Wednesday 28 December 2011

Tuesday 27 December 2011

Bulletstorm gameplay coming soon

(some excuse why I haven't been posting in ages)

I am currently working on a new gameplay video of Bulletstorm. I started this work late last night, after having to reinstall adobe CS4 (because I reinstalled my OS a while back and hadn't got around to it yet). It runs pretty well on the 5830 but not as well as I hoped it would, not managing 1680x1050 or any antialiasing, so really for this game its no better than my 8800GT.  I hope to get the video up on Youtube later today.

Tuesday 6 December 2011

After neglecting the blog for quite a long time, here I am again.
I finally got a new (secondhand) video card, the AMD HD5830. It is "Amaze" brand which i am not too happy with but it looks OK with a red pcb and dual fan aluminium cooler and seems to play my games very well.
I'll just do a quick review of the performance I found so far.

System: Phenom II 955 BE, 4GB DDR2 800 4-4-4-12, M3N78-EM motherboard, Enermax NAXN 450W PSU.

Skyrim at 1680x1050 is PERFECT with consistent 40-50+ fps. Unreal Tournament 3 is easily maxed with 62 fps. COD Black Ops and MW2 run perfectly maxed as well. Bad Company 2 also runs well maxed but maybe not max fps. Crysis is a funny one because it runs well but only at 1440x900 or lower and no AA. other settings are on high or very high and probably gets 30-40 fps. Only game it doesn't play well so far is Fable 3 and I don't know why but it lags quite badly no matter what settings its on. Crysis 2 runs well but i'm not too sure of fps, it was on advanced settings I think. On the Windows Experience Index it scores 7.3's. Temperature wise it idles at 45-50 and goes to about 58-60 under load. Measurements taken with speedfan 4.45 and FRAPS, all fps are estimations only based on what I remember seeing when playing.

I notice my computer is significantly louder since I got it though and I put that down to mostly the cpu fan, the dual gpu fans and the increased load on the power supply making the fan go faster. my case fans are hardly silent either so they don't help with noise.

So overall I'm pretty happy with it. Good value too at only $140 NZD (~$110 USD).