I accidentally some games.

1. Bioshock Infinite 24.99€
   
2. Antichamber 6.45€
   
3. Civilization V Gold Upgrade 2.50€
   
4. XCOM Enemy Unknown 9.99€
   
5. Surgeon Simulator 3.39€
   
6. Far Cry 3 Blood Dragon 6.74€
   
7. Sleeping Dogs 6.24€
   
8. Tomb Raider (2013) 12.49€
   
9. Tomb Raider Underworld 2.24€
   
10. Fallout 3 GOTY 4.99€
    
11. FEZ 4.99€
    
12. System Shock 2 2.49€
    
13. The Swapper 6.99€
    
14. Mirrors Edge 2.99€
    
15. Dishonored Knife of Dunwall 3.39€
    
16. Max Payne 1 & 2 3.74€
    
17. Rage 4.49€
    
18. SimCity 4 2.99€
    
19. Torchlight II 4.74€
    

Grand total 116,83€... oh well, didn't need to eat this month anyway.

My personal recommendation for the final/encore sale day: Bioshock Infinite. The story is SO GOOD! Gameplay is pretty much like any other modern FPS tunnel run, but the incredible lore and story totally won me over. It's so well written, even at only -50% off I'm totally content and happy with the purchase. Get it discounted while you still can!

Biggest disappointment: Tomb Raider (2013), where do I start with this game. There's just constant QTE's and cinematic cutscenes continuously interrupting your gameplay, inconsistent charecter behaviour (Lara turns from a scared little girl to a mass murderer back and forth within seconds all the time) and it's just an unpleasant game overall. Older TR games are much better.

No, I mean ordinary uphills and downhills combined with high speed corners. The cars get these strange hover motions and feels like it's turning around its center axis. It's the exact NFS shift physics behaviour.

Here's a good sample, skip to 6m52s if it doesn't work: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VVGmOunhPy8#t=412s

(Yes it's from an old build, but the same thing is still happening with the physics)

Quote from Born2BSlow :

And with respect it's not using Shift physics, that is just overused mud to sling at a game you have chosen to dislike in order to scare off other Sim racers from even trying it.

It's not using Shift physics per se, but it IS using the Shift engine with tweaked physics - they haven't overhauled them. The weird floaty four wheel drifts still occur when driving over uneven terrain at high speeds even in the latest version from what I saw my friend try it yesterday.

Quote from tristancliffe :

I mentioned a few things wrong with the handling.

According to their forum I was wrong.

Funny, same thing happened to me.

Quote from Born2BSlow :

If you don't think it's right and can provide video or telemetry to demonstrate it (there are threads on how you can do this which are very helpful), then the Devs can do something about it, and will if it's clear cut.

The thing is, you don't need telemetry to see when a car turns around its center axis or behaves completely unnaturally, atleast if you've ever driven a real car hard or on the track. If the devs can't (or don't want to) see that by themselves, then there's very little the average simmer can do about it that would make things to be any better.

I'm a firm believer of the opinion, that when you start developing a sim, it should always begin from the physics. The fact that they used the Shift engine as a base shouldn't change this fact, they could have dumped the physics and tire model code from the start and write a new one to get the handling right, and then jumped on the eye candy bling bandwagon, but they chose not to.

Just by being on Steam should provide plenty of sales, as long as they can get people to be actually aware of the title.

So far, they've been doing a good job on that part atleast, even if PCARS is winning in awareness due to their unlimited eye candy screenshots.

Most memorable moment for me was propably seeing three guys (I remember Palon was one of them) triple drifting door-to-door with GTT's on Blackwood when S1 had just been released, sometime in July 2003. It just impressed me more than anything I had previously seen in any racing game and drove my desire to become as good as they were at car control.

That's the reason when I play LFS, I still mostly do it sideways.

Quote from edge3147 :

Basically, when buying a gfx card you want to compare the GPU clock speed and the number of stream processors or CUDA cores.

Memory bandwidth is also important however. If the card is choked by a narrow bus, no amount of CUDA cores or high clocks will help you if the framebuffer can't push the pixels to the screen quick enough.

Quote from edge3147 :

Also your statement about the 610 and 210 is False.

Yeah you're correct, I remembered 210 having the specs of 220 which the 610 was actually rebranded from.

I love these things for some reason. Would love to buy one, especially the turbo model, if only they wouldn't all be rusted away by now.

Not necessarily true. 7950 beats 7790 at absolutely everything, GTX 660 is faster than 570 and so on. It depends on the generation of the GPU, sometimes even a lower tier card (going by their model numbers) can beat higher tier cards of previous generation.

With 240/610 that isn't the case however, as the 610 is pretty much just a renamed 210.

That kind of "hardcore" game mode would actually be pretty interesting! Implementing it would also be very easy in to something like GTA if the devs went for it.

Quote from Born2BSlow :

Bit tetchy aren't we? Chill out. I was just pointing out that you were responding to a question about the project when you are no longer involved.

To which I responded with correct information and you seemed to get your knickers in a twist that I didn't praise the godly game. Other option for the person asking would have been to point him towards buying a second hand account, which is illegal and against the ToS of PCARS.

Quote from Born2BSlow :

Behind the curtain is a fascinating place to be, it's a shame you just thought you were buying a chance to play a game 1/2/3 years before release.

And where have I claimed so? The only reason I got in to PCARS was because some fellow simmers on this very forum, who I thought to know their shit about car handling and dynamics, said it's very promising and realistic already. I guess the lack of LFS updates for so many years has had its effect on people who apparently now accept even arcadey physics for realism as long as it looks pretty.

Quote from Born2BSlow :

Anyone interested in games development would have been fascinated to get an inside view of what's involved, granted it's not full access but all changes are documented and open to all involved to see and try to understand.

This is basically the same as kickstarting any game - except with kickstarted games you get the finished product for much cheaper, unlike with PCARS. Even if you get in to PCARS with one of the cheaper tiers, you'll still need to pay the difference to full retail price eventually to get the finished game.

Quote from DeadWolfBones :

It's not the most powerful phone, but it should be plenty to run Android smoothly. And it does, sometimes. Whenever I install a new ROM, it's great for a week or two and then gradually slows down to the point of being a pain in the ass to use. Today, for instance, I installed CM10.1 and it's flying again—but I know it won't last.

Yeah, it shouldn't really hesitate too much when everything's working like it should. Sounds like the problem might be caused by some app(s) you're running if the phone is fine after a fresh rom and gets worse over time, ever tried diagnosing it? Logcat helps a ton to figure out what's going on in the system.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RoGxA48HQ1g

I've bought way too much already from these sales. Loved Bioshock Infinite story and lore more than anything since a long time in video gaming, truly fantastic writing.

Right, thought you meant you've had issues with more phones than one.

GNexus was pretty much mid-tier in speed even when it came out though, so it's not that surprising, I was more annoyed by the Pentile screen on it rather than the hesitation. High end Android phones in the past couple years have been really snappy from what I've tried. Running One X (with the battery killer Tegra 3) on CM10.1 myself, and it never hesitates or drops under 60 FPS in general usage.

I just can't see the point in moving to iOS or WP8 from Android. You're just locking yourself in to a closed garden, along with very limited app support on the WP platform.

Which high end Android phones have been lagging for you?

TBH I'd go for the One Google Edition running vanilla Android. It's as smooth as silk.

Good call.

PCIE 3.0 is backwards compatible, so you're fine even if the mobo only supports 2.0.

That's actually the non-boost cards review, boost version is much closer to 660, that's why it's such a kickass value for money card. When overclocked, it can actually outrun the 660.

http://anandtech.com/show/6838 ... tx-650-ti-boost-review-/9

http://www.fractal-design.com/ ... p;category=2&prod=110

Not "big" whatever that means, but 79€.

Quote from lol_men :

Guys, not sure if You have noticed but its running on GTX 560, Intel quad core CPU, 4GB ram with medium graphic settings (thats what YT discription says)
I dont even want to thing what are requirements to run smoothly with full grid

Well it's a modern game with modern graphics, you can't expect 100 FPS on a 3DFX Voodoo 2 with a full grid like on LFS.

Aren't those specs pretty low end anyhow?

The type of vram doesn't really matter so much with slower cards, they're choked by main memory bus to make use of faster chips. Also, you can't compare cards purely by their clock speeds. Atleast not unless three simple conditions are met:

1. The core architecture is the same - you can compare a GK104 to GK104, but not to GK107
   
2. The number of CUDA cores/stream processors must be roughly equal
   
3. The framebuffer bus width must be roughly equal
   

If those conditions are met, then you can compare one cards speed to another purely by their clock speeds.

I mean if you compared a GTX 680 to a Titan, you'd see that 680 has higher standard and boost clocks, so that means it must be faster than a Titan, right? Wrong, the Titan has shitloads of more CUDA cores (2688 vs 1536) and a wider memory bus (384-bit vs 256-bit) so even with way lower clock speeds, the Titan completely destroys the 680.

Now, the reason why that GT 610 is so much slower than your previous GT 240 is because it has far less CUDA cores (48 vs 96) and the memory bus is very narrow (64-bit vs 128-bit) so this is another good comparison how clock speeds aren't the holy answer to everything.

Last edited by Matrixi, Fri 12 Jul 2013, 07:53. Reason : Typos

Just follow this.

Quote from Bmxtwins :

I heard there wasn't much of a difference between that card and the 610?

From the same person who said GT 610 is faster than GT 240? Do yourself a favor, and slap him/her in the face for talking complete bullshit.

Now, let's look at performance. Here's GT 240 vs GTX 650 in plain numbers. Remember, that 240 is already a ~twice faster card than 610.

http://www.hwcompare.com/13536 ... gddr5-vs-geforce-gtx-650/

Yeah, unfortunately anything in the 0-100 bucks area is where you're getting poor value for your money.

This fits in your budget, but it's a lot slower than TI Boost.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/ ... aspx?Item=N82E16814127703

Well that certainly gives you more room to play with, but this is pretty much the slowest card I would personally recommend to anyone playing anything more serious than facebook games:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/ ... aspx?Item=N82E16814130914

It's pretty much a whole different beast compared to absolute low end stuff, while not costing THAT much more.

2GB vram won't make a difference, the card is too slow to make use of the extra memory and it only matters if you're running 1080p or some very texture heavy game like modded Skyrim anyway. I'd seriously return it for something better and faster.

If your budget is that low, try what you can find from Ebay.

GT 610 is frankly total crap, integrated graphics in processors are way faster.

GT 240 is about twice as fast, but still very slow.

http://www.videocardbenchmark.net/gpu.php?gpu=GeForce+GT+610
http://www.videocardbenchmark.net/gpu.php?gpu=GeForce+GT+240