This is kinda like three blogs in one, just a warning!
Back in early May before the Witcher 2 launched, I decided it was time to upgrade from my Core 2 Duo system. I started looking at getting a Phenom II CPU, but people started talking about Bulldozer and how it was coming out in June. I decided I wanted my new build to last as long as possible, and the idea of getting into a new generation of CPU's right at the start seemed like a good one. June turned into August, and August October. After the Witcher 2 there weren't really any demanding games until Battlefield 3, so I didn't mind waiting (despite getting poor performance in The Witcher 2). Early signs looked concerning, and when the reviews rolled in last Tuesday us patient waiters worst fears were brought to life: Bulldozer flopped hard. They single-core performance is sad, and given that most games support 4 cores or less, the advantages of having an 8-core CPU were minimal. In games, the Bulldozer CPU's often fell behind the Phenom II's.
As soon as these devastating reviews were brought to light, I swallowed my pride and planned out a Sandy Bridge build despite my unfounded rebellion against Intel with my previous upgrade-based blog. On Friday I went down to NCIX and bought the various parts. I love living in the same town as one of these stores since I can order and pick up parts at the same time.
Here is what I ended up getting:
Gigabyte P67X LGA1155 ATX mobo
2x4 gig 1600mhz Mushkin DDR3 ram.
1TB Western Digital Caviar Blue HDD
and a generic LG SATA DVD drive (finally time to retire the O'le IDE Optical drives).
I'm going to keep my AMD 5850 PSC+ for the time being since it's still a good card. It has a really beefy aftermarket heatsink, and I saw one review of the card where they got a 20% performance increase from overclocking. After seeing this, I've pushed the Engine clock speed from 760mhz (factory OC'd up from 725) to 850, and the memory clock speed from 1050mhz (up from 1000) to 1150mhz. I didn't have any comparison because I did the overclocking right off the bat in my new build, and I was getting a terrible CPU bottleneck with my old CPU, but it's still running stable and cool thanks to the fantastic heatsink.
The first two game's I tried are the two that gave me the most trouble due to my CPU: Bad Company 2 and The Witcher 2.
Both games saw massive performance gains with the new hardware.
BC 2 went from 30-40fps on med-high settings with 2xAA and HBAO off to 70-90 FPS on max settings with 4xAA and HBAO on. Since I was used to playing with lower frame rates and lag spikes, I did so well in my first match that people thought I was hacking and I was kicked.
The Witcher 2 went from 20-40fps (depending on the location) on a mix of medium and high settings with most features turned off to 40-60fps on high settings with most features turned on. I enjoyed playing The Witcher 2 with the high graphics settings, good frame rates and of course with the 2.0 patch so much that I'm going to start another playthrough. It's probably the best game to have come out so far this year.
I also tried out Crysis 2 with the v1.9 dx11 patch and high res textures. I could run the game fairly well before, but the frame rate would drop to around 30 or lower in some areas (when the game first released). I believe I was running on the second highest settings using wasdie's advanced graphics thingy. Now, I get 40+fps constantly on Ultra settings regardless of the area.
Driver SF: From 30-60fps on high settings with AA on to 120 fps on the same settings.
Huge gains overall, Oof course, the real test will come next week with Battlefield 3. The beta ran well for me on Operation Metro, but Caspian Border gave me about 20fps regardless of the graphics settings. I'm hoping the new CPU will resolve that issue.
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RAGE
I was really excited for this game a little over a year ago when they first started releasing gameplay footage, but my hype levels have died down since. The end result is rather underwhelming.
First off, I was among the worst affected by technical issues. No matter what, I get horrible freezing and choppy frame rats with my ATI card installed. Even the driver updates, cfg. tweaks and patch didn't fix it. Luckily, my laptop was able to run the game very well.
Some aspects of RAGE are really impressive, such as the enemy AI and character animations, but the driving is bad, the side quests are bad, the story is bad and the mini-games are redundant because I already had so much money that I could buy more ammo than I could possibly use and all of the upgrades for weapons and armour.
The linear story levels that were based around shooting were quite good, but these only accounted for about 6 hours of the campaign. Everything else felt like filler, which is pretty unacceptable for a 60-dollar game.
I'd put it behind Bulletstorm, Crysis 2, Homefront and Space Marine as far as shooters this year are concerned.
Check out my full review at NGN.
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Driver San Francisco
I picked this game up about a week ago, and have only had the chance to play it for a couple hours. I like the car handling and the pulp-fiction vibe, appropriate music is imperative to how good a driving game such as this is , and Driver: SF seems to have nailed this. However, I'm not enjoying the missions where you have to escape the cops. These conjure up ugly memories of the worst parts of GTA IV. They seems really difficult to lose, even pulling sharp u-turns and going down allies doesn't seem to shake them most times. You need to find an area with a bunch of side streets and make a series of fast, abrupt turns, and this can be really challenging, often frustratingly so. However, I'm enjoying the rest of the game quite a bit. I just hope there aren't too many of these cop chases, otherwise I could give up on the game.
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Trackmania 2
Even though I think Trackmania 2 is not as good as previous games in the series, I've been spending a lot of time with it. I've gotten up to a rank of around 6500 in multiplayer, and have been spending most of my time on the Cos-Fullspeed server since it has some great tracks.
My gripes with the game mostly revolve around the fact that wall-riding and looping control has been drastically reduced, and this means that there aren't many good wallride tracks which were my favourites to build and play with TMNF. I also think the track editor isn't great, but I still put in a some time with it.
I even made a few tracks myself which I uploaded to Mania Exchange, I like to think they are pretty good (at least the first two), if you own the game you can check them out: