PC gaming: Must have games to justify your rig

[eastyy]

Sorry was a seperate point from the imac with my experience with half life 2 on the pc years ago was such a hassle for me personally with no broadband at the time just to play the thing tested my sanity ...consoles were just soo simple so i just moved over to them

and i think with pc gaming many games are just not that well optimised

[sj33]

^
^Without wanting to sound like I'm being anti-Mac, the Source games do run worse when playing in OSX native (compared with Windows) due to the lackluster implementation of OpenGL in OSX. It is a known problem, and Valve have been pressuring Apple to get their act together with it.

Still, Macs can dual-boot Windows anyway.

[capcom_suicide]

^
^Without wanting to sound like I'm being anti-Mac, the Source games do run worse when playing in OSX native (compared with Windows) due to the lackluster implementation of OpenGL in OSX. It is a known problem, and Valve have been pressuring Apple to get their act together with it.

Still, Macs can dual-boot Windows anyway.

There was an update for the mid 2010 imacs a week back.

Still a really nice thing with steam is that I am allowed to install on Mac my PC purchases! (Orange box)

So I will have boot camp and can install steam on win7 x64 and also on Mac OSx.

It will be interesting to see the difference, because the native videos above looked better than my xbox and PC from 5 years ago. (7800GTx)

EDIT: here is the link to the graphics fix info:

http://www.geardiary.com/2010/08/18/apple-valve-work-to-update-mac-graphics-performance/

[JohnMcL7]

Sorry was a seperate point from the imac with my experience with half life 2 on the pc years ago was such a hassle for me personally with no broadband at the time just to play the thing tested my sanity ...consoles were just soo simple so i just moved over to them

and i think with pc gaming many games are just not that well optimised

It can still be a pain in the neck unfortunately, Steam is fine when it's behaving itself but when it starts throwing a wobbly it can be difficult to resolve due to the total lack of error handling. I bought Chaos Rising on release and was obviously keen to play the game as I'd been waiting a long time for it. Fired up Steam and waited for the main window to come up...waited some more and more but Steam was having none of it. Checked the processes and it was there running but couldn't see the window there at all. Spent a couple of hours troubleshooting and searching online but got nowhere. Eventually noticed that the Steam process was downloading a trickle of data and leave it running...six hours later the main window finally comes up and is functional but the game needs a massive update...that's the first two nights gone while it gets all the updates.

With the game now fully patched I can get into it but there's an error with Windows Live so it won't sync my profile and therefore won't let me start a new campaign....try numerous times and look online again but night number 3 is lost.

Night number 4 and Windows Live is now actually working so I can start a campaign, woohoo! Hang on, this doesn't look right where are all the textures? Arrrghhhh!! Well the game is playable it's just I can't see any of the characters and most of the landscape is missing. Download new graphics card drivers but still no luck, reset my control panel settings etc. so time for more online searching which is hampered by this being a new release and few people playing it. It turns out if you had the first game, the settings are copied and the ingame settings ignored which means if you had AA on in the first game, it totally screws everything up for the second one. A rake through the config files finds the setting and I can change it - game now works but spent so much time fiddling around, no time to play it so another night lost.

This is what drives me crazy with PC games, I'm quite a tech savvy person but it does my head in when I have to spend considerable time coaxing the game into running and while Chaos Rising is one of the worst examples of this it's by no means completely out of the ordinary. With no quality control PC games can be as sloppy as they want and frequently are, ports can be even worse when the game is massively unoptimised leaving it crawling along when it should be flying.

I also have a core i7 940 and a 27in 2560x1440 monitor (Dell U2711) and there's no doubt when it's running properly, games do look incredible but there's been a few times when I've ended up back on the 360 when the PC isn't playing ball because I can just put the game in and it generally works as intended.

John

[dataDave]

That has to be a better visual experience than Xbox 360, I'm 99.99% sure of it. Even if the imac has low res textures, I think that 2560x1440 should look great.

If you can get it holding 60fps with v-sync it will. I loved moving the view around as fast as I could without a single trace of screen tear. HL Ep2 is an amazing game anyway.