Have you tried Oldblivion?
It’ll run fine, but I’m so burnt out on OOO and the other shit that I wont be reinstalling it for a long long time.
I’ll tell you this - STALKER runs like butter at 1280x1024 with max everything.
So, you guys liking your XPS 420s?
I have an annoyance with my own. I have a second hard drive in there, and it seems the mobo is always letting it cool down, only to spin it up again for the next mp3 I play from it, or whatever. This is not the first additional hard drive I’ve had in there, so I know the extra drives aren’t at fault because both are fine in other machines. I’ve already tried two different SATA ports for the additional drives, and the same thing happens with both.
I tried updating my BIOS from A01 to this month’s A03, but that didn’t solve anything. Heh, when I actually updated the BIOS, I was freaked that my computer would explode because it made the fans spin way louder than they ever had before, louder than a 360 and for longer than expected. Upon reboot everything was fine, though.
Mog: Check the Windows power settings. By default it’s set to “Dell Recommended” which is way more energy-conservative than I like (puts computer into sleep after 1 hour, shuts down hard drives after 20 mins, etc). You can set all of these things individually.
Yeah, that’s not it; I had already changed that stuff before. The only thing I changed right now was turning off hybrid sleep, but I can’t see if that fixes things until this huge 60-gig transfer of some of my music from one hard drive to another is finished. I wasn’t even talking about a 20-minute period; the spinning up would happen for every mp3 I played off the second hard drive. it was annoying and I hope turning off hybrid sleep does the trick.
Can’t give my full judgment until the replacement network card arrives on Monday, but on the whole I’m pretty impressed with it. It’s also, hands down, the quietest machine I’ve ever owned.
Well, disabling hybrid sleep seems to have fixed my spinning-up problem, so thanks for making me look there again, Vespers. Yeah, now it’s finally up there for quietness.
My quick review (Only have played Crysis & WoW so far - didn’t have much time this weekend): This system is awesome. It’s near silent, everything has been running very awesome, and I’m pleasantly surprised by how little crap Dell had installed by default. I killed Google Desktop and probably will remove PC Cillin, but otherwise, no spam-ware. The case itself is extremely well made, with a nice design and inside had very clean wiring. (Not to mention the biggest heat sync I have ever seen!)
Lots of nice touches like a leather case for manuals & CDs and a decent metallic mousepad.
I’m a big fan, too. I still haven’t gotten my second harddrive to work, but have copied all of my music over on DVDs so the point may be moot. The problem may be with the cheap IDE-SATA
converter I bought at CompUSA, but who knows.
I can’t stand the thought of using the base Dell OS (though it ran beautifully), so I reformatted and reinstalled Vista, an incredibly easy process that took about 30 minutes. With driver installs and new programs it’s easily taken me three hours to get back up and running, but I’m very happy where I am now.
Runs great, and Vista sure is sexay. Haven’t had any of the problems I did last time, either, with Vista not allowing me to install Steam because “the administrator has disable access to this feature”. Fuck User Account Control.
I played Crysis 1.1 (new patch is 119mb!) last night on 1680x1050 on all High settings for about an hour and a half. It runs amazingly well, and the only time I had chunkiness was during heavy combat. I’m going to drop the resolution down to 1400x900 to see how it smoothes it out, and then experiment with enabling certain Very High settings over the next week. I’ll try to do some Fraps benchmarking too.
Yay for new toys!
You know, I think Crysis is going to end up doing okay for EA. I suspect it’s going to be one of those games that everyone buys as soon as they get a new PC.
You know, I haven’t even checked what Nvidia drivers this thing is running. I’ve been kind of enamored with the whole “works out of the box” thing.
Okay. Here’s the first recommendation straight from the Tweakguides Crysis Guide:
Wow. I’ve been running in DX10 mode, of course, and the thought of serious gains like that are enough to make me FREAK out!
Not really, but let’s see…
Incidentally, you can tell it to launch in DX9 mode by right clicking the Crysis icon in the Games panel.
And you can set it to play in DX9 by default by right-clicking the game icon in Games, selecting “Customize”, and choosing “Play DX9” as the default “Play” action.
So here’s some results. All of this was done with Fraps, at 1440x900 with all settings at High. All background programs except Xfire were off. I’ve also reformatted since I got the box, so this is on a fresh install of Vista (which may be slightly more responsive than the one with Dell’s background stuff running; or not, who the hell knows).
I played two different sections of level 2, Recovery. In the middle of the level two tanks come after you and the action is frenetic as hell. There were tons of KPA running around shooting at me as well as tanks. I played that section twice through, killing both tanks each time, in both DX10 and DX9.
The way I played them was of course different each time, but I tried to keep my actions similar. The action is fast and heavy regardless, so that shouldn’t make much difference. Notice in particular the averate framerate, which is 5fps faster in DX9 in both cases, even though the first DX9 test was almost twice as long as the DX10 test.
The second thing I did was in a much more open, grassy environment, up the hillside from the village. A patrol runs down the road as you crest the hill from a hilltop checkpoint, and I drew them up the hill with gunfire, circled around behind them, and picked them off with a combination of silenced weapons and melee attacks. I did this only once for each DX mode.
In this test the times were fairly similar, and the results were very close. The DX9 was still higher, but the DX10 is apparently not held back as much by a grassy hillside and low key action as it is by urban streets and a frenetic pace.
Most importantly, the FEEL was a little better in DX9 mode. It’s more responsive, and just enough smoother to notice. I’ll be sticking with DX9 from here on out, with occasional forays into DX10 to impress friends with water effects and sliding DX10 turtles (which are so much more intense than DX9 turtles).
Okay, one more test, then bed.
Playing around with the Shadows setting, I’ve had some serious results. On a short run through the forest by the waterfall in the second level, Recovery, I saw some pretty major framerate differences between High and Medium shadows.
It’s pretty amazing how big a difference that 4fps average makes. It feels a lot smoother.
The downside is a slight reduction of shadow quality (duh) and some unrealistic shadows. At High the mountain realistically occluded the sunlight, but at Medium there was light in areas that should have been in the mountain’s shadow. I didn’t even notice it until I realized I was seeing more light than the last time I’d run through the exact same area.
I may be running at Medium shadows from here on out. The frame rate difference is worth the image tradeoff, I’m thinking.
Try this config file: this will enable a shitload of the high end graphical effects but actually gave me improved performance over what I was using before. Runs great at 1280x1024.
It’s a slightly tweaked version of one I found on the Crymod forums - the one I grabbed way overdid the HDR and bloom and gave everything a supersaturated quality.
Put it in the main Crysis directory (on mine that’s C:\Program Files\Electronic Arts\Crytek\Crysis) to use.
That tweaked file does look great, but performance was not as good in my experience.
Fairly big difference for me, and a little too noticable.
Oldblivion is meant for machines that don’t support Shadermark 2.0. My card does Shadermark 3.0 and HDR. So, no, I haven’t bothered. Why would I want to play the game in 1992 style?
So, fellow stusser-lovers, anyone wanna test something with me?
I’m wondering if my reformatting has had any effect on my system, and would love it if one or more of you guys who have kept the out-of-the-box OS and software would like to compare benchmarks with me. I’m thinking we fire up the latest version of 3dMark, whatever that is, run it a time or two (three, preferably) and post the results up here.
It’d be interesting to see how my OS compares to yours, and will also provide a good benchmark for all the non-stusser-lovers out there to realize and begin to accept our incredible e-peen dominance.
Anybody interested?