I've lost all interest in Assassins Creed, I've even canceled my preorder. If they originally announced that it would come to PC but not right away, I'd have been fine. But to say it's coming out for PC at the same time for ages and then delay it, twice, is very bad form. A developer should know, months in advance whether a game would be ready for the announced launch so there's no excuse.

Maybe when I've run out of games to play I'll buy it but for now, I'm not interested.

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Well theres Rainbow Six Vegas with up to 4 player coop, Gears of War which you've mentioned. I believe Rainbow Six Vegas 2 will have coop as well, but I'm not 100% sure. There is also a coop mode in Splinter Cell Chaos Theory, but I'm not sure about Double Agent as I've not played that.

Beyond those few games, I'm at a bit of a loss. For some reason developers don't think we want to play together, just against each other, no idea why. The only other place to look for coop is game mods, their is a few coop mods for Half Life 2 I'm sure.

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I don't see the attraction to any setup like this at all, sure you get a full 180 FOV but you get two horrible black bars in your vision. But because the screens will display as though they are continuous you get the horrible effect of an image being rendered at 3840x1024 and having it split into three and moved appart, which is just evil to play with. Also, because the game is renderign with 180 FOV and is only really 90 of your view, everything looks streched and distorted, how can that be any good?

I personally prefere a widescreen projector, you don't get the insane FOV but it doesn't look as distorted, you don't get the horrible black bars and costs far less.

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I think the sooner developers take Vista seriously the better. Currently Vista supported games are games designed for XP and DX9 with Vista and DX10 support bolted on. This means they design the engine to work with DX9 and then bend it to fit how DX10 functions which can't be very easy to optomise. One way or another, Vista is the way things are going to have to be for Windows based gaming, I won't say PC gaming because OpenGL is gaining support. Who knows, maybe in 18 months time all games will be running OpenGL and aimed at Linux :P.

As far as BF3 being Vista only, I will agree, it is a little soon to cut XP support but it will be risky manoevres like this that will push things forward, willingly or not. I'd imagine that other developers would be watching the launch of BF3 closely to see how it is received, if it goes well they may follow suit.

I guess that the people that don't want Vista will have to either stop playing games or become a console gamer sooner or later.

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Well, while you are right on the whole DX10 being a standard for the graphics cards manufacturers to aim for, this is nothing new, it's been like that since DX7, maybe earlier. So developers have always had a platform to aim for and optomise to. The biggest impact on PC performance in games compared to consoles isn't the optomisation, it's the OS, consoles don't have them. The average PC is running 50~ processess before the game starts, thats 50~ programs using CPU power and memory resources.

Hardware and resources being bogged down with background programs is far more damaging to performance than developers optomising their games.

You can actually get some performance back from your computer by booting in minimal boot mode, this is about as close as you can get to the true power of your hardware.

BTW, a good example of what you are talking about with OpenGL being just as good as DX10 is Quake Wars. There is an effect called Soft Particles, which smoothes the edges of particle effects that clip into geometry. This is touted as a DX10 feature but Quake Wars uses the Doom3 engine, which is built on OpenGL 2.0. So yes, you are right, DX10 level hardware can just as good effects with OpenGL or even DX9 as Crysis has shown.

Also, John Carmack is working on iD Tech 5 which is running on OpenGL and looks amasing.

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About 8 months ago we hada Dell Optiplex desktop at my companyBSOD randomly and then it got worse and stopped booting at all, it would get to Windows logo screen, then BSOD and reboot. I called Dell support and they said it could be the motherboard and to open the case up and check the transisters. If they look normal then it would be something else but if they look fat or the top is domed, the motherboard needs replacing.

So it might be worth just checking this just to rule it out. Failing that memtest and drivers are the most likely fixes.

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It might be worth checking the SLIzone forums for the best advice on what graphics/power configurations to go with. But I'd say that 8800GTS 640Mb edition would be a safe bet, they're slightly better than the GT (not to be confused with the normal GTS edition which is slower than the GT... why nVidia have played around with their naming I don't know but it sucks.)

But like I said, just do some searches on the SLIzone forum and you'll find tons of usefull information.

Oh and 8 Gb of RAM is pointless, nothing will utilise that. 4 Gb is a bit of over kill also, you wouldn't see much difference between 2 and 4 Gb to be honest, but if you do go with 4Gb you NEEDa 64-bit OS because 32-bit OS's can't see all the RAM, I don't know the full reason why, I just know that 64-bit is required to use 4Gb.

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