Ultra Mode - WOW!

This.

When UM went live, I spent a fair bit of time just flying around watching my own character's shadow and reflections. XD

Except, the trees (blue and red sides) are really bad graphically themselves. I'd like to see a Praetoria make-over given to Paragon City and Rogue Isles for the natural effects of trees and bushes (what? no, I don't hang out behind them THAT much )

Ambient occlusion, meh. Shadows are great, but I can't run them without taxing my machine a bit, so I'll look for a moment with shadows on then turn them off.

That makes me sad, I still notice the reflections every where I go. Desensitizing is bad

That's one reason I keep saying that game graphics these days are "good enough." Yeah, sure, there's more that can be done with them, but my question is... Is it really worth it? How much more time should we spend making what already looks good look better, possibly at the cost of spending money on something else?

Maybe it's just me, but I'm over buying games because they look good. If I want something that looks like a CGI movie, I can watch a CGI movie. Avatar comes to mind. Personally, I'd play a game with graphics on the level of City of Heroes without a second thought (provided it didn't lag like hell) if the game were fun to play. I don't feel the need for my good games to have all the latest DX11 bells and whistles before I give it the light of day.

Are good graphics cool to have? Oh hell yes! But not at the cost of performance and not with the idea that THAT will be the game's primary selling point.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

UMMM holy crap!

What the hell kind of system must the OP's The Beast be, if what you posted above has issues?

In other words what kind of scray skynet type system are folks who can run ULTRA MODE running?

Different tolerances for lower minimum framerates. Also quite possibly, some people running with chat logging on, but that should really only be relevant if you're suffering from that lag bug with logging.

I have a similar system [i7, gtx 285, 12gb ram instead (triple channel)], and it runs at 'default' ultramode in the Trials...

There is also a lot to be said about system optimization, the less junk you have running that you don't need, the better.

Have you tried turning up your UM settings recently? Things are a lot better now than a year ago. There's been a lot of optimizations done server side. On my beast it used to be I simply couldn't run with everything turned up, but now I can, though, I do turn a few things down so that things like Raids don't become slideshows.