Torn between PC gaming and new console

New console time is making me think about going down the PC gaming route...

Need a PC graphics card and would something like this NVIDIA GTX650Ti be man enough to match or improve on my experience of xbox 360 graphics?

I like the inclusion of HDMI on new generation cards, as while the beast PC I have is a tad noisy for shooting gaming less of an issue I think.

Slight worry about going back to PC gaming is my addiction to the tower defense genre may resurface, but mainly looking for Battlefield 4. Would love to buy the new console and boost the dual quad core PC.

I would get this instead.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Gigabyte-NVIDIA-GTX660-PCI-E...

the 650 will easily surpass the 360, but new games ported from next gen are probably going to be more demanding so the 660 should be a safer bet than the 650.

Wouldn't take much of a graphics card to improve on the experience of a Xbox 360 that is the best part of 8 years old.

With new consoles on the horizon I would have thought you would have been more than happy with the Xbox One or even a Playstation 4 .

And like you I also love Tower defence games,play quite a few on my IPod and Nexus 7 ,may be you can suggest a few of your favourites,you never know I may not of heard of them

You can suggest Steam based games as long as they are Mac compatible .

Ideally would love to do both upgrades.

Was going to spend the time up to Christmas drooling over hardware and decide in the New Year, plus might have run the ethernet from the loft down to dining room to give best performance and just maybe will have FTTC by that time also

Or you home plugs I find them just as good

Got all my gaming stuff in the living room all running through Homeplugs and never really experienced any issues and the speed is extremely fast and reliable .

Damp in the shed killed one of mine - was running webcam off of it

Have the drum of external cable just a case of crawling into the loft space

My system's running BF4 well enough with medium settings (high textures, effects and geometry, level detail but low filtering/aa). I seem to be averaging around 70-80FPS at the moment and need to tweak it more. Got lighting and shadows set quite low I think. Could look better for sure.

Current PC setup is some 4-5 years old now: Quad core Intel CPU @ 2.66GHz (stock), 6GB DDR3 RAM, Crucial M4 SSD (which makes a huge difference to load times), ATI 5870 GFX card

To max out the settings on BF4 you've got ULTRA settings (low, mid, high, ultra): Guru3D have a relevant article.

I was actually toying with the idea of getting a nVidia GTX770 card for c. £240-250. I think that'd probably pretty much be able to play anything at high-max quality settings (barring aa etc) for a few years. Having said that, I don't know whether the CPU would bottleneck performance at all and haven't read the Guru article myself yet. Edit: check their chart! Should be good to go with the 660 then.

Some of AMD's latest higher end cards are meant to be better optimised for BF4 with performance optimisations due to their latest API, 'Mantle'. Couldn't say if it pays off in actuality but the 290 runs at 95 degC and though it's within design spec I don't want to go anywhere near those kinds of temps. I'd rather not game.

Edited by deleted (Mon 11-Nov-13 01:19:03)

This card would be a better option if you're on a restricted budget, The AMD 7850 1GB is a faster card for the same or less price point although their drivers are flaky and higher resolution gaming is slightly compromised by only having 1 GB of video RAM

\as for the noise issue, thats easily fixed if it is due to case fans as there are a lot of aftermarket silent fans out there.

Edited by deleted (Mon 11-Nov-13 05:28:28)

All this talk of specs and tweaking settings makes me miss PC gaming, I do enjoy all of that

My PC is way outdated now though, it is about 4 and a half years old but was quite a budget build at the time so would need everything replacing.... Dual core AMD @ 2.7Ghz, 4GB DDR2, ATI 3650 512 MB

In reply to a post by SPOOKish:

Some of AMD's latest higher end cards are meant to be better optimised for BF4 with performance optimisations due to their latest API, 'Mantle'. Couldn't say if it pays off in actuality but the 290 runs at 95 degC and though it's within design spec I don't want to go anywhere near those kinds of temps. I'd rather not game.

Watercooling ?

funny enough the cpu and ram would probably be enough for majority of games.

COD ghosts with its 6 gig ram requirement has been proven to be artifical, people have shown it only uses 1.5 to 2 gig of ram but it asks for 6 to launch.

Watercooling, yeah, I like it. You could power the rest of the PC from the steam it would generate.

Your system is more like the one I had before my current one so maybe mine isn't quite as old as I thought. It would probably be good for BF4 with just an updated gfx card (the AMD 7 series looked good value). Add an SSD for your system installation and you're gonna whizz by!



Do you miss all the crashing as well I wonder? Maybe not so much anymore as I guess consoles have their fair share these days? I dunno tho as I haven't had a console for many a year. BF4 has crashed badly 4 or 5 times on me but I guess that's an improvement to when you last gamed on a PC. BF2 used to crash to desktop all the time in the old days.

Its these issues that hold be back from the PC side.

Console crashes seem to be overheat shutdowns for me, clear dust and we are good to go again. Console updates seem more idiot proof, and I prefer to switch off the work part of my brain when gaming.

As a PC gamer I think I can fairly confidently say serious crash issues are far rarer. It's unusual for my Win 7 system to throw up a BSOD over a game so at least the operating system doesn't go down anymore like it used to.

BF4 is buggy for sure but it seems to be getting better though I haven't noticed any client side updates. The sound goes a lot in game, almost as if you were concussed but certain sounds remain. A strange one and common I think as other players complain of it in game too.

I had another couple of severe BF4 lock ups but they were recoverable through alt, control, and delete. These are graphics driver issues. I'm using the latest 13.11beta drivers from AMD that are meant to be optimised for BF4. Upgrading graphics drivers is always a somewhat irksome and scary process as the uninstallers don't do a thorough job and leave a lot of important stuff behind that seems to always have some negative effect unless you use something like Driver Sweeper, which is free from Guru3D in case anyone needs it.

However, I'm confident DICE will get the bugs under control if only eventually. BF4 is a good game and looks and runs well. I've jacked up the graphics settings more and I'm still getting 60-80 fps I reckon so I'm gonna put it up a little more. The important thing is it's fun and this greatly outweighs the bugs as I can get several hours of gaming in without crashing. Actually, there's a freeze up crash as well but that's recoverable too - I forgot about that as it doesn't seem so severe. But it's still worth it and I'm not a rabid fan.

The only other issue about PC gaming that I don't really know a lot about is cheats. I'm not sure how widespread it actually is but BF2 got hacked a lot in the end with C'artillery attacks and so forth. People complain of cheaters in BF4 but not often and I don't think there's anything suspect going on really. I think MrNelster made a good point about consoles being more of a locked down OS that helped prevent rampant cheating if not eliminating it altogether? I can't attest to this as I don't know one way or the other but that and the lack of ongoing system maintenance might make it more worthwhile for people to go the PS4/XBO route for an easy life. With Steam and Origin, at least you don't have the concerns of patching and there's probably exploit updates too as there are DRMs running so I guess people have more to lose if they're found out.

game breaking bugs can happen on consoles also.

fable 3 got rushed out by microsoft (publisher) they preffered profit to quality product. Result? People played the game, and were bugs such as corrupted save games, unbeatable games (due to game ending glitches), and this broke the game as the game enforced a single game save file per playthru meaning no backup save to fall back to. Lionhead released a patch which partially fixed but then they seemed to cease all work after that point (probably microsoft telling them to move devs to next game again for profit reasons).

The issue with BF4 seems similiar, DICE (developer) told to finish by X date regardless if ready or not as EA (publisher) wanted the sales now instead of waiting.

It can work both ways tho.

Blizzard dont have release dates, no deadlines. Their games take severeal years to develop, they are very high quality, bugs are pretty much non existant but have to wait an eternity for their games to be released. Starcraft2 still isnt completely released, they havent dont the final 3rd of campaigns yet, hearthstone seems to be in beta for an eternity and its a card game. So better games means longer waits, gamers get impatient as well because publishers tend to release details to build hype/preorders and then at that point gamers want it 'now'. I am shocked seeing games for sale as preorders for a year or more before release is now common practice. To me the best solution is dont announce a game until it is actually ready then less time pressure to release but publishers dont like that as then less built up hype and preorders.

Final fantasy 13 took about 4 times as long to make as final fantasy 13-2 and it shows. The latter is noticebly less polished and has more bugs. However I dont think I would have preffered waiting another 4 years for a new final fantasy game so I was ok with the shorter development time of the game.

The good news is bugs seem to get fixed more on PC games so I expect BF4 to get more patches. Take an example of a cross platform game, dragon age 1. All versions of it were released quite buggy, but the PC version carried on getting fixes after they stopped updating the console version.

Edited by Chrysalis (Wed 13-Nov-13 03:51:08)

With the upcoming steam box its going to make pc gaming more like console gaming. The big picture feature of steam is already like this, utilising the tv and a controller to play your titles in a console like way but with the benefits of better, upgradeable hardware. Then there is nvidia shield which makes pc gaming even more portable.

Haha, a real Steambox

I never did much gaming on this system, only games I played properly when I built it (2009) were HL2 and TF2, after that I got a PS3. Oh and this year I played the new SimCity but not been on it for ages after all the problems. My real PC gaming days were from 98-2003, I played TFC and CS loads back then

I reckon I will probably stick to console gaming now but when it comes to building a new PC I will think about making it capable of playing some games also.

The problem with DICE is that it takes them a very, very long time to fix even the most important bugs. It's taken a year for them to get BF3 into a decent shape (although the Battllelog still has problems, especially with Score/Min being set to "NaN").

Cheating is pretty large in Battlefield (despite what their forum dwellers say) - after all, you can easily buy all sorts of cheats, mainly because DICE refuse to move from Punkbuster to other things

Really? That's interesting Toady.

You can buy cheats eh? Maybe that's what I should do eh? I need all the help I can get. Can you buy likewise cheats for console versions then I wonder?

Punkbuster, I'd have hoped ought to be doing a far better job these days. I also had some small confidence that at least you'd have paying players who've bought the game and which had some kind of DRM going on through Origin to check they were legit. So, my hope was they'd have something to lose if they cheated: ban from the game and waste of investment.

It is really sad to see cheats in games that are meant to be adult aged 18+ games. When I've heard other players using in-game VOIP I've only heard mature players in their 40s or whatnot. I don't know much about the cheating business so it's interesting really as I couldn't even say what level of cheats were out there. Had no idea you could pay for them either; a regular cottage industry by the sounds of it.

Buying cheats does of course risk your score being lost and then being banned... Until you buy a new copy of the game

Cynics say that is why not much is being done with regards cheating - just get people to buy multiple copies of the game...

Origin doesn't work like Steam (unfortunately in that regard at least) - it is just a program starting and online shop system.

I presume you know about what caused the large-scale server shutdown earlier in the year - or at least rumors of the cause of it ?

Edited by deleted (Tue 19-Nov-13 13:39:00)

In reply to a post by MrTAToad2:

I presume you know about what caused the large-scale server shutdown earlier in the year - or at least rumors of the cause of it ?

Nope. I wasn't even aware of a large scale server shutdown no. It wasn't 4Chan or anything no?

Yeah. Of course it makes perfect sense to force people to buy the game again and again. So, there's no DRM running in Origin then or is that built into the actual game itself? I'm sure there's a ton of stuff running in Ubisoft's own Uplay system. It irks me to have these on my system running alongside Steam.

Not seen you around for a while and i thought you had been whisked of to join Im a Celebrity get me out of here,because frankly your about as well known as the people on it

Dice are pretty quick to fix problems, biggest issue with BF4 is developing for 5 platforms- BF3 was for 3 and PC was dropped as lead platform to get the console versions out the door.

Not sure where you get the 'year' to fix BF3 as it was only a few months but thats normal for any new game released these days.

As for cheating, hacks are profitable and its basically a cat and mouse game between them and punkbuster, punkbuster will catch up and ban a few people but the hack deveopers will always be ahead.

What BF4 uses in addition to punkbuster which is client side- is fairfight which is a server based script and monitors the game- hackers will have above game average score and many are being banned and wiped beacuse of this.

Very nice of you to say so!

BF3 was released in November 2011, and the last update was 3/4 months ago - with still a lot of stuff needing to be fixed (and by all accounts support has now been stopped for it).

Not sure what stuff still needs fixing as the game has been playable for quite a long time, support will likely continue but it will be a very small team.

As I mentioned previously, NaN needs fixing - apparently its been like that a while (and even the EA support person I spoke to has the problem).

Then there are :

And then there is a problem where you are directly next to someone and collision detection doesn't always work (usually a shotgun problem).

Black loading screens (not as bad as it has been, but it is still present).

Edited by deleted (Tue 19-Nov-13 20:21:33)

He's not very good mate,toady he a little upset because dice havent implemented Aim Bot in there update and Patch

I meant Swanny Toady....but you can have a little credit to for making some hilarious PC v Console posts ....

Is SPM such a big worry for players, its always going to be higher for those that play infantry only on small maps compared to large conquest, does it affect gameplay at all?

BF3 net coding is the issue their and its always been [censored] as its client side and not server side hit dection- change your network smoothing factor.

The black loading screen, most of the issue are due to foreign versions of the game bought on russian cd key sites- are other issues but each system is different.

My network smoothing is, and always has been at 0.

The SPM value isn't important. The calculation for it is - if its a NaN value, then either its too high to be displayed (unlikely), or, more likely, they are stupidly trying to divide by 0. Hence a rather silly bug that needs fixing. It also only seems to happen after stats are reset.

And good news, my all time K/D is now 1.0! Yey!

Well, considering you must've killed a fair few as a 100 level Colonel (and higher by now I guess) that's a good K|D ratio. Mine is currently languishing around .76 or so.

What's all this SPM stuff then? And NaN's?

I've been messing about in BF4 on the Zavod map destroying all the trees. I think DICE went a bit mad planting trees on this map, they get in the way. I can't see for frickin' trees.

Erm, so what's trees gotta do with the topic at hand? Not a lot I suppose except it takes more processing power and that requires a better graphics card.

Edited by deleted (Wed 20-Nov-13 18:46:05)