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Rant: PC Gaming viability. Time for some changes.
Posts
Not true. Nvidia's Detonator drivers broke my Gladiac brand Geforce 4 MX, but NWN wouldn't even run with the old drivers off the CD. I had to use a bizarre home-brewed cocktail of original and new drivers to get Neverwinter Nights to run...which then broke Deus Ex and Unreal. A later update of the Detonator drivers finally worked with my card, but long after a GF4MX would run anything that wasn't way old. I found out at some point that it's just a "Gladiac sucks" thing. I think they went out of business, too.
I had a friend in college who bought an ASUS mobo and an ASUS sound card. They were incompatible. And no, it wasn't the user...he wrote is own sound card drivers for Linux back in the day, so he knew what he was doing.
PSN ID: fearsomepirate
Thanks, without sounding like too much of a shill, if you like it and you are a digg/stumbleupon or other social news network member, I would really appreciate you 'thumbsupping' it, this kind of post is me kind of testing the water to see what kind of response the internet has to me branching out.
They are all with different price ranges. Nvidia and ATI have to make money some how. If it takes 50 different models of one GPU then so be it. Their bottom is money and without a wide range of cards they will not be able to make as much.
Sure, but I am trying to discuss the issues of the industry and the difficulties for all parties involved. I personally feel this is a problem area for the consumer. Maybe not for the people here, including myself, but for everyone as a whole.
Well I suppose my idea is also based around game devs. By having four distinct hardware options and nothing more, they can really optimize their game faster. Factor in say, auto hardware detection, and then what you have is the console experience of just popping it in and playing. Not saying you couldn't play with settings, but for those who just want to play, this would be a godsend. This doesn't factor in processor, ram etc. since I haven't thought up an idea for this. I guess honestly I couldn't care less about Nvidia or ATI maximizing their profits. I'm all for giving devs and consumers and easier time. So agree to disagree?
I would if I could, but I'm afraid that I'm only active here and on one other forum (Which is pretty much dead)
That's cool, it got my Mums seal of approval anyway, that's enough for me.
Now, that's BC.
I will state this one more time. My concern was never with raw performance. I have been burnt by "3 month fans" which even modern cards ship with. Also, quality capacitors. The 8600GT as per the benchmarks we are all intellegent enough to read (God, why does everyone assume the worst) is enough to do what I want. This was the only card at the time with BOTH a quality Zalman cooler and solid state capacitors. It runs extremely cool, and while I admit isn't terribly high end, is enough for any and all of my games at middle-of-the-road settings. Crysis may be the only game truly out of my reach for a while, and I have other things to keep me happy.
I will repeat this again to make sure everyone gets it.
I did not buy a 8600GT for performance. I can read benchmarks too. I bought it for the Zalman and the solid state capacitors. It was the only one like it on the market at the time. Even with dual Geforce 8800GTX SLI, VSYNC FSAA and AF is all but disabled on anything other than DX10 games, and the keep aspect ratio feature will still be broke on any wide screen setup featuring any Geforce from the FX series on up. It's the driver, and its been an issue since shortly after XP's release. There is no known fix aside from the fact it's artificially locked out on all desktop based geforces by the driver. In fact all of my hardware is just fine. It is all performing as I expect and it was all cheap. Not one item I purchased wasn't on severe markdown.
Apparently doing whatever specifically asked me to do is confusing. I edited down my post because apparently no one wants to talk about gaming and the problems thereof. Everyone is still naive enough to think I didn't spent weeks as a technician studying the issues, and then even went to multiple graphics and computer enthusiast forums to diagnose the issue. I was originally trying to make a point, not find more armchair techs to tell me 1. what I already know or 2. misinformation.
Due to thread confusion I will add to the opening post my original post in a spoiler blocker. If anyone genuinely cares, well yay. It's a large wall of text, but it WAS important to me before I realized what this group was all about. Of course I am short with these responses. Not one person read a word I had to say. I'm still seeing "Geeh, an 8600GT? Those perform so poorly!". And "User error!!!" Yes, it's my user error that is causing problems for tons of gamers, many of whom I have talked to (even in nvidia's own forums).
Good rant. Sounds like some stuff has gotten worse since I quit PC gaming.
PSN ID: fearsomepirate
Anyway, I am pretty sure the utility aTuner helps force vsync and AA if you really want to (I have used it to default vsync off on openGL and directx games).
Well vsync isn't "required" to play a game, it prevents graphical tearing. I've heard a lot of people say things about how it makes things slowly. Supposedly that is true, but I've never seen it. The only thing like looks "unsmooth" is the upper and lower half of the screens seperating about anywhere from 1 to 3 centimeters, sometimes more. As for FSAA and AF, there is no reason other than artificial lockouts why I shouldn't be able to use them, but I would live with them if I got vsync and direct draw override. Those are basically are required to play (not necessarily to make the games run).
I've tried some tuner programs before, but most cause more trouble than they are worth. I shouldn't HAVE to use one just to make the out-of-the-box features work anyway. Alas, tis a decent suggestion. Thanks.
Thank you! Everyone keeps saying "This isn't where we talk about this" "this goes in the help forum" "we hate 8600!". You don't need to agree with me, or even like my rant, but thank you for reading some of it. It just sickens me that these issues are all either Nvidia's laziness (on the aspect ratio issue, the function works on most mobile chips, artificially removed from desktop), and Microsoft's strong arm tactics to get game devs to add their own features into the game itself. Good idea, but it's a standards war. Which is "corporate jargon" for the consumer suffers.
PC gaming has it's issues. It isn't general reliability. I never have crashes, over heating, spyware issues, or things like that. I know what "not to do" and what "to do" to prevent any unwanted hiccups. x86 PCs CAN be good and reliable. It also isn't performance as I've mentioned. All of it is highend enough. Even the games are there. Tons of them in fact, even if they are sometimes a bit weird (as I said, Cave Story a la NES all the way up to those uber games like Crysis and anywhere between). Even as fickle as Vista is, compatibility has yet to be an issue for me. Every game I own runs. The closest thing to an issue with compatibility I have is Visualboy Advance's menu is invisible on start until I press ALT, then it's good. All of the technicals are there. Decent hardware if you look for it, XP or Vista are both functional (though I advise sticking to XP when possible).
There is absolutely no good or reasonable excuse any of this shouldn't work. aside from Microsoft placing artificial brokenness upon the video card companies. In an article from Anandtech someone posted earlier (which was enlightening, if useless), it basically covers this. MS specifically asking the video card companies to artificially disable these features just to make those naughty game devs to what they want. Not everyone will EVER do what MS wants and all of this junk actually worked before. Why should we all be caught in their crossfire?
The aspect ratio scaling issue I can't even fathom. They have kept this busted feature in their CP since XP and it hasn't worked since then. You'd think they might remove it from their CP but they refuse. As I mentioned, the Quaddros or at least their laptop GPUs seem to not suffer and the x3100 Intel GMA (the most notoriously known junk video) does this one thing RIGHT. We are in sad times when x3100 GMA will serve me better than a Geforce 8600 or higher.
This does not match with what I observe on my setup (GeForce 7600 on Windows XP with forceware drivers v169.21 connected to a Samsung 226BW(idescreen), which has no aspect ratio anything).
Playing Unreal Tournament in 640 x 480 with Nvidia Control Panel -> Change Flat Panel Scaling -> "Use NVIDIA scaling with fixed aspect ratio" gives nice black bars on left and right sides. The monitor's OSD says the signal is 1680 x 1050 so the screen is doing nothing.
The Manage Custum Resolutions tab also allowed me to add some much needed lower resolution widescreen settings.
I have no experience with Nvidias 8000+ cards, but my 7600 card does everything widescreen related that my screen doesn't.
You know what, you are right. This doesn't match up. SOME users seem to be having different experiences, but many are having the same problems I am at this point. My roommate was suffering the same problem for the last yr on his Geforce 7900GS until just today when he installed the latest driver. His problems are fixed, but mine are still not. This only makes me more curious and annoyed. I fail to believe they fixed it for the 7xxx users but didn't for the 8xxx users. He is on that same Samsung too. I almost have to wonder if it isn't some kind of issue with the video card driver in combination with specific monitors. How or why this would even be possible, I don't know.
Has your setup always worked or did it need a driver update? Are you on Vista or XP?
Thanks for chiming in here. I would like to study your setup as well as my roommates now that his is fixed.
I'm on Win XP with a completely fresh install. I'm pretty sure the aspect ratios was not working on my old install, but I'm not sure what drivers I used and I did not do any testing.
The screen should have nothing to with getting correct aspect ratio since it's getting a signal at it's native (widescreen) resolution when the Nvidia card does it's job.
The only things I have done that should affect this is installing forceware 169.21, setting flat panel scaling to "Use NVIDIA scaling with fixed aspect ratio" and adding some custom resolutions and tinkering a lot with the custum resolutions settings.
Edit: Tested some more on a fresher windows install. Installing drivers and setting flat panel scaling to "Use NVIDIA scaling with fixed aspect ratio" was all that was needed for MOST resolutions. My screen (and I'm guessing this is pretty common) can only do 60Hz on it's native resolution of 1680x1050 22inch. Which is the resolution Nvidias scaler scales up too. When It got a signal with higher refresh rate then 60Hz it can only scale up too 1280x1024. This is the largest 75Hz and 72Hz signal this monitor accepts (and many more I guess). This 5:4 signal is then stretched out and the aspect ratio ruined.
So if you want the graphics card to correctly transform a 4:3 signal to a wide screen make sure the refresh rate of the original signal is is acceptable to the monitor after it is upscaled. Changing the refresh rate at this stage is neither practical nor desirable.
I've tried this with various drivers, at this point up to the latest beta driver. When I click apply on "Use NVIDIA scaling with fixed aspect ratio" , it just pops back to the non-scaling setting. It's obviously locked out from the driver, and always has been. I don't know exactly how or why. The refresh rate settings should all be correct.
I understand that the monitor itself shouldn't be able effect this issue, but most reports of this (though not all) have come from Viewsonic users. Later tonight I plan on trying a few things more things. My roommate is on Vista 64-bit. Maybe V64's driver isn't crap. Who knows. I'll experiment with any notable differences.
In my case, I had an ASUS motherboard that refused to recognize PS/2 hardware, forcing me to buy all-new (then) expensive USB stuff, a problem with continually getting bad RAM from an online vendor, an off-brand GF4 MX that simply would not work with nVidia's Detonator drivers, and my PC randomly choosing whether it would be using the onboard sound or my sound card when I started up.
But it was all my fault. Nvidia's drivers not working were because "lol GF4 MX sux." The answer to my PS/2 keyboard not working was always "USB stuff is better." My PC randomly deciding to use the onboard sound every so often was because "Why did you buy a mobo with onboard sound, idiot? No one needs onboard sound."
Oh, and the deal with $40 games not working without installing a bunch of patches, or the patched version working even worse with my old drivers? What about the fact that $50/month broadband didn't fit into my budget? "Why don't you have broadband? Patches aren't inconvenient for me."
And then I was one of the people whose machines were crippled by SP2...and yet, the answer to that was "SP2 worked fine on my machine."
So yeah, I know where you're coming from. The fact that the PC industry feels quite at ease to continually release spotty, broken software and refuses to work toward standardizing things really does screw over some people, and the refusal of a large number of PC gamers to acknowledge that this does indeed happen (or just accept it) doesn't make things any better. And now we've got Vista mucking things up even more, from the sounds of things. I know that none of our industrial software at work is Vista-compatible. And it sounds like the problems of 2003 haven't been fixed, and in some cases are just getting worse. I hear PC gamers talk about PC gaming--even in what they think are postive terms, and it just strengthens my resolve to buy more SNES carts of eBay.
PSN ID: fearsomepirate
Well all video cards are off-brand other than the first party Radeons. Nvidia doesn't sell "Nvidia cards". Most cards, even bad ones usually just use the reference design as well. Since they both use unified driver architectures, it's theoretically near impossible to have a driver problem (related to the card having wonky hardware). I know I get sick of the excuses.
As for RAM, well, you do have to watch who you buy from. Like any store, some people are trustworthy, others are not. Faulty ram has never been a huge issue for me. On the rare chances anything weird came up regarding new ram, just pop in a ram tester boot CD and return the product once it's proven.
I realize since there is no oversight to many companies, you see some weirdness. Half of what you are talking about I call "hiccups". All PCs have them occasionally. Not really acceptable, but sometimes easily fixed. The other half of your issues are exactly analog to my own. Silly little problems that shouldn't exist on any hardware setup. After all, it's all based on clean-cut standards designed to be interoperable. The only reason PS/2 devices shouldn't work is burnt ports or dead keyboard/mouse (which historically for me has always been the case, see: dead mobo). The hiccups are the nature of the beast. It's just how open devices like a PC work. The "industry wide flubs" are inexcusable because it always comes down to "we know about our own issue, we just refuse to fix it".
I'm a stickler for quality and always do research before buying much of anything. During this time, the unforeseen things tend to pop up. My friend with a nice Core 2 Duo setup has a USB hard drive attached to his system. He uses an intel branded mobo. Well, now it takes 3 mins to boot and randomly doesn't boot. Know why? An obscure flaw that is in (supposedly) only Intel mobos BIOS prevents proper behavior during boot. Do you think Intel has a fix? No. It's been an issue for yrs now. The user base claims the HD should be removed from the enclosure and put inside the system connected via SATA. My friend didn't buy an external hard drive to put it inside his system lol. Intel is usually pretty good in many regards, but this one shocked me.
PSN ID: fearsomepirate
Nowadays different manufacturers just receive the cards from nVidia and print out stickers with their logo on them, anyway, occasionally while using non-standard cooling devices.
I should have specified that my comment didn't apply to crazy workstation cards.
Phantasy Star Universe is scum and doesn't run. This happens sometimes, but is to be expected. I can let it go. Sega should be ashamed though. In order for their virus-like Gameguard to work, you have to shut off vital windows protection features. I think not. Gameguard then sits in the background running whether you are playing or not, and shuts the game off if it detects many different third party programs including things that have nothing to do with cheating (which it's designed to prevent). Shame shame!
Can you tell me if aspect ratio scaling works properly on 640x480 in XP? I'd rather not do a reinstall just to learn that info.
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