pc online gaming

[johnbhoy]

i have been xboxing it up for a while but have now had a third xbox break on me. f++king outrageous in my opinion.blimin overheating and xclamp issues... cannot return as case has been opened to do the xclamp.

instead of buying a new console am considering spending the money i would spend on a new core console on a decent graphics card and am gonna get the geforce 8800 gt. My pc is already pretty decent (though not total gaming machine)

i do enjoy FPS and the online experience from xbox live. Have found out that you can also play online with windows live (which is free) .

Couple of questions

1)how good is playing games like cyrsis and call of duty 4 online on PC. is it as good as xbox live or better. i generally used to prefer gaming on pc due to keyboard mouse combo.

2) my pc is in loft connected on monitor and also connected to plasma in lounge via long 3 m vga cable.pc in cloned mode. i discovered you can get a 360 wireless controller usb receiver for windows. Which means i could use my 360 controller to play pc games. now the thinking behind this is i would still be able to play games the same way i normally did but without the xbox. IE sitting in lounge with 360 controllor on plasma tv. Will the long vga cable cause any problems for gaming like this ???

if this means i dont need to buy another xbox then i will be very happy indeed.though will miss xbox live a bit

 

[crashuk2k1]

1 . Never played on live but have been playing on line FPS via PC for almost ten years. It ROCKS roud:
you get to play with all the cheating wallhack scumbags out there.lol Dunno if Live is hacked? With online PC games you seem to get more patches, updates and Mods to mess with.

2. If you can get your PC to play on your big tele you would need a top notch graphics card to get a good resolution. As for using 360 controller on FPS games?????? I always use keyboard / mouse. do use the 360 controller for driving games tho.
If you do need replacement Xbox Try GAME store my m8 exchanged his for a repaired xbox £23 :Clap:

 

[johnbhoy]

cheers.

thats a good heads up on the exchange at game. will look into that. Did not realise they did that.

You did just remember me of the cheating that goes on online though with pc games.... that craps. ah means whats the point. ....

 

[johnbhoy]

This might sound like a stupid questions but……. If I have a 17" monitor at 1280x1024….. Will buying a bigger monitor at 22" with 1680x1050 resolution give me a better picture QUALITY . Or will it just give me a bigger viewing area. This will mainly be for gaming.

 

[little_pob]

The 22" will allow you to set a higher res in games, which will give you a better picture quality, but if you don't have a good enough graphics card to match your fps will suffer.

For example I've currently got a single 8800GTS, as the GT wasn't available at the time, powering a Dell 2001WFP (a 20.1" tft) at 1650x1050. It runs Crysis on the suggested medium settings but with AAx2 (suggested was 0) and theres a noticable drop in frame rate in certain parts of the game - the final boss is one that springs to mind.

Looking at the prices, whilst there is still some life left in the 8*00 cards, its worth noting its two releases old. With the 9*00 and 2*0 series cards being seen as the mid-range and high-end solutions.

An ATI 4870 can be had for ~£180 and, on benchmarks, sits comfortably between nVidia's latest offerings of the 260 and 280. However, if your budget is closer to the £100 mark go for an ATI 4850 or nVidia 9600/9800 over the 8800.

Don't forget to look at the recommended wattages and compare them to your power pack, the 280 and 4870 cards can draw over 200W by themselves when under load.

BTW only games with 'Games for Windows' natively support the 360 controller, COD4 is one of these, but I'm not sure on Crysis. It doesn't mean they won't, its just not guarunteed.

But a 1680*1050 res isn't far off a 1080P resolution, so even if your HDTV is 1080P you should be Ok to use that.

 

[johnbhoy]

Thanks for that.

I ended up going for the zotac 8800gt amp edition £105 delivered from cclonline which actually seemed a sllightly better deal than the 9800 It got quite good reviews and is more then enough for decent gaming. I can confirm that the window live receiver is quality. It works through walls. (well in modern house anyway). Also use a program called Xpadder to map the controls to the xbox controller which means it’s a lot more configurable . For example in cod4 you can map strafe buttons, which you do not have in the xbox version, to the controller and choose your perfect set up. I have mine very similar as I was used to the layout.Only small issue with this program is that it does not recognize double key presses… IE in cod4. you can press B button to crouch and then by holding it in you go prone. This will be implemented in a future release though and when it is then it will be perfect.

So to answer my own questions at the top of the thread. The 5 m vga cable does not make too much of an issue with the graphics on my plasma. Still looks pretty good whilst playing . Without actually taking my pc downstairs and plugging it in there (hmmm... may do that at the weekend) I will not really know. On comparing it to the xbox graphics its just the same. Only noticeable issue is when on the menu screen when it looks a litte more faded ( to be expected I think when using such a long cable, will also be quality of cable dependant I guess as well)

This coupled with buying a logitech gaming mouse mx 518 …its all happy dayz in my house. Also have got crysis and cod4 configued with the controllor. Works brilliantly. Cannot wait for call of duty - world at war as this will be a cross platform live gaming experience….. Peachy.

Now I am looking at my 17" monitor upstairs and thinking should I replace.,.. Hmmm, even though I know higher resolution usually means better picture. I was just concerned that this was not going to be relevant though as I was considering screen at 1680 x 1050 resolution…Now my current monitiro is 1284x1024 so the extra pixels you are getting is really just accounting for the widescreen areas that I don’t currently have. Or at least that’s how I understand it at the moment. So I think I will just be getting a bigger screen and not necessarily a better picture (pixel quality wise). Just looking for confirmation on this.

 

[little_pob]

As long as you set the res in game to the native res of the screen you'll always get 1:1 pixel mapping.

Setting the res in COD4 to 1680x1050 on a 20/22" will look the same as your 17" set to 1284x1024 until you got beyond that resolution. (Due to a larger 'dot pitch' the image would be bigger on the 22" than the 20" yet contain no more visual information.)

I don't mean to piss on the 8800 range (as I said I've got a GTS myself), it quite happily pushes COD4 along at 1680x1050 with 4xAA and settings set to on or normal. But it does stutter in places in Crysis on medium settings.

For info; to reduce the gamma in COD4 go to settings > graphics and play with the brightness slider.