The Steam Thread - Page 10

My girl said something very similar when I stuck her in front of Dirt 2.

I loaded Just Cause 2, but haven't played it yet. It definitely needs some settings tweaked from the default Medium to get good framerates out of the 6870 at 6024x1080. I'll have to load it up at High 1920x1080 and Medium-Low 6024x1080 and see which one gives me the better experience.

I grabbed Kane and Lynch plus DLC off the Square sale. Already had everything else I was interested in, either on 360 or PC.

I also think I'm going to stop by Gamestop when I make my weekly Target snacks run to check out some wheels. I probably won't pick anything up today, but I'll see what's in my local market to fiddle with.

About liquid cooling: I've never bothered. I run everything at stock speed as squeezing 10% improvement out of anything borders on the edge of human perception, so I don't produce more heat than normal. At that point, I would need two fans anyway for the PSU and the liquid radiator, so I may as well just go with 3 or 4 super quiet 7-volted fans instead and save the hassle. Hell, this will be the first time in years that I've even had a 120mm on the back of my case, to combat the 6870's internal exhaust. Normally, the 120mm on the bottom of my PSU has served me just fine as my primary system exhaust.

I'm more likely to build baffling to muffle my exhaust fans than I am to move to liquid. In the same regard, I run a pair of 5400rpm 1TB drives in RAID 1, paired with a large Compact Flash as my swapfile drive, just to keep the other primary noise source in PCs in check. I know, 5400rpm sounds like 1997, but trust me, they are nice and fast for reads in RAID, and taking swapfile work off of them makes for snappy performance. The only time they are really noticeably slow is when installing newly downloaded games in Steam/GFWL, but then we're talking 5 minutes versus 4.5 minutes. Either way I'm making a sandwich. In trade though, I get lower pitch noise that isn't nearly as irritating, at a lower volume, and with less heat dumped in to my case.

Wow, that was a tangent.

Assaulting the first base in Just Cause 2.

I spent a good two hours playing Just Cause 2 last night, plus another little bit tweaking it to run at a perfect, solid 30fps. The game has an option to cap the framerate at a specific amount. In this case, after a bit of tweaking I ended up picking 4800x900 with 2xAA instead of the native 5760x1080 of my display with 0xAA. Performance was essentially the same between the two, with a slight edge to 900p, but the GPU scaling and minor AA resulted in much nicer looking foliage and a generally more pleasing image. After settling on some Medium settings, I ended up with a pretty stable 55fps without v-sync, with v-sync on it would bounce between 30 and 60fps, with a very jarring smoothness difference between the two when it toggled. Framerate capping at 30fps leaves me with a perfectly solid 30fps, with a very nice buffer of 25fps that I have to lose before I drop down to 20fps.

I suddenly wish more games would allow framerate capping.

Oh! And the game? Fantastic! The field of view is also bloody awesome on three displays.

Thanks, but I know all about D3Doverrider. I'd rather have a solid, stable framerate than a variable framerate.

It's a Team Fortress 2 kind of a night.

Let's test that.

Cool. You can hotlink directly to Steam screenshots.

Oh, and the game doesn't need to specifically support the Steam cloud screenshot function. It just needs to be running the Steam overlay as far as I know. This means anything that you open through Steam, even if it isn't a Steam game should work with the screenshot function.

More games should let you fly around in planes. I am still constantly struck by the excellence of Just Cause 2. I highly recommend picking it up the next time it comes around for ~$10, guys!

http://www.bluesnews.com/a/2179/valv...e-steam-to-gdc

Steam is getting an optional console-like front end with gamepad support for livingroom use.

Playing around with the Steam cloud screenshots I ended up with this. I made a shortcut to the non-Steam version of the Crysis 2 demo, in order to enable the Steam overlay and therefore Steam cloud screenshots. Of note is that most of the post-processing is completely missing. In game there is significantly more bloom and whatnot.