Father Xmas

And don't forget about TV Detection Vans to find those who scoff the law.

Well due to 2xp/reactivation weekend Fri/Mon maintenance went to Thur/Tue. And because of the Monday Holiday in the US, patch day Tuesday got bumped to Wednesday.

Next week starts maintenance Thursday instead of the usual Friday/Monday schedule. But that still doesn't preclude servers down due to patching or server calamities.

Actually I find the squirming within the ice block an interesting change. They still aren't moving and they still aren't attacking so no real impact on play.

The current rumors are that manufacturers and not nVidia are deciding not to continue producing the 260/275/285 series of cards because the profit margin are so thin. Unless nVidia reduces the cost of the G200b GPU and license fee for the board layout of course.

ATI's new HD 58xx series are faster than the GTX 285. The less expensive one, the HD 5850 is in the $260 range with the more expensive HD 5870 in the $380 range. Of course you will be stuck with the quirks that ATI's drivers have with this game (see BillZBubba's ATI guide) but due to short supply and high demand are constantly out of stock at NewEgg.

However looking at NewEgg there still seems to be an able supply of GTX 285s in the mid $300 range, for now.

They, the devs, haven't in the past adjust the amount of XP required between levels. What they've done was adjust the amount of XP rewarded by defeating a critter of that level there by reducing the number of critters needed to be defeated to level. I believe the I16 changes are similar, bumping up the XP reward of critters in those level ranges.

Well it depends on if you are looking for a card to hold you over or one that you can bring with you down the road.

At the very lowest end, I would recommend a 9500GT with 512MB of GDDR3 memory. You can get a nice factory overclocked model for as little as $40 after mail-in rebate.

Double the raw performance for nearly double the price is the 9600GT with 512MB for $75 after rebate.

Bump the raw performance numbers up again by roughly another 50% and you end up with a 512MB 9800GT for $100.

Lastly there's the GTS 250 with 1GB of memory for $130 after rebate. The GTS 250 is roughly 1/3 more powerful than the 9800GT and over 4x faster than the 9500GT.

Each successive video card I listed requires more power than the previous. It's important to know how many watts or amps at +12 volts your power supply produces because that's what the video card will feed on. And when I say raw performance, I'm simply comparing the total FLOP output of the unified shaders. For a more realistic look at performance you can check out the charts from this review. You can look at benchmarks of 19 different games at 4 resolutions and AA/AF modes to get an idea how a card may perform in your system. Please remember that the way video cards are benchmarked is by testing them in a system with the fastest CPU available and each game at it's highest quality setting to show each card's limits. You don't have a fast CPU so the differences in performance won't be as large.

Note I didn't include the GT 220 as a recommendation because of it's similar performance to the 9500GT but it retails at a 9600GT price.

Actually there isn't a lot of data, relatively speaking, that is sent from the server to the client when you bring up the market interface. The market interface itself loads an enormous amount of data from your hard drive, the description and icon of every recipe, salvage, inspiration that is in or ever been in the game.

Worst case solution. Exit and restart the game from the market and access it first thing.

Correct.

Well at 7900GS uses under 50 watts, nearly all at +12 volts so around 4 and a bit amps at 12 volts.

If the 7900GS is currently working in 3D with your current PSU, then a better PSU isn't going to do much other than give you the peace of mind that your computer isn't going to not start up one day because the PSU finally couldn't take it any longer. It won't make the 7900GS run any faster but you won't be "redlining" they 12 volt supply.

Of the two cards you listed the 7900GS is much faster than the HD 3450. The only thing the HD 3450 has going for it is Dx10.1 compatibility which is small consolation for a card 2 to 3 times slower.

nVidia denies those rumors last I heard.

ATI caught them flatfooted (or pants down, pick a metaphor) with the HD 4xxx series. Now that the HD 5xxx series have out performed nVidia's GTX285, ATI has officially caught up. nVidia's solution is to release a white paper on how awesome their next generation top end chip will be.

Personally, I don't care about the $400-600 video card, what are you doing in the $150-250 range that's new? Look at the last three generations.

G80 - 8800GTX top end, anemic 8600 as mid range.
G90 - polished up G80. 9600GT is what the 8600 should have been.
G200 - GTX260/275/280/285, where's the midrange based on this design?
G300 - over twice the SPs of the G200. Over twice of a lot of aspects of the G200.

In a market where people are looking for a luxury trim sedan, you, nVidia, are delivering hand built super sport cars. PhysX isn't going to save your bacon.

Well I think Wolf_Shadow remembers the really old first generation Dell P4 systems which did use a custom pin out and PSU for the main power connector. Eventually Dell adopted Intel's BTX motherboard layout which does use the standard 20 pin ATX main power connector.

But there was a time where plugging a standard ATX PSU into an older Dell P4 meant you were going to need a new motherboard.

Welcome to the club.

You might want to check the market before you mass convert old base salvage. There are some who are into collecting obsolete game items and will pay big inf for them.

Also if you get into a mindless rhythm converting, beware, at some point you will reach the Brainstorm->Invention Salvage section and if you're running on autopilot you will start converting brainstorms, which you can have a lot of, into salvage. The problem comes when you realize your storage racks can no longer hold 1000+ pieces but now can only 30.

It doesn't matter if it has 1GB or 512MB, it's a misconception that the amount of video memory has a significant impact on performance. That GPU simply isn't all that powerful relative to your resolution, the total number of pixels it needs to process per frame.

On a desktop, would you expect great performance at 1920x1200 with an 8600GT on a desktop? That's about the performance of a 130M. Is that 1GB of video memory GDDR3 or DDR2? The speed of video memory can make a big difference in performance since not enough memory bandwidth (speed x width) will cap performance.

The 130M is a nice GPU for a laptop, heck of a lot better than a lot of GPUs found in non-gamer laptops. My only qualm is pairing it up with a large hi-res display.

Expect to play with a lot of options set to minimum. It's not highly rated.

A 130M video card is OK but not at 1920x1080. Expect to turn down the resolution to 1600x900 or even 1280x720 to get the frame rate up.

Ones not mentioned in your initial list

Ouran High School Host Club - Comedy/Parody
Gundam 00 - Mecha
Rurouni Kenshin - Action/Period/Samurai
Kanon (2006) - High School Drama/Emotion Shredder
Clannad - same as Kanon but slightly less traumatic emotionally
Stellvia of the Universe - SciFi Action/High School Drama/In Space
RahXephon - Action/Mecha
Gunbuster - Mecha/Parody/Drama (it starts as a parody and becomes serious)
Otaku No Video - Self Referential Parody/Pseudo Historical origin of Gainax Studios

Before AE often Broadcast was dead, relative to how active it was after AE first hit the scene.

Broadcast is zone only. If you are looking for particular level players broadcasting in a zone of that level range could provide better results.

SSK plus enhance difficulty settings allow regular missions to offer similar XP and inf benefits that AE use to provide. Only drawback, if you call it that, is recipe and salvage drops are random instead of skee-ball tickets which one can trade in for recipes and salvage of your choice.

Sounds like a Mac issue (obvious now looking at the flyspec system spec at the bottom of your post) you might get a better response posting on the Mac board or contacting support directly.

Note: Lately I've developed the habit of not reading thread titles in Player Questions and the Tech board since I read all new posts and threads. That's why I didn't notice until now that the thread title was "Mac-Crash...".

Well glancing at the current Steam hardware survey and assuming this is a fair representation of PC gaming platforms, there is still 7-8% of systems running with a Dx8 or lower class card, 24% still running on a single core and 22% with less than 2GB of memory. Over half still run 32-bit XP while a quarter run 32-bit Vista.

Also ATI just added OpenGL 3.0 support this year. Also remember OpenGL has never really been a huge priority with ATI. id Software, the driving force for OpenGL in games, is finally starting to support Dx (but still only Dx9) as well as OpenGL.

Also OpenGL requires, or at least use to (it's been a while since I played with it), a full API implementation. If a function isn't supported in hardware you must emulate it in software. Therefore embracing the a later version of the API my have significant performance issues on older cards.

And hardware tessellation is cool and all but it will be a long time until enough Dx11 class cards (hardware tessellation I believe is required with Dx11) are out there to make it attractive enough for a developer to fully embrace. It would require both NURBS and pre-tessellated meshes to be included, depending on if your video card supported hardware tessellation or not. It's a lot easier to develop for multiple methods from the start than going back and attempt to add support well after the bulk of the art assets are already done.

If my choices were no +5 powers (old exemplar rules) or +5 powers and no IO bonuses, I'll go with the second choice.

Old saying about a gift horse applies here.