Far Cry 2

Looks like about 3.5 gig…it took about an hour for me to download…

…But not for Europe.

It sucks.

Woah. So as someone almost ready to hit the button on buying parts for an upgrade … is dual core officially now behind the curve, and quad the way to go? It’d cost me a good 150$ more for a quad but if farcry2 is just the first of a new breed of quad optimized games…

I’d heard that too, and with a Q6600 myself I was rather happy about it.

If you’re JUST about to buy something, I’d hold off for a week and see what the conclusion is. It may be a bunch of marketing doublespeak again.

Crysis was supposed to use quad-cores too, for something called “framerate stabilization”, but I haven’t heard much more than that, and certainly not that there was much benefit from it.

Definitely wait a week or two, and then ask in the Hardware forum if any of these claims are true.

Well, from what I’ve experienced, they may not be ready for primetime.

I installed the new 180.42 beta drivers and when I tried to start the game, I would just get a black screen with a Windows border around the edge. I could hear the main menu music but I didn’t get any picture. I’m running two Nvidia 8800GT’s in SLI mode on a dual core.

After a lot of experimenting, I finally reverted to the previous beta driver (177.92) and now the game is starting properly. I haven’t played it yet to see how performance looks, but actually being able to get into the game is a nice perk for the older drivers.

I noticed the new drivers enable some kind of PhysX GPU options in the Nvidia control panel… maybe my problem had something to do with that? I dunno.

The PhysX stuff is new, allowing for PhysX effects to be handled by your GPU instead of a dedicated card. Running dual 8800GT’s in SLI here myself (on a quad core though), will report back on how (or if) those beta drivers work.

Here’s a supposed fix from one of the message boards…can’t vouch for it myself…

“Somebody probably solved this already. Anyway here’s the fix for that black screen windowed when you first load the game. Go in your (user)\Documents\My Games\Far Cry 2 folder and open up GamerProfile.xml.
Find (Maximized=“1”) change it to a 0 and save. Problem solved almost. Now load game and go to options and change dx9 to dx10 and accept then quit game. load game and go back to options and change your resolution to what ever you like then accept and play. Now the 180.42 drivers work great!
PS:I could not enable dx10 and change the resolution at the same time because game would go back to that black window mode.”

Hey, I’m sort of desperate to avoid spoilers and even any more impressions of the gameplay, but I’d still really like to performance-tweak to my heart’s content. Why don’t we move this kind of talk to a Far Cry 2 Technical thread and continue it there. If another thread is unwanted, let it die on the vine; no harm, no foul.

Man, the patrols and checkpoints are really killing it for me so far. Even just driving around on the roads for the first few missions I’m already tired of turning a blind corner, having an enemy jeep smash into me at full speed, and then start raking me with fire from 2 feet away while I have to wait for the “calmly get out of the car” animation before I can even shoot back.

Is it easier to travel at night and by foot?

Got it, played it for about 2 hours. It’s what Boiling Point wanted to be, but much prettier and not horribly broken. Good stuff.

Going at night might be a good idea, I’ll try that, but on foot would take forever.

Travelling at night helps, travelling by water helps a lot. The bus helps the most, but it feels like such a crime to skip all that scenery.

I think I’m near the end now - the game’s just informed me there’s no going back. My thoughts and a few shots up here.

Well it’s good to see my fears of a slow download from steam was unfounded. Grabbed the sucker in less than 20 minutes, now I just need to update my drivers to the new nvidia beta and my safari can begin.

So this is what it’s like to live in a world without punctuation.

I kind-of like the game so far, but the fact that every mission wants me to drive all the way across the map is kind of annoying. I’ll try sticking to the plot missions (now that I know which ones are non-plot missions) and see how it goes…

I’m not digging it nearly as much as I’d hoped I would. Finding lots of little nits to pick, some minor and some damned annoying and very little in the way of anything to make up for it that I couldn’t find elsewhere. I’ll stick with it awhile though.

Also for the record, the beta patch from nvidia did give me a nice performance boost.

I thought you were making fun of me for a second, but another 5 minutes of FarCry and I was laughing out loud. The subtitles appear to be properly punctuated but the first actors you encounter are all obviously past speed reading champs.

Also, the ‘You will be safe at that house.’ line had me in stitches too. No I won’t you stupid git, there are signs all over the place pointing to it, clearly contradicting the very idea it’s meant to embody. It’s only because it tries so hard to be realistic that I keep finding all of these little faults. Don’t get me started on the car repair. Still, seems like a great game so far once I stop nitpicking it to death.

The speed-reading thing is really bizarre. I’m just past the opening train ride - does that acting choice continue through the rest of the game?