PC Owners Thread

[yourbeliefs]

More good news about DS3 on PC.. A person has ALLEGEDLY figured out how to softban players himself..

http://kotaku.com/dark-souls-3-pc-c..._source=Kotaku_Facebook&utm_medium=Socialflow

 

[yourbeliefs]

Friendly reminder folks: That free Windows 10 upgrade is ending on July 29th. After that, you have to actually pay.

http://lifehacker.com/reminder-windows-10-home-will-cost-119-starting-july-1774880058

 

[king3pj]

Today was the day my first month of Humble Monthly unlocked. For those who don't know, it's a $12 per month subscription service that gives you a new bundle of games every month. They have one early unlock game to entice people to sign up every month but you don't get to see what the rest of the games will be until you are locked in and paid for that month. These were the games I got for this month.

Mad Max
Infinifactory
Crawl
Galak-Z
Jumpjet Rex
Fran Bow
Oddworld Abe's Oddysee: New 'n' Tasty
1993 Space Marine

Outside of Mad Max, Galak-Z and Oddworld I would have had little interest in any of these games based on just seeing their names. I had never heard of about half of them. I should point out that every game was released in 2015 or later and each one ranges from "Positive" to "Overwhelmingly Positive" in the Steam user review system. Infinifactory actually seems like it might be a nice surprise and Mad Max was worth the $12 by itself to me.

The early unlock game for next month is Rocket League. I already own this game so it's not as much of a sure thing for me. Still, I feel that I got my money's worth this month so I will probably keep my subscription active another month and see how it goes.

 

[yourbeliefs]

Just a FYI to everyone, Galak-Z and Oddworld were PS+ free games.

 

[yourbeliefs]

Here's a video of Doom 4 running on a GTX 1080, which is at 200 FPS. Obviously a screen recorded YT video can't completely convey the effects, but enough is displayed to make me wish I had an extra $600 lying around..

 

[king3pj]

I'm pretty tempted to sell each of my 970s for the $225 they are going for on eBay. $150 out of pocket for a 1080 doesn't sound too bad. Hell, I could actually make a small profit if I sold them and bought a 1070. Since SLI 970s are about as fast as a 980 Ti and the 1070 is faster than that this might not be a terrible idea.

The only downside is that I would probably be without a GPU for at least a month. I would have to sell before the new cards release to get the best return and stock of the new cards will likely be limited for a little while.

 

[yourbeliefs]

I'm going to hang on to my 960 for a while. My eventual plan is to do a massive upgrade of my system, like completely replace it in the future with new everything, as opposed to my last investment where I simply upgraded everything within my existing case. I mean my Alienware case is over 10 years old now and not even all the USB ports work properly anymore (not to mention the thing is an eyesore.) When I do my big upgrade in about 2 years I'll probably go all out on my video card like I did all those years ago. I mean even now a Titan X is more power than you'd need for at least 3 years, so I like to think the 1080 will have a decent shelf life as well, and the price can only go down over time. And of course, we can't really rush to judgement on the 1080 until we get some real benchmarks in.

 

[king3pj]

I'm going to hang on to my 960 for a while. My eventual plan is to do a massive upgrade of my system, like completely replace it in the future with new everything, as opposed to my last investment where I simply upgraded everything within my existing case. I mean my Alienware case is over 10 years old now and not even all the USB ports work properly anymore (not to mention the thing is an eyesore.) When I do my big upgrade in about 2 years I'll probably go all out on my video card like I did all those years ago. I mean even now a Titan X is more power than you'd need for at least 3 years, so I like to think the 1080 will have a decent shelf life as well, and the price can only go down over time. And of course, we can't really rush to judgement on the 1080 until we get some real benchmarks in.

Yeah, as much as I would like to sell my cards now and pre-order a 1080 that doesn't seem like the smartest move. Even if I lose some resale value on my 970s by waiting I want to see real benchmarks that show what kind of improvement I can expect and how much difference there is between a 1070 and 1080 before going through with it.

 

[yourbeliefs]

Blizzard has responded to allegations that it doesn't listen to players of WoW. Short answer: Yes it does, but you can't please everyone.

http://kotaku.com/world-of-warcraft...dium=sharefromsite&utm_source=Kotaku_facebook

 

[yourbeliefs]

This story encompasses both what I love and hate about PC gaming...

So Final Fantasy X/X-2 was released on PC yesterday, and one of the things that got fans excited was the announcement that the game would not only have the English track, but also Japanese. There's a number of players such as myself who prefer to play JRPGs with Japanese track because it's obvious that the character movements were originally created for them, and oftentimes seeing the characters over-emote to more subdued English speech can really pull someone out of the game.

Anyways, for some stupid reason, Square Enix decided to make these two modes separate. Meaning that if you choose English Speech, you're allowed Latin based subtitles (English, French, Spanish, etc) while if you choose Japanese speech, you're only allowed Asian subtitles (Korean, Japanese, etc.) Needless to say, people are pissed. Of course they complained, and Square Enix gave the bullsh*t excuse of "It's impossible to make all languages available on all settings." Now the modders are hard at work ripping the game apart to fix this oversight themselves.

http://www.polygon.com/2016/5/12/11...x-x-2-japanese-english-language-settings-mods

 

[Ramy]

Civilization VI announced for release on October 21st.

http://franchise.civilization.com/en/games/civilization-vi/
http://www.civilization.com/#preorder

 

[meStevo]

Stellaris is consuming all my PC time. Great 4x.

 

[yourbeliefs]

Looks like the Steam Summer Sale is starting June 23.

 

[king3pj]

It leaks every single year. Hell, I have gotten emails from Paypal saying to stock up for the Steam Sale with the date listed before it was announced by Valve.

 

[yourbeliefs]

At this point they may as well make it like a "Black Friday" thing where it's a set date every year, like the fourth Thursday of every June or something. Make it an event. I guess they don't want to because purchases will likely go down leading up to the sale, but then again the same thing can be said about BF.

 

[king3pj]

I actually just received a $50 Steam card as a birthday gift. I was planning on putting it towards Doom and I probably still will but it would smarter to save it for a month and buy 5 or 6 games during the Steam Summer Sale with it.

 

[yourbeliefs]

Yeah save it for the sale. You'll probably be able to get multiple games with that $50 as opposed to putting ALL of it towards Doom 4 and then still having to pay extra (I doubt Doom 4 will be included in the sale.) And even if it is, I can't imagine more than 20% off.

 

[yourbeliefs]

Speaking of Doom...

Back in the mid 90s, you were likely either a Playstation kid or a N64 kid. I was a PS kid mainly because I looked at that N64 controller and thought "In no world does that look like a good controller" and the higher game prices (N64 games usually cost closer to $100 than they did $60) pushed me to Sony and PC gaming. Anyways like many people I played Doom and loved it. Doom would go on to be ported to nearly every console out there and the N64 was no exception, but it turns out that Doom 64 wasn't a port, but rather a completely different game. I wasn't even aware of this until I saw this video:



Anyways I thought it looked mildly interesting, and then I looked down in the comments and saw someone mention Doom 64 EX. Apparently some guy went out and completely ported Doom 64 to PC with Mouse/KB controls as well as HD resolutions. So if you're looking for some more free Doom action that's completely separate from what's out there this may be worth a look. I'd get into it myself but I'm expecting Doom 4 any day now. I'll likely give it a look during the summer when the yearly game drought occurs.

https://doom64ex.wordpress.com/

 

[yourbeliefs]

Reviews are trickling out for the GTX 1080. It looks like a real winner. It's either on par or beats the competition in nearly every category. While everyone is in agreement that the 1080 is a smart purchase, they're also telling everyone to wait until the 1070 comes out and to wait for the performance of that.

I think come Xmas or my Birthday (more likely Xmas) I'm going to be treating myself with a new rig and a 10X0 card is definitely going to be part of that build. I'm also going to have to reconsider my monitor options. Doom 4 taught me that in this day and age, 60FPS is no longer the goal but the standard, whereas ~100 is what you should aim for.

Thing is, I REALLY do like playing on a 50" screen, but at this point I may have to just suck it up and choose framerate over screen size. Even Gamestop mentioned that for pure 1080p gaming that a 1080 is super overkill, and locking it to 60 FPS feels like having a car but never getting past 3rd gear. And unlocking framerate just looks bad. I tried on Old Blood and it looked like someone kept trying to cut the bottom of my screen with a knife. Then again, a new PC/monitor could be moved to my basement, which would allow me some more gaming privacy (my house is very open and I've been yelled at for talking to loud during games. Not even yelling, just talking.) I'll likely keep my old PC in my living room because I do like the HTPC setup of having all my videos and various web streaming services on the device.

 

[king3pj]

Reviews are trickling out for the GTX 1080. It looks like a real winner. It's either on par or beats the competition in nearly every category. While everyone is in agreement that the 1080 is a smart purchase, they're also telling everyone to wait until the 1070 comes out and to wait for the performance of that.

I think come Xmas or my Birthday (more likely Xmas) I'm going to be treating myself with a new rig and a 10X0 card is definitely going to be part of that build. I'm also going to have to reconsider my monitor options. Doom 4 taught me that in this day and age, 60FPS is no longer the goal but the standard, whereas ~100 is what you should aim for.

Thing is, I REALLY do like playing on a 50" screen, but at this point I may have to just suck it up and choose framerate over screen size. Even Gamestop mentioned that for pure 1080p gaming that a 1080 is super overkill, and locking it to 60 FPS feels like having a car but never getting past 3rd gear. And unlocking framerate just looks bad. I tried on Old Blood and it looked like someone kept trying to cut the bottom of my screen with a knife. Then again, a new PC/monitor could be moved to my basement, which would allow me some more gaming privacy (my house is very open and I've been yelled at for talking to loud during games. Not even yelling, just talking.) I'll likely keep my old PC in my living room because I do like the HTPC setup of having all my videos and various web streaming services on the device.

This is why I ended up with my 1440p monitor. On my old 1080p 60Hz monitor each of my SLI 970s were averaging about 20% usage to maintain 60 FPS in most games. That second 970 felt like a complete waste when a single 970 could handle every game I threw at it. I debated for quite a while between going with a 144Hz 1080p monitor or a 1440p 60Hz monitor. Ideally I would have gone with a 1440p 144Hz GSYNC monitor but those were quite a bit more than I was willing to spend.

In the end I decided to go with a 1440p monitor. 2560x1440= 3,686,400 pixels vs 1920x1080's 2,073,600. Since 60 FPS already felt buttery smooth to me I thought I would be more likely to actually see the difference an extra 1.6 million pixels would make more often than I would notice framerates higher than 60.

I certainly don't need to upgrade from my SLI 970s yet but there is a good chance I will anyways. SLI 970s are roughly equivalent to a single 980Ti or Titan X. Nvidia claims that the 1070 is faster than that. My guess is that it is by a very small margin so it won't be a noticeable upgrade in games that support SLI well. It will be a massive improvement in games that don't support SLI and games that use more than the 3.5GB of fast VRAM in a 970. With the used value of a 970 being around $200-225 right now I could sell both of my 970s to buy a single $379 1070 and actually have a small profit.

I'm not sure it makes sense to keep my SLI 4GB 970s when I could have a single 8GB card that is slightly faster without actually spending any money and I would have the added benefit of not needing SLI support anymore. I'm just waiting on 1070 reviews to see if the 1080 is worth the extra $220 or not.