Ban_Sidhe

It is soooo hard to resist the new stuff. But like I said, establish your budget and stick to it. Shop around, get the most bang for your buck and don't bemoan the fact that there is a more expensive card. You can wait for the darn thing to come down in price, but when it reaches your price bracket it'll be out of date and the new spangly stuff will be vying for your attention. So it's not worth the hassle. Any card over £100 will probably be able to run Ultra mode, and most modern cards under £100 will probably be playable too.

Noticed FFM has studiously missed my comment about him having SLI'd 8800's, that or I misinterpreted his views on SLI being a complete waste of time Obviously I was wrong

I'm not running in SLI (Only have 1 card) so I don't know how much of a difference it makes. There's loads of people on the forums with SLI cards though FFM has 8800's if I remember correctly

GR's requirements, so far, seem to be geared to making better use of OpenGL (Dread to think how the Mac's are going to deal with it) that's been in the spec for some time now. SLI will probably make a difference, but I don't know.

There were ruminations that NVIDIA would be supporting COX in 3D mode with their glasses as well. So that might be VERY cool, but will probably lay waste to many gaming rigs across the world. So a high-end NVIDIA card might be worth it if you want the gimmicky 3D. I think they said March 2010, which is around the time GR is expected to land anyway.

Take a look at Tom's hardware for reviews of the cards in your price bracket.

They are very in-depth, but the interesting stuff is at the end (If you're not interested in the techie detail) Also take a look at the reviews for higher-end cards of the same type. They inevitably draw conclusions with the lesser cards, giving you a better idea of what to go for.

I splashed out on a GTX260 when it arrived. At the time it gave the biggest bang for my buck, and as they come down in price it becomes increasingly attractive to add another card in SLI mode. So far it's not disappointed.

Oh, and remember that it's not just the graphics card that can slow you down. The CPU is a major component in getting the most out of your machine.

General rule of thumb. Set your budget. Stick to it, and don't faff around waiting for the next big thing to arrive; cause it will, about 3 weeks after you buy something.

Ooooooooh new badges!

Miss Chief is right. You'd probably be better off just buying a new graphics card, and maybe updating your CPU.

If you're after the cosmetic feel that you actually have a new PC, get a nice new case as well.

Usually XP slows down over a 12month period, and a backup and re-install is like having a breath of fresh air through your system.

I can thoroughly recommend Win7 though. If you're going to replace your hard-disk for something a little sparkier, then wait until the end of October and grab yourself a copy of Win7. MS are suffering from Star-Trek Movie syndrome with their O/S's and Win7 is very good indeed.

Yeah, took ages to work out how to login. Eventually managed to get to the Account page via the reset password.

<sniff> Really miss "Show all" </sniff> cruising the doom threads will never be the same again.

Right. My previous post had me a hundred miles away from my PC. Back home now

I'm running Driver 185.85 for Win 7 x64.

Seriously, Vista is a broken down nag compared to either Win 7 or XP. Reminds me of the Windows Millenium debacle at the turn of the century. XP probably still out-performs Win 7 in certain ways, but darn if Win 7 ain't turning out to be a worthy successor to XP. I know it's still the Vista architecture under the hood, but I'd treat Vista as a rushed beta of Win 7. It's a bit like Star Trek films... The even ones are usually good (Note: Usually. I'm sure most people will want to forget the even one I'm thinking of)

Make the heroes work for them as well

The ATI thing is not really an issue, more of an interesting note that NVIDIA is predominant on the game screen, but the website is leaning towards ATI. It might be interesting if the devs are using some OpenGL calls that perform better on the ATI than on the NVIDIA cards.

[ QUOTE ]
Ban_Sidhe does your 260 work alright with the game?

[/ QUOTE ]

Yep! I have everything turned on and it's brill. I even manage to get 50-60FPS in GV! (As long as I'm not looking in the wrong place, 25-30FPS if I am looking in the wrong place ) I'm running Win7 x64 RC (Build 7100) but the latest NVIDIA patch that included the ION drivers boned the game. So I rolled back to the previous version for Win7, and they work a treat

No not really. But it's always nice to squeeze as much performance out of the game as possible.

It's picky, I know. But I noticed recently that the NVIDIA symbol has disappeared from the US site to be replaced by ATI RADEON.

Does this mean that Paragon studios have sided with ATI now? Are they recommending ATI for best performance of the game? Do I need to ditch my lovely NVIDIA GTX260 for an ATI card? Will Doom ensue? etc... yada yada.

Seriously though, up till now COX has been firmly in the NVIDIA camp. Is this changing? I presume only Avatea will know.

I must say that this is a truly fascinating discussion. Personally I think that the experiment was somewhat flawed in that it did not expand to include the other social aspects of the game or, for that matter, other games. It concentrates on the single aspect of PvP within COX whereas a more meaningful result could have been gathered by drawing comparisons between different games, with different mechanics, but the same, underlying, social progression.

There was little mention that the players social situation and general sense of right/wrong were becoming obvious in the interactions within the zone. The creation of "unwritten" rules of etiquette could be considered a mirror to real life rules where such anti-social behaviours are very much frowned upon.

Are we actually well balanced!?

I'm definitely not the author, but I do hope he reads the discussion here. I would like to think it would broaden his view of the COX community. Especially here in the EU.

If you read the word document itself (There's a link in the article to it) he made a number of poor assumptions. The main one being that the droning tactic he was using was within the "Rules" of the game. This is a very bad interpretation, as while the mechanics of the game allows droning it's not in a pre-defined ruleset for the game.

The experiment was deliberately designed to illicit a negative reaction from those around his character. The behaviour of the character was within the gaming mechanics, but were socially reprehensible. If the zone had allowed hero-on-hero actions, in addition to the established hero-on-villain actions, he would have quickly discovered that his supposed moral stance of "Must remove all villains from the zone" was incorrect. The "Breaching" behaviour that he went out of his way to present to the community quickly resulted in his ostracism from not only the villains, but the heroes as well.

I don't understand the requirement for establishing this kind of, previously documented, social interaction (Or lack of it in this case) in a simplified and purely artificial environment.

I'd be very interested in what he's up to now.

I agree that he should run a study on the EU servers. There are a lot of cultural differences that would probably become apparent. I think the EU servers are far more diverse in both Culture and Language from the US servers. I suspect/hope that we'd be more tolerant. Hope, being the operative word.

While I haven't read the paper, the article is biased towards PvP. An extremely competitive part of the game, and really not representative of the majority of the players. I would hope that the analysis included the use of alts and an examination of the normal playerbase, and also of the cooperative zones.

It might actually be an interesting read.

Saw a link to this on Slashdot...

Professor's hero becomes most hated char

I know that this is primarily based upon the US experience, but is it really that scary over there? Would this happen over here? (If there was anyone in the PvP zones... I think he'd get pretty bored pretty fast, they're not the most highly populated)

Does anyone on this side of the pond think that we'd figure out what he was doing pretty quickly? How long would he last against some of our stalkers? Would he get the level of abuse from the EU players that he got from the US players?

I think we'd probably excommunicate him. But I find it REALLY hard to believe that the Villains on the US side found it so hard to take him down.

What do you guys think? Is the article representative of ALL COX players, or more representative of the US players. Personally I think he should do a seperate study on the EU servers.

Invulnerability
force field
scream so that I can destroy the annoying people on the road.

Ooh, Looks like Nosatufer needs some ideas guys!

Mine are:

1. Ban-Sidhe - Sonic/Sonic Corruptor (Personal Fave)
2. Gravitrix - Grav/Shields Controller
3. Cerebra - Psionic/Psionic Blaster
4. Coconut Jack - Brute
5. Slipthread - Magic Stalker
6. Enerva - Mutation Corrupter

Then there's Larassa, Iridium Blue, Professor Parallel, Andrealphusia, Brown Dwarf, Velour, Pioneering Star, Mind flare, Herja and Exquisite.

Got into plenty of arguments over how to spell Ban-Sidhe. There's like a million (Exaggerated) different ways, and everyone has their opinion!!

Got accused of being a Marvel fanboy over Cerebra. Actually had to go look it up afterwards (Dev's, this char is nothing like the comics)

Got complemented on Exquisite!

Had the same problem. Rolled back to the 185 WHQL driver, and everything works wonderfully. Wondering if it's something to do with the ION/Vista inclusion. The 185 driver is Win7 x32/x64 only.

The server sections will become a cosy fireside, with big comfy seats and your favourite tipple on the side-table next to you. Good, sensible conversation in the drawing room, while the riff-raff outside scream at each other over what the best colour for their imps are.

LOL

Just checking

Is it my imagination, or has Golden Girl not mentioned the gratuitos, flowing, black locks of one of the central characters in the trailer yet?

Or am I looking at the wrong thread?

Turned out the problem was Vista. Don't know why, the latest NVIDIA drivers on Vista 64 seem very unstable. Installed Windows 7 RC1, and everything is fine again.

To everyone using Vista and having nvidia problems, try Win7RC. Works a treat!

I haven't seen one yet, so I'm just assuming that it doesn't exist. I could be wrong, so say if I am!

Can we have a proper shopping mall map please? We have all these zombie invasions, but no shopping malls! Come on! It's a REQUIREMENT for goodness sakes! Zombies + Shopping Malls = fun! We can have "Rescue the citizens" missions for the heroes and for all those zombie masterminds out there "Invade the shopping mall"!!!

Not to mention we could go shopping. Which might be nice.

I14, latest patch. Playing my shiny-shiny blood widow. 2 crashes since the patch today. I have Vista x64 ultimate, 4Gb's of RAM a GTX260 with latest drivers... Has anyone else experienced any game crashes since this afternoons patch? Seems a little coincidental to me, as the machine has been running fine.