What game are you playing now?

I enjoyed Rage 2 for about 3/4 of the game... until I unlocked that stupid helicopter thing. Essentially removing any travel challenge, I slowly lost interest in the game.

 

Can't believe it I started playing rage 2 last night for about 5 hrs and just finished main story after about 5 more hours, seemed so promising at first and really nice graphics but wow what a disappointment if you're not into all the bases/arks and just mindless combat, not my style. At least I didn't get that final mission bug that so many seem to get from the steam reviews.

Finally got around to starting DMC5 and it's just not my type of game, too many constant cutscenes and cringey dialogue, thought it might be fun hack and slash after I enjoyed Nioh 2. Maybe give it more time.

 

I cleared out everything before finishing the story then did the expansion, I think I logged about 80 hours total.

 

Recently started playing Just Cause 3 again after a few years. It still a fun game.

Its very nice to be able to run the game on Max Settings now compared to my old laptop (750m) where it barely runs on playable FPS on 720p with most of the settings on Low-Medium.

 

Yeah I don't mind some of the grinding but not my thing to hit every base/ark, just like the open world AC games. Still it's got some really great graphics and combat no question.

Finished Yakuza Kiwami 1, fantastic crime drama once again, not as good a story as Y0, so glad I found this series. Kiwami 2 is utterly amazing graphical and QOL upgrade from the previous two. From what I've seen the remastered 3-5 actually will be back to y0, yk1 graphics and mechanics. But the greatness is not primarily about graphics and the earlier mechanics were fine.

 

1060 gaming gost recon breAKpoint maxed getting 33fps average as with all 3rd person games playable and fun at 30

 

Started Bravely Default 2, hadn't played one of these games in a while but it sure hits the nostalgia nerve. Music when going into battle totally reminds me of the older Final Fantasy's.

Also played a bunch of Dying Light in CO-OP and I forgot how much fun I had in that game, it's even more fun in CO-OP than it was in single player.

 

I can't stress enough how much fun I'm having with CoD Black Ops Cold War Zombies - Outbreak. Don't know if this game mode is going to be something permanent or just a limited time thing but for me, I find it extremely satisfying.

I was always a fan of zombies games but I never did get on the usual CoD zombies train. I didn't like the waves/fast paced gameplay style, in small maps with lots of close quarters.

This mode is very different. Currently there are only 3 maps but they are large and open. There are all sorts of mission types, both side and main and the usual progression: you get points for killing zombies or from chests and missions and you spend them for upgrades and perks. The difference is that you control the progression, there's no timer, no need to rush through a map. You choose when you start the missions, when you leave the area, etc. Undoubtedly this is designed with coop in mind but I'm having a blast playing solo. Pack-a-punch shotgun is the way to go

The free period will end in 2 days but I'm almost certain I will buy it.

 

Right now warzone and the new outbreak mode with friends.

 

I'm playing Dead Space 2 right now. I finished the first one this past Saturday.

I gotta say I like Dead Space 2 a lot more than the first one. I hated the invincible enemies from the second half of the first game's story, and it got quite boring at times. I don't plan on playing it again.

Dead Space 2? I'd definitely play again from what I've seen so far. Apparently this game and Dead Space 3 didn't sell as well as the first one, which I find stupid since I find the second one to be a lot more fun. Maybe it's because of the change in focus to action rather than horror.

Funnily enough, I tend to like a game series more when it shifts direction towards action (if it wasn't originally focused on action). That makes games a lot more fun in my opinion. Unfortunately this same shift tends to kill off a series since the fans don't approve of the change.

On another note, I really hope Red Faction makes a return with a new entry in the series. The destruction physics are amazing!

 

Yeah I think DS2 is the best one, a compromise between DS1 very slow and DS3 which is a lot more action oriented. But the whole trilogy is really good, probably the last EA games I played. Really nice open space graphics and genuinely great horror in the dark at night. Like the Fear games they really need to do a simple graphics remaster, everything else is fine.

 

Been playing a lot of Valheim recently. Really enjoying the relaxing pace of it.

 

beat saber...i know i know its vr only but its soooooooo fun

 

Metro 2033 Redux

 

MSFS.
Hoping around Europe in FBW A32N.
So far so good, though the game still need a bit of work. Live weather is also kinda hit and miss.
It's snowing with heavy winds in the departure airport, MSFS gives me clear weather with Live Weather. U w0t, m8?

 

Fired up D1 with Tchernobog last night since I had JUST finished complete D3 playthrough Friday night. Still fun even contrasting it with some of the much needed QoL and control scheme and pacing changes that have happened up to D3. Still lost track of time. Soundtrack still legendary.

 

What's the best VR today? I don't want to deal with facebook logins or anything like that - at all. I don't care about cost but want a simple setup and easy to use solution. I've never even tried VR at home, not really a controller user but willing to try to get that VR feeling I keep hearing about.

Most of my games are from GOG but I'm ok with doing VR on Steam if I have to.

 

Everyone seems to love the Valve Index the most, hit up the Half Life: Alyx thread though, I don't have a VR kit just my guess from reading others.

 

Finished Yakuza (Kiwami) 2 which was fantastic. Dove into the remastered Yakuza 3 and it's underwhelming, all they did was update some textures and controls my guess, because it's clunky otherwise. Going from the up to date rebuilt/revamped YK2 on the modern dragon engine to a 2009 PS3 game is disappointing. 3-5 are just remastered not rebuilt. 6 will be remastered on the dragon engine so should be great, march 26 release, and Y7 was released last year but I'm committed to doing them all in order since it's such a story rich crime drama with whacky hilarious side stories.

 

the best headset overall is the quest 2 with the elite strap..
second i'd say hp g2 but its tied with the valve index

depends on what you care about, screen resolution is important to get rid of the screen door effect(seeing pixels) and to mostly get rid of that distracting effect you will need the g2 or quest 2..index has amazing controllers with finger tracking..but a lower resolution..

also hertz is important if you don't want to get sick i'd say 120 is more than enough....quest 2 is 90hz but getting an update to120hz.. index goes up to 144hz

next fov larger the better, like looking through binoculars on my headset and i think its like 90 deg.

its really important you think about what matters too you personally, but the quest 2 ticks all boxes and if you hate facebook then I guess not, but if you can look past that then you get everthing including a standalone headset that does gaming movies ect wirelessly without advanced setup

so if you can live with facebook like the rest of the 1 billion- 4 billion people on the planet the quest 2 is the way to go.

if not

try the valve index or HP G2

 

Thanks that is great information! As long as I can create some sort of dummy facebook account I could live with it. Not sure if they put silly security things in place like tying to a phone # or something that make it difficult to make a fake account.

 

well it really is just an opinion...im lazy and sometimes i just want to surf the web or watch a movie and the fact its also stand alone and i just put it on its pretty easy and fast that is for me im really really lazy and can't be bothered.

i have the quest 1 and i think its going for 150usd right now....pick one up try it out and if you like it sell it and get the headset that suits your needs wants the best... ithink the quest 1is oled and 1600x1440

so if that resolution and screen door effect bugs you you really only have two options hp reverb g2 or quest 2


good look first look to see SDE



now a comparison of fov




didnt watch this but hes pretty informative and runs a great channel



verdict

non-standalone G2
Both standalone and PCVR Quest 2


Also I did not care about VR but got one just to see the fuss...now....its more valuable to me than my ultrabook and laptop and tied as far as overall enjoyment goes with my cell phone..

like for 150 you can play and beat Alyx and watch a couple movies and you will have already had a good ROI...and if you cant stand feeling like your inside the game and hate 160 foot theater screens for your bluray or 3d movie collection then I strongly advise buying a 12in tv or using a 11 inch netbook for your personal maximum enjoyment/immersion LOL

I see one here with all the bells and whistles

Oculus Quest 64GB VR Headset - Black 815820020271 | eBay

why the quest 1 ? too see if it's your cup of tea

 

Dyson Sphere program.

 

What a coincidence, I just finished my first playthrough of that game just a few days ago and now moving into Metro Last Light xD

Really enjoying them so far, could not wait to also start on Exodus.

 

Surprisingly I'm still having a lot of fun with Outbreak Zombies game mode in CoD Cold War. I've been playing solo daily. Weirdly it's very satisfying after a long day to just run around blasting zombies. Also, I found it's a great way to level up weapons. Fully upgraded shotgun makes zombies extremely easy to plow through. Now I'm working on the FFAR since it seems to be the one to have in Warzone. I feel I am also getting good aim and recoil control practice with zombies.

I do have an issue... the game crashes way too often. I tried updating all drivers and I keep changing graphics settings. I disabled all RTX features, I set most others to low/medium, I tried playing fullscreen/windowed, nothing seems to make a difference. It crashes once every 2-3 games. Strangely in Warzone I didn't have any crashes lately but to be honest I haven't even played it since this zombies mode came out, so who knows. Any ideas?

 

Skipped over Yakuza 3 after about halfway, it got a little ridiculous with the new chase mechanic, if the police grabbed you, once you button mashed to get out of the hold it would be very hard to figure out which way to run with the camera all over the place. Failed that a bunch. Clunky mechanics in general and this is the oldest game when you take into accouny Y1/Y2 were rebuilt and upgraded in the Kiwami titles. Y3 needs a kiwami.

I'm now into Yakuza 4 which is done way better overall and the foot chase sequences are much better. Story is more interesting to me too. Played this with DSR at 4k and since it's locked to 60 by the game it works just fine but I'm skeptical of the visual difference to rendering at 1080p, my gpu usage went from around 30% to 99%, temps the same. Switched back to 1080p render. Will try thehunter COW at 4k dsr. Kiwami 2 looked better dsr 4k but again from 40% gpu to 99% gpu, 80-120fps to 30-55fps. But in heavy cpu games this is a great way to not have bottlenecking, temps aren't any different, 2k would be better for fps though.

 

your 2060is a beast....most people have a 1050ti level with laptops and 1060 with desktops

 

Well these are old games it would be pretty bad fps in aaa newer games I was just curious about dsr from seeing the ncp setting. You should try it on yours, depending on the game it's not that taxing and from youtube videos it does look better. 4k is too much but the 1.78x 2k works better afa fps. I was targeting the dark souls 2 and 3 games for 4k/2k easy to switch back to 1080p for immediate comparison.

 

your 2060 is a monster.....im rocking a 1060 which i think is 50 percent slower

 

What about my Vega 56?
That's more or less comparable performance-wise... actually, should be on par... except of course no RTX (which I don't really care about).

 

Dayem wasn't even aware that existed, pretty cool actually looks like a nice desktop replacement. Can you do any sort of upgrading to it at all or is it also soldered gpu/cpu? 2k/4k screen? From the NBC article it is a desktop gpu that fits in between 2060m and 2070mq. Too bad Amd didn't follow up on that, with ngreedia's tactics many would make the switch if they were made in larger quantities and updated over the years.

https://www.notebookcheck.net/One-o...s-is-on-sale-right-now-for-1300.427937.0.html

 

Well synthetically it's somewhere like 69%, 3692 vs 6252 ul timespy or so but the notebookcheck games fps charts may not get to that high a difference. Without checking I'd guess 30-40% avg games fps difference.

thehunter cow 4k dsr lowers the cpu usage a lot and the gpu is the same, same temps all around. 1k=80-90fps, 2k dsr=60fps, 4k dsr=30fps lol

TW3 1k around 110, 2k dsr 80 but locked to 60 by me, 4k 30-40 lol

This approx. checks out with the NBC fps games testing so I can see what it will be approx. without booting up/reinstalling the games they tested.

 

The RTX 2060 is about a 35% improvement over the GTX 1060.

 

Depends on the game. In CP2077 it's more like 75-85%, and that's before DLSS.

 

Oh wow. I'm assuming that's because of architectural improvements that favor those games.

 

Looking at Time Spy graphics score, a pretty typical indicator of performance scaling in modern games, it’s about 70% as well. Yeah Pascal is an outdated architecture, and the 1060 has fared especially poorly and is at the bottom of the performance charts these days.

 

yeah I had the choice between a m15 with a 2070mq or a msi gs63vr with a 1060....hmmm...lets just say uneducated purchase. I don't need the power but its always nice to have extra..and yeah from what ive seen the 2060 is 50 percent faster overall with games i like to play....also its most likely higher due to cpu bottlenecking

 

Yep, always outliers. GTAV a weird one, I watched a comparison of 1080p ultra native vs 4k dsr on yt and there was no real difference in fps and cpu/gpu usage. What happened with RDR2 lol

@JRE84 Try dsr on the games you play.

 

The CPU is not soldered... but because Acer never put out any relevant microcode updates for the laptop, I'm stuck with Ryzen 2700 and can go up to 2700x with ease.
Not that the 2700 is bad in any way, but this machine could definitely do with all the latest AGESA updates and Zen 3 support, as this would provide a really nice upgrade in the CPU department, and the cooling can easily fit a 105W TDP cpu without increasing temperatures by much (yes its THAT good)... meaning a 5900x or possibly a 5950x could go inside.

Other upgradeable components are the hdd (which I replaced with a 2TB SSD), and an extra m.2 slot which I filled with 500GB SSD... so all in all, I have 3TB of SSD storage.

RAM is also upgradeable... this is one of the areas Acer missed actually. The RAM is 'stuck' at 2133 or 2400 MhZ if all 4 RAM slots are filled (this looks like entirely BIOS issue limitation which could be remedied with latest AGESA among other things)... however, the machine CAN be fitted with 128GB RAM (which would be amazing if combined with say 5900x)/

For now, I'm happy with 32GB RAM... but I might upgrade that to 64GB soon.

The Vega56 is soldered to the motherboard, but to be fair, its more than powerful enough (it just needs better developer support in professional software so it can be used fully).

I'm presently using the machine for content creation mainly (3ds MAx, video editing etc.) and some gaming.
Considering this thing is from 2019, its actually holding up well.

The display is 1080p, 144Hz... but to be fair, I don't think I technically need a bigger resolution... I'd need another monitor actually as sometimes when I work in Max, the material editor takes up a lot of the screen space (and yes, bigger resolution could do the trick, but not on a 17" screen as everything would look tiny).

As for more people going with the machine if AMD was on top of it... well, I just don't know.
This is a product of early Ryzen success in the desktop market, so laptop manufacturers still hadn't really made a lot of laptops using all AMD hw (mostly, they would just mix AMD cpu's with NV gpu's).

It wasn't until Zen 2 that the OEM's started using it in laptops... but adoption of AMD gpu's in mobile space has been sparse (despite their excellent performance and efficiency).

Heck, my Vega is limited to 120W TDP (so its very efficient) and its about 5-10% slower than the TDP unlocked Vega 56... and with older drivers, I could actually overclock and undervolt the GPU to gain another 5-10% in performance without exceeding 120W... but newer drivers aren't exactly playing nice with OC of vega on a laptop (in fact, because its a laptop, most of those options are usually scrambled in the drivers, so I need to use MSI Afterburner.

 

what does your vega 56 which I also did not know existed score in FS..

after some research wow tops a 1070 and it exists

 

Yup.
Plus latest drivers also increased performance and resolved some issues we experienced when Navi was first launched... latest Windows updates helped too.
I just wish Acer would get off their rear ends and release a microcode update with latest AGESA which would solve the RAM speed limitation and provide support for Zen 2 and Zen 3 (they can easily write out support for entire Zen 1 line if they need more space - but this is strictly speaking unnecessary as the ROM should be big enough).

 

What are your FS and TS graphics scores on that mobile Vega 56?

 

It's in between the 2060m/2070mq as the nbc article mentions. Note that the UL link says it's a TDP of 210w so I'm guessing this is score for the desktop version, so like what 5-10% lower score than that, 6835 desktop, 6152 mobile, about the same as my 2060m 90w.

https://benchmarks.ul.com/hardware/gpu/AMD+Radeon+RX+Vega+56+review

 

Bro, I may I know which NVIDIA driver that you're using for your RTX 2060?

 

460.79

 

Still playing D1 w/ Belzebub now though as the latest Tchernobog had some super bad quest bugs, I suppose it's just MP focused. It's pretty wild how much I've already forgotten about the quests given how many hours I dumped into it and the fact that I did a run through it not THAT long ago. I'm up to level 9 of the dungeon. It must be something Belz introduced but I do not remember anything about the Horazon's realm, it's a pretty cool quest that they added there. It's funny that I've forgotten enough about it that I'm like.. was this in the original? Making it more fun to replay it with this confusion to be honest.

 

forgot a game

 

In my Yakuza binging I'm now on 5. 4 was a lot of game and there were 4 different playable characters and I'm still not done with each ones side missions but done with the main story. Rubber bullets lol mmkay.

 

Taking a little break from Witcher 3 and doing some frags in Battlefield 5, owning noobs from the sky with the Bf109 is so satisfying

 

Oh and wanted to mention started forza horizon 4 and it's an older but great game, really well optimized now. I can get high 4kdsr 55fps+, 2khighdsr 100+fps. When I checked notebookchecks benches they are way way off, their ultra 1080p is only 88fps that's about 40fps below what I get with the ultra fhd at 120+, since I'm only on a 120hz screen. This is a nerfed test by them never fixed so can't blindly trust their numbers either.