Doomlord

If I want to torture test my Scrapper's attack chain, I go solo a pylon. If I want to test his durability, I go run an RWZ challenge. Both of these tests have been around before the MA and both still work very well. Honestly though, I'm rather surprised the AV soloing crowd hasn't come in here to ask why you're fighting EBs yet.

I don't think it's a question of teachers existing, but a question of students existing.

One of the responsibilities I've taken on in my SG is training newer players. There are a few out there who are eager and willing to learn, but they are a rare breed. Most are too arrogant to admit they are wrong (often because they've been playing for X months and think they know better) or simply don't care because they are farming their [censored] off. It's an incredibly frustrating experience trying to help someone who doesn't want your help, even when it's for their own good.

I seriously challenge all the veterans out there who think they know everything to pull their heads out of their [censored] and start looking for ways to improve their gameplay. I'll start: I need to get better at keeping Speed Boost cycled on teams all the time.

I think the big problem here is that we're not comparing real builds. I understand, of course, why Billz doesn't do so (and making such a comparison might not prove entirely useful in the end, anyways), but some of the sets in this comparison suffer highly from the lack of +Recharge while others are relatively unaffected. The same goes for pool powers, as well as a few other factors such as available enhancement set slotting.

I think if we wanted a definitive comparison, we would need actual builds to compare to each other. You could make all of them have a Willpower or Super Reflexes secondary to keep things fairly similar, but then actually capitalize on set bonuses properly as the primary demands them. It would make direct comparisons of the set an order of magnitude more realistic, although the logistics of such a comparison would make it quite a bit of work.

Basically, the comparison is interesting, but I don't think we can take it as a straight up this set > that set thing.

Having these same issues myself this evening. Is anyone else?

Try running the game at the resolution you had it at before the monitor upgrade or, if you're in windowed mode already, try changing your desktop resolution when you play the game back down. Of course, since you got the monitor [against your will] you might consider getting yourself a beefier graphics card [against your will] so you could enjoy the monitor at its true potential.

[ QUOTE ]
In my mind, Vista shouldn't of been on here. Sure it runs fine and all, but don't run anything else on top of it. Trying to play COH on it was a little nightmareish. I literally had to play it in safe mode. and even then, lower the graphics scaling when there was more than me on the screen.

I thought, why not. I formatted the thing, put Windows XP Sp3 on there. No more vista, no more of the ridicious bloat that comes with most laptops.

Completely painless install. everything works (even the built in web cam). Lets try City of heroes....

OH my god, wow! I can leave it on regular settings now! Taking off FSAA to make it smoother.

THats where my new issue arrises.

[/ QUOTE ]
Your other option is to do a clean install of Vista on the laptop so that the officially supported drivers work. Vista is/was not the issue here - 2GB is plenty for what you're trying to do. The bloatware on the laptop, as you surmised, was most likely the culprit. Now, since you already put XP back on, I would try the modded drivers others have suggested first, but if that doesn't work, this is another valid option.

This post has been made with full knowledge of the possibility of generating a Vista flame war.

[ QUOTE ]
It Blue Screened my PC while running Safari Browser.

[/ QUOTE ]
And you're blaming the browser hijack for the BSOD? Um...

Just for simplicity's sake, start by turning off:
<ul type="square">[*]Anti-Aliasing[*]Bloom Lighting[*]Depth of Field[*]"High" Water Effects[/list]
All are known to cause issues with ATI cards. If it makes you feel any better, it's because of the [censored] support for OpenGL that Catalyst drivers have, not because of the hardware itself.

There was this annoying crash bug with NVIDIA drivers for a while. Vista SP2 permanently fixed it, AFAIK.

Take a look at the sticky in this forum for instructions on posting a CoH Helper and HijackThis report.

We can go from there.

Hardware-wise, your system is fine. Post a HijackThis report up so we can take a look at the software side of things.

[ QUOTE ]
If a game, any game, needs to wait on the GPU to finish rendering the frame it's currently doing before it can send more data to the card, then having a 2nd GPU helps (assuming alternate frame rendering here). If the CPU does a little bit of work, send data to GPU, repeat until all the frame data is sent, then you won't see much improvement.

It's the ratio between these two extremes that affects the amount of performance increase you will see in a game with multiple GPUs. If a game is rarely waiting on the GPU to finish, you won't see much improvement in average performance but the minimum frame rate recorded will be higher. A game like Crysis, which has nothing but complex frames that take a lot of GPU time to render will naturally have the most improvement in Crossfire/SLi mode.

In the past someone did try SLi testing with their "normal" settings (which is everything except DoF and Bloom) at 1920x1200 as well as one with all the bells and whistles on (DoF and Bloom), using Zloth's demo player to test. At their "normal" settings they didn't see much of an increase except in the minimum frame rate. Average went up slightly. With everything turned on they did see an improvement in average framerate beyond the additional 2 or 3 fps but I don't remember offhand how much.

[/ QUOTE ]
I actually recall some people seeing lower framerates in City of Heroes with SLI running because it exerts a slightly higher workload (if I understand this correctly) on the CPU. The only person I have ever seen with a significantly higher framerate in SLI was some poor [censored] on these forums with a Dell "gaming" laptop that had no discrete video memory (but yes, still had SLI).

[ QUOTE ]
Dinah has a valid point. I know many occassions in this game someone has been doing something totally screwed up in their playing style and I have seen team leaders try to offer them pointers and be shot down rudely for their effort.

[/ QUOTE ]
This. I have, several times, tried to put together some internal classes for the newer/less savvy players in UHB and without exception the people who really needed help did not attend, and when asked, claimed they "had it down" or that they were an X month vet and knew how to play, even when they [censored] didn't in the least. Attempts to directly assist them were met with hostility.

I gave up. People are just too self-absorbed to come to terms with their mistakes. For all your good intentions, that's exactly what I predict your project will end up as. But hey, at least we have a new forum troll to laugh at.

[ QUOTE ]
Single powerful card not always better that weaker sli - the 295 Nvidia's top of the line is just two 260's (granted 55 nm 260s) slaped together on one card...and it's 500+ bucks. I can get two 260's for 125 a piece these days ;P - and since I got the good power supply when I built my rig - I am going to do just that and use a 8800gtx as a dedicated physx card - FREEM!

[/ QUOTE ]
The GTX 295 has two GTX 275 GPUs, not GTX 260s. And I was talking on a per-pricepoint basis. If you spend $300 on a card, it will, generally, outperform two $150 cards in SLI.

That said, I wouldn't bother with anything nearly that powerful for City of Heroes, since only one of the three graphics cards in the system will actually be necessary (the second GTX260 in SLI won't give much of a performance boost if any, and the dedicated PhysX card will do absolutely nothing). Is there some other game you have your eyes on to play with this rig?

[ QUOTE ]
Until it was fixed, it was quite annoying to stroll through Grandville with at least half the structures affected by a missing texture, forcing me to change my Detail preferences as well. For me, it wouldn't be so bad not having water or bloom so long as there aren't black holes all over the place. And DoF sucks anyway, so nobody is missing anything there anyway.

There were also several NVidia driver versions that caused the Cox experience to break down entirely. We had to roll back to earlier versions and wait for the next update instead.

Like you said, many of the NVidia issues have eventually been worked out, but some of the ATI ones have as well. We can't rule them out entirely.

[/ QUOTE ]
ATI issues are fixed? I just slapped my old X1600 back in an old rig to test it out and... nope, no fixes. The closest thing we ever got to a fix was Billz' driver settings workaround. So bottom line, NVIDIA issues have been there, but they're fixed now. ATI issues have been there, and they're still there. It wouldn't stop me from buying an ATI card if there was another game out there that I really wanted to, say, play in DirectX 10.1, or something. But to be fair, ATI has standing issues with the game that don't appear to be getting fixed any time soon.

On a side note, I personally like Depth of Field when it's toned down a bit with some registry tweaking (or TweakCoH).

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
ATI has a longstanding series of issues with CoH, so I would stick with the green side of things if you want the rig to play this game well, specifically.

[/ QUOTE ] NVidia has had their fair share of driver and texture issues with CoX as well. Don't get me wrong, I love my NVidia better then my old ATI also, but I can attribute that to it being an upgrade anyway. Lets be fair.. either company can be just as good when tweaked properly.

[/ QUOTE ]
Sorry, no. ATI's drivers make you pick and choose on eye candy - being unable to use AA, Bloom, and Depth of Field, and the higher-end water effects simultaneously is a bigger issue (to me at least) than the occasional missing texture. Vista SP2 seems to pretty much universally solve that driver crashing issue, or I would have been inclined to agree with you.

The irony is that the ATI hardware is as equally capable as NVIDIA, it just gets hamstrung by driver issues in this game specifically.

[ QUOTE ]
Most likely the Video card is getting too hot.

[/ QUOTE ]
This is possible, but it could be a host of other issues. OP, please take a look at the sticky in this forum and post your CoH Helper and HijackThis reports here so we can take a look.

[ QUOTE ]
Although peole will tell you CoH no longer supports or uses SLI, I still force split fram rendering in SLI mode; and I get a higher framerate than in Single GPU mode.

[/ QUOTE ]
How much higher?

To the OP: Beefier single card &gt; weak SLI cards, but any single GTX-series NVIDIA card will run City of Heroes without a problem, even at that resolution. ATI has a longstanding series of issues with CoH, so I would stick with the green side of things if you want the rig to play this game well, specifically.

[ QUOTE ]
the simplicity of life that comes with having it (no bloatware, no major virus/spyware issues, few if any crashes, etc.)

[/ QUOTE ]
Huh, sounds like a properly maintained PC to me.

One of the major issues you're going to run into with CoH on a Mac is the crappy graphics hardware most of them have until you start getting into the really high-end stuff, where you're paying out the [censored] for it. The lowest-end iMac that has any sort of decent graphics hardware for gaming is the 24" model that starts at $1800 - you can get quite a nice gaming rig (that runs Windows, of course) for that kind of money, and you can get an even better machine for your money if you build yourself.

[ QUOTE ]
I BOUGHT the E8400 because I knew it was overclockable to 4.0ghz. (Quite easy to do, to.)

[/ QUOTE ]
This seems to be a frequent issue with people that overclock their machines. There is no test out there that can verify 100% that your CPU is stable at any given settings. You can be pretty sure if stress tests come back fine, but never completely.

In your case, tweaking your voltages will probably do the trick. Just be cautious of temperature increases.

Copying all the files != installing. The system needs to make registry entries before the game is considered "installed". Just install it like you normally would - if you have the game files already copied, that actually saves you a lot of time because you won't need to update.

I'm curious what this would look like with the higher Crit chances taken into account for Scrappers. After all, the targets that the increase applies to are the ones where single target DPS is going to matter more. I think that, coupled with the usage of procs (which will give an advantage to the shorter-animating attacks) are the main reasons my numbers are so wildly different from Billz'.

The next thing I would try is to run the game without Bloom, Desaturation, or "High" Water Detail ("Low" should be fine) as these are known to cause issues with ATI-based systems.

Interesting. How exactly does it crash? Any error messages etc. or just a straight crash to desktop?

Well, you can clean up some of the stuff on your system, but we can get to that later. First thing is to get the Vista SP2 (just released yesterday) and see if the patch fixes your problem (SP2 includes the hotfix that people have been using to solve this issue for a while now.

Here's the download links:
x86 (32-bit)
x64 (64-bit)