the last hour I've been trying to get MW3 running on Game Pass with no luck. All drivers up to date and when I finally get past all the introductory/legal nonsense and select MW3 Campaign/single player, I get a hard crash with the PC restarting, or it then asks me to start in safe mode.
What a complete waste of time.

 

[xu^]

Age of Mythology - Retold

As huge AOE fan in general, it was a rare preorder for me, if u liked the original, you will love this, been playing most nights with me and a friend vs the AI, be great fun.

 

[SKRDPTSGL]

Age of Mythology - Retold

As huge AOE fan in general, it was a rare preorder for me, if u liked the original, you will love this, been playing most nights with me and a friend vs the AI, be great fun.

What are the differences between this and the Age of mythology remastered?

 

[xu^]

You mean the older AOM - Extended Edition ?

Retold is the Remaster, new graphics,sounds, high res/refresh rates etc , not sure if there's new content as its been a long time since i played the original.

 

[RatusNatus]

Star Citizen

 

[Space Lynx]

What are the differences between this and the Age of mythology remastered?

The high refresh and better graphics actually do make it more immersive, I have been playing it as well.

 

[SKRDPTSGL]

You mean the older AOM - Extended Edition ?

Retold is the Remaster, new graphics,sounds, high res/refresh rates etc , not sure if there's new content as its been a long time since i played the original.

Yes.

 

[Splinterdog]

For the last hour I've been trying to get MW3 running on Game Pass with no luck. All drivers up to date and when I finally get past all the introductory/legal nonsense and select MW3 Campaign/single player, I get a hard crash with the PC restarting, or it then asks me to start in safe mode.
What a complete waste of time.

I was looking forward to playing MW3 single player again, especially the remastered version, but frankly the entire Activision/Battle net process is a step too far.
Furthermore, I've been investigating the crashes - MW3 hasn't started for me one single time - and there are pages written of what might fix the crashing, up to an including reinstalling Windows. You have got to be effing joking!
My last stab at this was to use DDU and reinstall Radeon drivers from scratch, followed by moving the game to the NVMe. If neither of those options work, then it's chau to Activision and Battle.net forever.
Every other game runs perfectly on my PC, so I haven't got the time or inclination to mess around any more with this nonsense and glad it's on Game Pass, rather than having paid for it.
Rant over...

None of the options worked, so I nuked the lot, leaving no trace of Call Of Duty, Battle.net or Activision on my PC.

 

[Space Lynx]

I am playing the new expansion on magic arena that launched yesterday, called Duskmourn. It's been surprisingly fun so far

 

[nomdeplume]

None of the options worked, so I nuked the lot, leaving no trace of Call Of Duty, Battle.net or Activision on my PC.

Special K?

 

[natr0n]

Played some Lollipop Chainsaw Repop. Still waiting for 2nd test/beta run of Delta Force in October.

 

[Frick]

World of Warcraft and it's annoying how I can't download vanilla while Classic is running.

wait what the shit is Anduin again? *looks it up* *groan* I'm not keen at all on reading up like a decade of WoW lore at this point. And why have the modeled the character selection screen after Diablo??? WHY IS THE ENTIRE PLANET SHANKED

EDIT: Well phew at least one of the first quests in the "old" expansion (Dragonflight) is about killing baby dragons for their skin.

 

[Splinterdog]

At least the GOG version of Crysis works right out of the box (as opposed to Steam) and still looks amazing after all these years. To think I used to run this game on a Pentium 4 and 2Gb of RAM and a Leadtek Winfast A400 GT GeForce 6800 with 256MB of VRAM!
By today's standards, it knocks so many games out of the park - unlimited manual saves (with checkpoints), loads the game in seconds and it's the prefect single player shooter in my opinion.

 

[natr0n]

At least the GOG version of Crysis works right out of the box (as opposed to Steam) and still looks amazing after all these years. To think I used to run this game on a Pentium 4 and 2Gb of RAM and a Leadtek Winfast A400 GT GeForce 6800 with 256MB of VRAM!
By today's standards, it knocks so many games out of the park - unlimited manual saves (with checkpoints), loads the game in seconds and it's the prefect single player shooter in my opinion.
View attachment 364820

I like running the benchmarks hidden in dir. I believe this game needs/properly uses a pagefile as show by icons in benchmark.

 

[Frick]

At least the GOG version of Crysis works right out of the box (as opposed to Steam) and still looks amazing after all these years. To think I used to run this game on a Pentium 4 and 2Gb of RAM and a Leadtek Winfast A400 GT GeForce 6800 with 256MB of VRAM!
By today's standards, it knocks so many games out of the park - unlimited manual saves (with checkpoints), loads the game in seconds and it's the prefect single player shooter in my opinion.
View attachment 364820

"Can it play Crysis" was ... well, never really true. It ran quite well on slower hardware. I assume you'd have to really scale back the settings though, I played the multiplayer demo (and it was so fun) on an Athlon 3000+ and a Radeon x1950pro and I managed I want to say medium settings on 1280x1024. I didn't like the single player demo at all actually, but at some point I saw a comment somewhere that it was so much better when you played at Delta level and so I tried it ... and it was true. No longer was it a "FPS with some gimmicks", it became a really good game and it felt like the entire game was balanced for that difficulty level.

 

[lexluthermiester]

well, never really true. It ran quite well on slower hardware.

When the game was new, it was true. Gamers needed what was at the time very powerful hardware, CPU & GPU. If you had a good enough GPU, a high Mhz single core CPU was enough to stay above 30fps, but most people didn't. Remember, it came out the year after the Core2 & Athlon64 X2 series. The game game was aimed at those CPU and most people were still rocking their single core older CPU's..

 

[Frick]

When the game was new, it was true. Gamers needed what was at the time very powerful hardware, CPU & GPU. If you had a good enough GPU, a high Mhz single core CPU was enough to stay above 30fps, but most people didn't. Remember, it came out the year after the Core2 & Athlon64 X2 series. The game game was aimed at those CPU and most people were still rocking their single core older CPU's..

I played it on a single core CPU though*. This was a Long Time Ago though, but I remember a bunch of people playing it across various configurations with little problems (see the 2.4 Ghz P4 above, which was like the base level of computing as I recall it, at least for the kind of people that would play Crysis)... Unless you're talking about say the Geforce MX or stuff like that.

*re single core vs dual core the one game I remember basically requiring dual core was Supreme Commander...

 

[Princess Garnet]

At least the GOG version of Crysis works right out of the box (as opposed to Steam) and still looks amazing after all these years. To think I used to run this game on a Pentium 4 and 2Gb of RAM and a Leadtek Winfast A400 GT GeForce 6800 with 256MB of VRAM!
By today's standards, it knocks so many games out of the park - unlimited manual saves (with checkpoints), loads the game in seconds and it's the prefect single player shooter in my opinion.
View attachment 364820

What's wrong with the Steam version? I haven't played it forever so I didn't know there was something amiss with it now?

As someone who doesn't play a lot of FPS games since they usually don't attract me on basis of being a shooting game alone (they need something else to draw me in, like Doom 3 or Resident Evil with the horror/survival horror elements), Far Cry and Crysis were both exceptions to this and games that I enjoyed. The scale of the levels at the time was unheard of. That was before all this open world stuff we have now. I loved the tropical environments in those two games, and Crysis had the fun suit powers to play with too.

The first PC I played it on (demo version) was similar to yours, a Pentium 4 2.8 GHz, 1 GB DDR, and a GeForce 6800 GS AGP (256 MB). Seeing like 12 FPS, if I'm not misremembering, when it was at higher settings was wild (I forget what resolution, but it would have been on a CRT at the time so it probably would have been between 640 x 480 to 1024 x 768 or so). Keep in mind that this was being developed around the time the 6800 and 7800 were nVidia's high end cards. Even at low, the game was taxing on that hardware. I know lack of optimization is definitely a thing (always was, and always will be), but people who have only been around for the last decade or so, or people that got comfortable with the last decade of long life of usefulness of hardware, don't know/forgot how it used to be.

My first PC I built had a Core 2 Duo E8400, 4 GB DDR2, and a GeForce 8600 GTS OC 256 MB (shortly upgraded to a 8800 GT 512 MB). I could now run at medium with the 8600 GTS at 800 x 600, and that got moved to medium-high and 1024 x 768 with the 8800 GT. Probably frame rates in the mid-40s to 60. Or, I could go with 1280 x 720 if I was okay with 30 FPS to 40 FPS. I later got a 1920 x 1200 LCD (and still have it...) and I think it wasn't until my GTX 560 Ti that I could play at that resolution and be near 60 FPS most of the time at high.

 

[lexluthermiester]

I played it on a single core CPU though*. This was a Long Time Ago though, but I remember a bunch of people playing it across various configurations with little problems (see the 2.4 Ghz P4 above, which was like the base level of computing as I recall it, at least for the kind of people that would play Crysis)... Unless you're talking about say the Geforce MX or stuff like that.

*re single core vs dual core the one game I remember basically requiring dual core was Supreme Commander...

I was a manager for a PC shop back then and remember well the differences in performance as we had to demonstrate such quite often. Single core CPU's with a very good GPU could offer a playable and steady 25 to 30FPS. But for fluid 60fps+, a high mhz dual core was required at minimum and a Quad was recommended. Crysis was our Core2Quad seller. It was an easy task to show differences with the in-store demo systems. It was night and day. And that was with Radeon X1950's or Geforce 7950's. So GPU power was not the issue.

We're getting a bit off topic, so I digress..

What's wrong with the Steam version? I haven't played it forever so I didn't know there was something amiss with it now?

It has issues. If you want to play Crysis, get the GOG version as it runs no issues.

 

[Frick]

I was a manager for a PC shop back then and remember well the differences in performance as we had to demonstrate such quite often. Single core CPU's with a very good GPU could offer a playable and steady 25 to 30FPS. But for fluid 60fps+, a high mhz dual core was required at minimum and a Quad was recommended. Crysis was our Core2Quad seller. It was an easy to show difference with the in-store demo systems. It was night and day. And that was with Radeon X1950's or Geforce 7950's. So GPU power was not the issue.

We're getting a bit off topic, so I digress..

We're not, it's cool.

Interesting! Were you FPS nerds back then as well? Sometimes I think one of the good things about me is that at the end of the day my one requirement for a game is basically "do I find this enjoyable". I distinctly remember playing the multiplayer demo at 1280x1024 on a mix of medium and high settings, on a Athlon 3000+ (venice) system, running at I want to say 2.2GHz, with a Powercolor x1950pro and 512MB RAM. It was heaps of fun, and some matches I even did pretty well in, and I just remember it looking gorgeous and running well (for my given definition of well). I'd make a terrible sales person (I know this from experience).

 

[Splinterdog]

What's wrong with the Steam version? I haven't played it forever so I didn't know there was something amiss with it now?

As someone who doesn't play a lot of FPS games since they usually don't attract me on basis of being a shooting game alone (they need something else to draw me in, like Doom 3 or Resident Evil with the horror/survival horror elements), Far Cry and Crysis were both exceptions to this and games that I enjoyed. The scale of the levels at the time was unheard of. That was before all this open world stuff we have now. I loved the tropical environments in those two games, and Crysis had the fun suit powers to play with too.

The first PC I played it on (demo version) was similar to yours, a Pentium 4 2.8 GHz, 1 GB DDR, and a GeForce 6800 GS AGP (256 MB). Seeing like 12 FPS, if I'm not misremembering, when it was at higher settings was wild (I forget what resolution, but it would have been on a CRT at the time so it probably would have been between 640 x 480 to 1024 x 768 or so). Keep in mind that this was being developed around the time the 6800 and 7800 were nVidia's high end cards. Even at low, the game was taxing on that hardware. I know lack of optimization is definitely a thing (always was, and always will be), but people who have only been around for the last decade or so, or people that got comfortable with the last decade of long life of usefulness of hardware, don't know/forgot how it used to be.

My first PC I built had a Core 2 Duo E8400, 4 GB DDR2, and a GeForce 8600 GTS OC 256 MB (shortly upgraded to a 8800 GT 512 MB). I could now run at medium with the 8600 GTS at 800 x 600, and that got moved to medium-high and 1024 x 768 with the 8800 GT. Probably frame rates in the mid-40s to 60. Or, I could go with 1280 x 720 if I was okay with 30 FPS to 40 FPS. I later got a 1920 x 1200 LCD (and still have it...) and I think it wasn't until my GTX 560 Ti that I could play at that resolution and be near 60 FPS most of the time at high.

It used to run fine on Steam by renaming Bin 32 folder or deleting it and then renaming Bin 64 folder to Bin 32, so Steam would default to that, but all I was getting were black screens, no matter what I did.
Then I remembered that I also had the game on GOG and launched it with no silly fiddling about. I can only assume that GOG fixed the launching issue, so that we didn't need to suffer, which is typical of GOG. The platform is streets ahead of others in that respect, which is probably why it's called Good Old Games in the first place.
Excuse me while I launch Crysis again on GOG

 

[lexluthermiester]

Interesting! Were you FPS nerds back then as well?

Oh hell yes! I have been a "FrameRate is Life!" kind of guy since the Doom1 days(early 90's). It became critical with the release of Quake 1 and Unreal 1 and only took off from there.

I am still a FrameRate is Life kind of guy!

on a Athlon 3000+ (venice) system, running at I want to say 2.2GHz, with a Powercolor x1950pro and 512MB RAM.

And that set of parts would render a solid performance, but it would be sub 60FPS at high resolutions, regardless of aspect ratio. At that time, 16:9 and 16:10 LCD panels were on the way in and many were 1366x768 or higher.

 

[64K]

What's wrong with the Steam version? I haven't played it forever so I didn't know there was something amiss with it now?

As someone who doesn't play a lot of FPS games since they usually don't attract me on basis of being a shooting game alone (they need something else to draw me in, like Doom 3 or Resident Evil with the horror/survival horror elements), Far Cry and Crysis were both exceptions to this and games that I enjoyed. The scale of the levels at the time was unheard of. That was before all this open world stuff we have now. I loved the tropical environments in those two games, and Crysis had the fun suit powers to play with too.

The first PC I played it on (demo version) was similar to yours, a Pentium 4 2.8 GHz, 1 GB DDR, and a GeForce 6800 GS AGP (256 MB). Seeing like 12 FPS, if I'm not misremembering, when it was at higher settings was wild (I forget what resolution, but it would have been on a CRT at the time so it probably would have been between 640 x 480 to 1024 x 768 or so). Keep in mind that this was being developed around the time the 6800 and 7800 were nVidia's high end cards. Even at low, the game was taxing on that hardware. I know lack of optimization is definitely a thing (always was, and always will be), but people who have only been around for the last decade or so, or people that got comfortable with the last decade of long life of usefulness of hardware, don't know/forgot how it used to be.

My first PC I built had a Core 2 Duo E8400, 4 GB DDR2, and a GeForce 8600 GTS OC 256 MB (shortly upgraded to a 8800 GT 512 MB). I could now run at medium with the 8600 GTS at 800 x 600, and that got moved to medium-high and 1024 x 768 with the 8800 GT. Probably frame rates in the mid-40s to 60. Or, I could go with 1280 x 720 if I was okay with 30 FPS to 40 FPS. I later got a 1920 x 1200 LCD (and still have it...) and I think it wasn't until my GTX 560 Ti that I could play at that resolution and be near 60 FPS most of the time at high.

Steam is great but they don't do as much as GOG for keeping those old classics running well. It's hit or miss with Steam but there have been several times when I couldn't get an old game on Steam to work but bought it on GOG and it worked.

For me I played Crysis for the first time on my first build. A E8400 Core 2 Duo Wolfdale, 2 GB RAM and a 8800 GT. I don't remember exactly what the settings were but it certainly wasn't Crysis in all it's visual glory. It was only much later with a GTX 680 that I could do that but I think a GTX 480 might have been able to but I didn't have one.

 

[Princess Garnet]

Huh? Interesting about the issues with the Steam version. I just tried and sure enough, Crysis won't launch for me. There was a Steam update to the game in 2023 which removed SecuROM. Might be related?

Crysis Warhead, however, does launch just fine. And that's basically a "standalone expansion" using almost the same game engine and everything from what I remember.

Crysis (original) gives me two options when launching, and one is blank. I tried both and get the same result. From quick searching, this seems to be the 32-bit and 64-bit choice. Supposedly the latter works for some people.

There seem to be workarounds, from setting Windows compatibility to older versions (apparently Windows 8+ is where this can break, but some people have it working fine), to using Crysis Warhead executable for Crysis, to trying 64-bit instead of 32-bit, to standalone launchers. I haven't tried any of that, besides the aforementioned "trying both options the game presents when launching" thing.

I'm not getting the Black screen and then crash that some people report. I just see a new (blank) icon begin to appear on the taskbar and then it immediately disappears without even going to launch/render anything.

I was a manager for a PC shop back then and remember well the differences in performance as we had to demonstrate such quite often. Single core CPU's with a very good GPU could offer a playable and steady 25 to 30FPS. But for fluid 60fps+, a high mhz dual core was required at minimum and a Quad was recommended. Crysis was our Core2Quad seller. It was an easy task to show differences with the in-store demo systems. It was night and day.

I'm not going to question your claim, because you have a high sample size from a business perspective you're pulling from on this so I'm sure you saw the results you claim, but I will say I do find those results interesting. I remember Crysis as being infamously thread limited, not core limited, and I do recall the E8x00 Duos outperforming the Quads due to clock speed disadvantage. I know my E8400/E8600 ran the games very, very well.

The real limiting factor was almost the graphics cards with this game anyway, not the CPU. Maybe with a Pentium 4 or similarly slow Athlon XP/64 single core CPU, would it be a bigger issue.

The first big game I really remember where quad cores showed big differences was the PC port of Grand Theft Auto IV.