I use an X-Fi in my gaming machine now but my next card definitely won't be a Creative after their Vista driver mess. The Asus seems to be the best choice for Vista gaming now. One question since all the audiophiles are in the thread:
What's your preferred format for music compression? I play music on my machine and my iRiver, care about sound quality, and don't need tiny file size since I have terabyte storage. I have been using mp3 since I know it will work with everything out there, but I'm sure there's better formats now.
Permadeath would be a horrible thing to have in WoW since death can't be avoided if you want to instance or PVP. Latency spikes or the world server going down would also randomly kill you even if you were careful as possible. The Bind-on-Pickup is to ensure that there is always a reason for people to enter dungeons and raid and try to add a sense of 'worth' to powerful epics - though it is easier to gear a character now than ever before which isn't a bad thing.
I stopped playing a few months after BFRs came out - I heard they released a cloaked flying vehicle since then and added stuff to engy/hacking. I played on Markov/TR and most enjoyed the smaller enounters away from the main zerg battle- tower fights and base resecures. Adding in-game ads and upping the sub fee made it pretty clear SOE just wanted the game to die out slowly. I'm surprised it still has a development team at all.
PlanetSide was my addiction before WoW but the lack of development and fact that it still runs horrible on modern hardware drove me away. Does it even run reliably on Vista?
I loved how Crysis shat all over even high end hardware, just as Doom 3 did at launch. It raises the bar on graphical and physics performance on all fps which is a good thing. I'd hate to see any hint of stagnation in visual progression because developers are falling over themselves to design the game to be playable on long obsolete hardware. Luckily, Crysis has sold pretty well for a game which "can't run on anything." I don't mind for a second that I have to run the program in "High" instead of "Very High" because the game still looks nicer than any others and makes for a fun single player experience too. Remember, driver maturity plays a big part in how great your games run. I've gained 15fps in Crysis since its launch and I haven't touched my hardware so I expect quad-sli to work a lot better as Nvidia improves the drivers for it.
I haven't looked at consoles since my poor Dreamcast went under =( but that's mostly because I enjoy genres which are better on PC (Fps, Rts, MMO) -- I'd be silly to be a PC exclusive gamer if I was into fighting or racing games. Getting a new console would also require I buy a HDTV to run games at their full resolution and I don't even own a regular TV!
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I use an X-Fi in my gaming machine now but my next card definitely won't be a Creative after their Vista driver mess. The Asus seems to be the best choice for Vista gaming now. One question since all the audiophiles are in the thread: What's your preferred format for music compression? I play music on my machine and my iRiver, care about sound quality, and don't need tiny file size since I have terabyte storage. I have been using mp3 since I know it will work with everything out there, but I'm sure there's better formats now.
Permadeath would be a horrible thing to have in WoW since death can't be avoided if you want to instance or PVP. Latency spikes or the world server going down would also randomly kill you even if you were careful as possible. The Bind-on-Pickup is to ensure that there is always a reason for people to enter dungeons and raid and try to add a sense of 'worth' to powerful epics - though it is easier to gear a character now than ever before which isn't a bad thing.
I stopped playing a few months after BFRs came out - I heard they released a cloaked flying vehicle since then and added stuff to engy/hacking. I played on Markov/TR and most enjoyed the smaller enounters away from the main zerg battle- tower fights and base resecures. Adding in-game ads and upping the sub fee made it pretty clear SOE just wanted the game to die out slowly. I'm surprised it still has a development team at all.
PlanetSide was my addiction before WoW but the lack of development and fact that it still runs horrible on modern hardware drove me away. Does it even run reliably on Vista?
I loved how Crysis shat all over even high end hardware, just as Doom 3 did at launch. It raises the bar on graphical and physics performance on all fps which is a good thing. I'd hate to see any hint of stagnation in visual progression because developers are falling over themselves to design the game to be playable on long obsolete hardware. Luckily, Crysis has sold pretty well for a game which "can't run on anything." I don't mind for a second that I have to run the program in "High" instead of "Very High" because the game still looks nicer than any others and makes for a fun single player experience too. Remember, driver maturity plays a big part in how great your games run. I've gained 15fps in Crysis since its launch and I haven't touched my hardware so I expect quad-sli to work a lot better as Nvidia improves the drivers for it. I haven't looked at consoles since my poor Dreamcast went under =( but that's mostly because I enjoy genres which are better on PC (Fps, Rts, MMO) -- I'd be silly to be a PC exclusive gamer if I was into fighting or racing games. Getting a new console would also require I buy a HDTV to run games at their full resolution and I don't even own a regular TV!