A while back I mentioned I was considering upgrading my aging but still potent ati HD5850 to something with a bit more punch for upcoming games such as Metro: Last Light, Crysis 3 and Company of Heroes 2. Wise people dissuaded me, and I left it for the time being. However, one day while bored at work I was checking the NCIX website (where I buy my PC parts in Canada land) and noticed the Evga GTX 670 FTW edition was on sale for $409 (down from about $480). I remembered that when I was doing research on GPU's a couple months before hand that this card was branded as one of the best for price/performance, given that it performed equal to, or even better than, a GTX680 in most games. I found a website comparing performance of different cards, and found that the normal GTX670 would give me roughly double the frame rate in most games, a pretty massive improvement. The deal was on for the entire month, and after some deliberation and going over of finances I decided to jump.
It took nearly a month to arrive, but the new GPU is finally here. I was surprised to find that it was actually about 1cm shorter than my current card, which is especially surprising given that the FTW edition of the GTX 670 is on a 680PCB with a 680 cooler. Fortunately size isn't everything, and this new card has proven to be a real beast in games. I tested it on the three most demanding games installed on my PC, Crysis 2 (with the high res texture/dx11 patches installed), The Witcher 2 and Battlefield 3, all maxed to the max running at 1600x900 ( I also sometimes game on my TV which is 1080p).
The results:
Crysis 2: bridge earthquake level (can't remember the proper name) I was getting 60-80fps consistently, spiking to 100 when the action slowed.
The Witcher 2 (ubersampling off): Battle for Vergen level, 70-80fps, very consistent for the 10 minutes that I played, which saw a lot of rain and particle effects on screen.
Battlefield 3: Caspian border - was only in the game for a few minutes at the base before the match ended, was getting 100-110fps. The map then switched to Operation Firestorm, I grabbed a anti-air vehicle and drove around getting into firefights, the lowest I saw the frame rate go was 75, usually it stayed well above 80.
So pretty staggering performance in all of these games. I got a new 620 watt Antec PSU since I wasn't secure in using my 500w one with the new GPU, and I used the new power to overclock my i5-2500k to 3.7ghz.
To Metro Last Light, Crysis 3, and whatever other demanding games are coming out in the next year I say this: come at me bro.
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Since there were very few game releases during the summer, I continued to pour time into Dayz. I have well over 100 hours logged on the mod, much of this time being spent with Nickprovs and some other Swedish fellows we met in game. I've had some great times in the mod, some of the most intense and memorable gaming moments I've ever had have been in Dayz (Nickprovs made a video of some of our shenanigans), but as with all games I am starting to losing interest.
The most compelling part of the game has always been finding new loot, but I have simply played the game so much that I know low-risk places that I can readily find the best loot in. Finding/repairing vehicles is fun, but I feel I have done pretty much everything there is to do in the game, and right now playing on high-population servers that usually have more exciting encounters will also involve playing with hackers who might decide to just kill everyone on the server. I still look forward to the stand alone, but after having my personal best 48-day survival run ended, I think I'm pretty much done with the current build of Dayz.
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The one game I did pick up in August is Darksiders II. The first game was solid, but didn't do any one thing well enough to really stand out. The sequel improves on the predecessor in pretty much every imaginable way, despite being a pretty bare-bones port on the PC. The gameplay is just a ton of fun, with fast and fluid combat, clever puzzles and great platforming segments. The amount of content is pretty staggering, it took me over 20 hours to finish on my first playthrough which is a really impressive length for a linear game with pacing as good as this. I had so much fun with it that I might even go back to it eventually for the New Game+ option so I can try some more skills and better look.
Read my excessively long review here.
Take my word for it folks, this is one of the best games of 2012 so far, don't let the lack of graphics options stop you from picking this up for the PC, you will be missing a really great game.
Today I picked up the Walking Dead games, having heard that they are great, even though I dislike the TV show I figure I'd give them a shot since steam was selling season passes for 15 bucks.
On a side note, I am quite upset that Dark Souls, a game I had a ton of interest in, is apparently unplayable on the PC with a mouse and keyboard. Can anyone confirm this? How about frame rate cap - does the game feel sluggish at 30fps?