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System Optimization Guide for Gamers
Mr.Tweak writes "We have written a comprehensive System Optimization Guide targeted toward Gamers looking to get the most out of their systems for all of today's latest highly demanding PC games. Take a few minutes of your life and read this System Optimization Guide for Gamers where TweakTown promises you will find something of use which will have you gaming at full speed in no time."
Where's the line between a system tweaked for gaming and a gaming console?
Isn't a gaming console, in essence, a system tweaked for gaming?
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
What would really be nice, as long as we're wishing, is that game producers would rethink the whole coding. So many games are bloated and buggey, and work only with this OS or that card. How many times have one of us installed a game and something else quits or starts acting strange? Whatever happened to "Write Once, Run Anywhere"? And how about (this is the last, I promise) more tools to add our own real-world stuff in the game easier. There are car and furniture and carpet dealers whose face I'd love to see in UT.
Slip of the click there... While waiting for the preview to load I accidently clicked 'Submit'. Now I can never fix the post :-(
/. has been lately?
Anyone else notice how slow
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Are you an SF Fan? Are you a Tru-Fan?
I used to tweak the hell out of my hardware. It got boring after awhile - between that and just getting things working, I'm much happier just to insert a disc into my Gamecube and just play games.
:)
Console gaming is rapidly catching up to pc gaming:
Internet multiplayer support? Check (although Nintendo is dragging their feet here)
Awesome graphics, surround sound? Check
Play in your comfortable living room? Check
System = same price as a mid range pc video card? Check
99.9% problem free? Check
Largest selection of games? Check
I still play games on my PC, but I find I do it less and less over the years, and only in areas that my console lacks (ie/ Gamecube has next to no role playing games).
I think between this and the four noisy fans I have in my PC right now, my next one will not be bought with gaming in mind. Maybe a tablet PC
About all the PC has is a lot more choice/freedom in hardware (though not really - usually two or three companies producing the top gaming hardware). Those of us with money can get a slightly better gaming experience (well, audiovisual experience, anyway) - but even that has the price of incompatibility.
Robots are everywhere, and they eat old people's medicine for fuel.
Used to be I would never own a console. Not gonna happen, not gonna do it - my PC is faster, better, has a hard drive -
Then I played Final Fantasy VII, and got hooked into consoles. Now, I prefer them. Why? True plug in play.
Buy/Rent game.
Insert into PS2/GameCube/Xbox/Gameboy Advance.
Turn on.
Play.
That's it. Granted, there are some games that don't "console" real well - I'm still not sold on FPS games on the console (though the developers who make their games keyboard/mouse compatible get kudos in my book), and games like Starcraft are just not happening (though there are some wonderful turn based strategy games), but overall, my console gets a bigger workout than my PC does for games these days.
What would make it better? Well, I wouldn't mind if Sony would make the PS3 with a built in hard drive (goodbye, memory cards!) and keep the USB (for keyboard/mouse FPS, online games, and when they start making Command and Conquer style PS2 games that I like), and include a VGA output by default (or a real adapter rather than a third party hack). Then I could just plug it into a monitor, and the only computers I'd really need would be my PowerMac and my Linux Server in the corner.
52 Weeks, 52 Religions with John Hummel
When you write a game you have to write to a certain architecture. The fast way to do something under one API is often totally incompatible with the fast way to do it under another API. When you have some virtual machine running interference between the program and the CPU, like java, it always results in a performance hit.
But there is another kind of evil that we must fear most... and that is the indifference of good men.
1) ASUS A7N8X Deluxe nForce2 chipset motherboard
2) Fastest Athlon XP you want to spend money on, Athlon XP 2400+ at minimum
3) Pair of Corsair DIMMs, PC3200C2 or higher, 256meg or 512meg each
4) Thermalright SK7 or SLK800 copper heatsink
5) Arctic Silver 3 thermal compound, follow the application instructions on their website
6) Fastest GeForce4 Ti (or Radeon 9700 Pro) that you want to spend money on, I'd go with one of the new Ti4200 8X cards and save up for the GeForceFX (next year)
7) Seagate Barracuda V 120gig IDE HD, the SATA version if it's available and has Linux drivers by the time you're ready to buy, alternatively a Seagate Cheetah 15K.3 SCSI drive and controller if you have way more money than me
8) Lian Li aluminum case of your choice
9) YS Tech rheostat (adjustable) 80mm fan for that Thermalright heatsink, or the highest RPM 80mm fan your ears can tolerate
10) Pioneer DVR-105 4x/2x DVD-R/RW drive, just because.
Substitute an ASUS A7M266-D and pair of Athlon XP 2400+ chips modded for MP operation (until the real MP 2400+'s are available) if you like. That's what I did. It's soooo nice. Make sure you get 266MHz FSB CPUs if you go this route as that's all the board supports.
This article is not nearly as irrelevent as you think. Not everyone has $800-$1000 just laing around to buy a new PC. Sure you could go and get it financed though Dell, and pay an outrageous interest rate. Everyone I know has a computer and I do not know anyone who has anything over a 1.8GHz. Hell, I am still running a PIII 1GHz (and no, I did not inherit this PC from my parents). It is just not feesable for most people to slap down nearly a grand for a new PC, when the one you have will run everything pretty damn good. I am sure if you did a /. poll you would realize that most people do not have the latest systems. So therefore, this article is very relevent.
[n8.r0n] http://petesweb.spymac.net/
..What? Someone is going to log into their PC and uninstall quake 3? ..
Last week my brother was setting up a machine for his mother in law, left the admin password blank to make it easy for her to log in, left it running for 4 hours while it downloaded service packs over his cable modem.
He came back and it had 2 different DDoS bots loaded on it.
I laughed at him.
Are you sure you are not a (L)user I support?
Heh, quite sure. This is actually culled from real-life experience from someone I did have to support. The woman is question did a lot of her own "fixes". Like deleting the pagefile (to increase disk space), running virus scan non-stop (can't be too careful, can we?) and starting up every service she could (what if I need it?)
I forgot to mention that, according to this person, you should compress all files on your C drive (smaller files run faster)
It took me a while to get her system working normally again, and it took even longer to explain why all of her "tweaking" was a bad thing.
An idiot with a little bit of knowledge and admin rights to the local machine is a dangerous thing.
psmylie's dictionary: Godzillion (noun) Any number large enough to destroy Tokyo
Is there something wrong with me?...
No, not at all. The solution is found in a counter-intuitive place, however: console games.
I was a big PC gamer in the nineties, tweaking and upgrading and tinkering with drivers, DOS boot-discs etc etc. During that time, the requirements of the "real-world" apps I was running on my PCs were keeping pace with the expanding game requirements. Sure, I might be upgrading six months earlier because of Quake, but I knew that the performance for the next release of Lotus 123 would appreciate it as well. Meanwhile, I read about all the consoles, saw the "super mario" and other four-color franchises grow, and figured these were toys for the high school kids.
Me, I was an adult, and I had an Adult Game Machine -- a PC! (*ahem*)
Then one day around the release of the G4 card (at circa $500) I realized that, unless I switched careers over to astronomy, there was never any reason I could justify that my business apps would ever benefit from all that graphical goodness. Since my time spent gaming with anything more sophisticated than blocks was becoming less and less (twin toddlers), I figured my gaming days had reached their natural, evolutionary end.
Okay, okay, I actually ended up buying two G4 cards, but that's not my point, hear me out...
I bought a console. X-Box, specifically, but the brand does not matter for purposes of this discussion. And it's great! The games look great, it sits in my LIVING ROOM, plugs into the home theatre 5.1, and there are titles available that appeal to just about every member of the family. Most have multi-player mode which allow for spouse co-op or dad v. kid(s) play.
I now play games as much as I did five years ago, but see my wife and kids more while doing it. There are, of course, some games that suffer from "dumbing down" due to the absence of a keyboard, but just as many or more which benefit greatly from being controller-specific (esp the Diablo-esque "Baldur's Gate" and its ilk). Best of all, I'm done: No monitor upgrades, no new cards, no registries to comb over, no OS's to flush every five months, it's all brilliant. You take a game out of the box, pop it into the console, and you're playing immediately.
And someday, when XBox 2 comes out, and I've played all the XBox 1 games worth playing, what's it going to cost me to "upgrade" to a new console.... $200? $300? Seems like that might be livable...
Yeah, I know, for those of you who have been playing on consoles for 20 years, this is old hat. But to a PC-diehard like me who has only recently stepped into the light, these are womderful times.
BIOS is a no no even if you know what you are doing.
I have to disagree on this. Sometimes changing settings in the BIOS is necessary (both of my Athlon system motherboards default to 100MHz FSB even with a 133MHz FSB CPU installed, so I've had to manually reconfigure that). OTOH it's also useful for changing things like boot order, num lock on/off by default, checking CPU temperature when you've installed a new chip, disabling onboard audio if you've got an add-in card, et cetera.
Anyone who is incapable of or uncomfortable with changing BIOS settings should be treating their PC like I treat cars - something to be bought as a whole instead of building from pieces, and which is serviced by professionals. I'm not saying this is a bad thing. We all specialize in different areas.
"...always new atoms but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday." -Richard Feynman
The difference here is that a good cooler (peltier, heat sink, fan) will cost you upwards of $50. Assuming a $1000 PC (about average now right?) that's 5% of the cost of the car. It will give you perhaps a 5-15% increase in performance due to overclocking. CPUs are generally rated at or near their performance maximum so you can't overclock them that far.
With a car, you might spend $2500 on a turbo kit or an engine swap. Assuming the car costs $18,000 that's about 14% of the price of the car. Doing this will generally net you around a 40% performance increase, because car engines are seldom if ever run at or near their limits in a stock vehicle. They are designed for longetivity. Well, at least the Japanese engines are, and we're talking about rice, right?
Or put another way; I can spend $8000 getting a 1997 or 1998 S14 240SX (Nissan.) Then I can spend $8000 on a SR20VET 2.0 liter turbo motor with a six speed transmission, putting me up to 257bhp with a six speed. If I spend another $4000 on tires and $5000 on engine upgrades and related equipment (injectors, fuel pump, cams, header, intake, ECU reprogramming, rocker arms) I can have 400hp on stock internals (Crank, pistons, rods, valves) as a reliable daily driver for ~$25,000. This is a RWD car with 5-link rear, 53/47 weight distribution, and I'm talking 17" wheels here, the whole shebang. That will absolutely massacre any production (more than, say, 500 cars) automobile ever sold in the US with the possible exception of some exotics (MODERN lamborghini and ferrari for example). The vehicle will also feature all the creature comforts like leather, ABS, air bags, et cetera.
This is just the Nissan example. You could do this with Honda or Toyota to (but why would you want to) :) Incidentally that's less than the price of a new 300ZX TT (when they were still available) and less than the price of the BASE MODEL 350Z. It will blow either of them away, as well as anything else you care to name which is less than $100,000 and is stock, and it'll get 25 freeway in the bargain.
As to the "rice" items which people put on their cars, like big exhaust tips or a wing on a FWD car which never goes over 80 mph, or an aero body kit; All of these are useful if you are going fast. Well, not the big exhaust tip, unless you also have a big exhaust. I used to have a 2.4 liter I4 with no turbo making 180 rwhp in a 240SX improved touring car, largely due to a big header and a 3" exhaust. Neon and shit is never useful, except for winning shows perhaps.
Essentially, this is NOTHING like import performance. Performance tuning for gamers is also nothing whatsoever like ricing your car by adding all kinds of cute doodads because that doesn't improve performance at all (unless you've done the engine and suspension up as well) but performance tuning of your PC does.
Next time you feel like talking about something you know nothing about, consider the fact that some people on /. DO know a little something about cars and will shut you down.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I forgot to mention that, according to this person, you should compress all files on your C drive (smaller files run faster)
I've been curious about this for a while with the on-the-fly compression that NTFS has. Since disk access is so damn slow, and processor speeds are blazingly fast nowadays, is it possible that by decreasing the file size, you could actually be increasing performance?
Since it only has to load a certain percentage of the initial file size, then very quickly decompress it into memory, it seems logical, but something about it just doesn't seem right... Obviously it wouldn't work well with some files (already compressed files, etc), but what about files that you get a 50% reduction out of?
-- Dr. Eldarion --
higher throughput off the disk for reading the files == lower latency.
Its great if you're doing map development for quake. Compress all the files, cuts your load time by 3/4.
If you don't change the file (often) its a speed boost.