forza3_01

Postal strikes are bad, but today quite frankly I can see an upside to it for my copy of Forza 3 arrived from GAME three days early!

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gtaiv_pc_01

I’m now the owner of the PC version of Grand Theft Auto IV and the results weren’t too bad actually. The game’s performance on my rig is roughly the same as its Xbox 360 counterpart. I’m running the game at 1680×1050 resolution with majority of the settings as high as they can go. The only thing I’m holding back on is draw distance, which is gauged on the amount of video memory you have. My card has 1GB onboard but I’m only utilising 890mb which translates to 32/33 on the draw distance meter.

I ran Fraps to see what my performance was, here’s the results.

Safehouse areas – 60fps steady
Low traffic areas (i.e. the first time you come out of the Safehouse) – 40 – 50fps
General – 30-40fps

As you can see, these framerates are very playable and it’ll get better if they somehow incorporate Crossfire/SLI support in a future patch.

The only time I encountered an unplayable framerate was when I was on foot in one of the parks and the framerate slipped to around 15-20fps. The strange thing about this was it calmed down once you had Niko jump into a car.

I may overclock my processor in future to see if there’s much of a difference in performance.

I obtained a copy (hehe) of Far Cry 2 last night and tested it on the new rig. My PC can handle this game at the top settings available under Direct X 9 (1680×1050, Ultra High and 8xAA) and it moves along at a smooth 40-50fps.

Next up, I’m going to install Grand Theft Auto IV, a very CPU intensive game and see how that one works out!

jizzedinmypants

I love my new PC!

Here are the pics of my new baby that I finished building on the 3rd October. After a week of use it’s still working fine (which surprises me). It runs Call of Duty 4 and Left 4 Dead really well, which was er… kind of to be expected and it also handles its own against Crysis on top settings.

The reason why I say top settings is because I’m still currently using Windows XP Professional 32-bit, in a few weeks my copy of Windows 7 will arrive and I’ll be taking advantage of the 64-bit capability along with the DirectX 11-enabled graphics.

The line got fixed but much to my dismay my Internet connection was still crap. After much frustration and reading around I found that a 2 meg IP Profile had been applied to my connection, which essentially meant my connection had been capped. I then proceeded to find out why and learnt that it was applied due to the fault meaning the line wouldn’t get overloaded, it also wouldn’t be taken off until 72 hours after the fault had been repaired.

72 hours have now come and gone, behold my new speed test result!

It’s still a bit iffy, but is much better than it was. I’m also currently downloading Unreal Tournament 3 from Steam and I’m hitting speeds of 740kb/s.

Awesomes!