Yantelope

Caught in a landslide no escape from reality

At $400 it's not even a question of how much I want it. I just can't really ever afford more than $200 on a portable device and I bet it takes a long time for something like this to drop to that price.

While it may be possible for game companies to make more money if second hand sales were gone that doesn't exactly make it a fair argument to say that selling used games is wrong. I'm sure book companies would love to kill second hand sales but there just isn't a real good way to do it (well, until the kindle takes over). I'd feel more sympathetic to the moans of developers if this were some new problem that's cutting their profits to a fraction of what they once were but really it's more an argument of "stop doing this so we can make way more money by doing nothing."

Lifetime warranty meaning the life of the product? Usually 3-4 years? The term "Lifetime" always bothers me. HIS has the cheapest 6950 right now and I'm wondering if they are any good. I had a Sapphire 9800 that lasted many years and never died so I'd be okay with ordering from them again.

Yeah, ok, having played the demo some last night, here are my thoughs. It's a great looking XBox game but it doesn't look the same as Crysis did on the PC. Fidelity is definitely lower, AA is 2x at most, low resolution etc. It doesn't have the wow factor that Crysis has on the PC. The game itself is shocking in just how much it copies COD. There are killstreak rewards, and small maps and the suit powers work a little like perks. It's not bad though since I was never really into Crysis multiplayer on the PC. The map is very small Dean. The PC maps I played had vehicles driving around huge open areas and that's just not even close to this demo. It plays like a small to medium call of duty map. If you compare it to COD though it stacks up pretty well. I was having a pretty good time on it what little I played yesterday. I'm still definitely getting this for PC.

This thing is gonna cost a fortune. I'm putting my money at $400.

yeah but all GPUs are made by a company other than ATI/AMD. Those companies can have different quality products. My MSI Geforce is great while my PNY sucked hard.

what was the brand of it? XFX? Sapphire? MSI?

Yeah, I kind of like how manufacturers have been more and more accommodating of the tweaker enthusiast market.

Just read this about the Radeons which is really cool. "There is a very welcomed Enthusiast feature that has been added to the Radeon HD 6970 and Radeon HD 6950. Both video cards feature dual-BIOS on board. This BIOS can be switched between with a little slider switch on the top of the video card. The reason AMD has implemented this dual-BIOS is so that people flashing their BIOS’s will not brick their video cards...simple as that. One of the settings on the video card is the factory default BIOS which is protected. The other BIOS is open and allows you to flash to it. If you screw up your BIOS flash, all you have to do is switch the video card back to the protected BIOS and re-flash the other BIOS. This is a great safety feature for enthusiasts built right into each video card." That would be great for trying to flash the card up to a 6970.

Yeah, 6-8 hours usually means $20 out of me.

Yeah, I do hate that. Other than that Super Shredder was super cool.

Go watch the Angry Video Game Nerd on TMNT 3. It's hilarious.

I haven't tried the demo yet but plan on doing so when I get home. Looks like it should be fun but I have suspicions that the full game will be short.

I too enjoyed Spider-Man 3 just fine. I never saw the new TMNT. TMNT3 was utter crap though. I thought that even as a child.

Sorry, yeah, If you watch the tech demo videos which are on youtube and gametrailers they list they types of effects that the engine can render and a fair few of them say "PC Only". Also, some other comparison videos done by people have indicated that the draw distance and other things on the console versions is much less than that of the PC version.

HA! Really though the engine isn't completely different than the first game and really it should just be more optimized. I don't think the graphics are much better than they were in the original.

the console versions are dumbed down from the PC version too. The tech demos show a few of the effects are disabled on the console versions and it clearly is running at a low resolution vs a PC (1650x1080 min). I haven't tried it yet but I plan on giving it a whirl when I get home. As far as the PC version goes, it'd be nice if they'd release a benchmark prior to the game release so that people could prep their systems for release.

It seems like there's a small but noticable performance boost for the 6950 and the extra $30 for the extra 2GB will probably matter. With new games like Rage being so heavy with textures I bet the Memory is going to be more important than it has been in the past. As far as the GTX480 goes, cards like that just disappear because manufacturing costs don't go down on them and they can't compete in performance.

Apparently there's a firmware flash available so that you can unlock the extra cores that the 6970 has on a 6950 but it's not tested so there's no way of telling whether the extra cores will work or not. It's something that ATI AMD has done for a long time. I had a Radeon 9800 SE back in the day that could be unlocked to a 9800 Pro. Sadly my cores didn't work and there were artifacts so I had to go back.

Yeah, at $100 less than the GTX570 it just seems like the best value at present.

Okay, thinking about ordering this: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814161355&cm_re=radeon_6950-_-14-161-355-_-Product 6950 is looking like the best value at present.

I bought a TV tuner card for my PC and i was gonna use it to record episodes of the simpsons, edit out the commercials and then archive them. Then I discovered that someone had already done all that for me and I just needed to download them. I'm a bit confused why one is legal and the other isn't.

I always liked this one:

the problem with KI gold is that we were promised a perfect home port of the original KI or even KI2 and it never happened. Why Rare went so hard in the FMV direction while knowing fully that Nintendo was going cartridge based for the N64 is a mystery. The gameplay was a pretty good port though. KI was a novel twist on the fighting games and it was a little deep if you understood how it worked. The problem was that you had to read a short novel to understand exactly how the combo system and the breakers and finishers all worked and most people just never understood the game. It was tons of fun though and has one of the best soundtracks of any fighting game.