Half Life 2: Episode Two came out and I was struck by a sudden desire to benchmark the crap out of it; I called Derek over and we went to town on testing Valve's latest incarnation of the Source engine. This unfortunately brought back horrible memories of staying up all night benchmarking Half Life 2 upon its release. For some reason, the Source engine makes me nauseous after about 30 - 45 minutes of staring at the screen. No other FPS does this to me, just anything in the Half Life 2 series. Admittedly I haven't tried testing with v-sync enabled, which Derek is convinced will fix my ailments but I haven't had time to because of...
Unreal Tournament 3.
Just as we finished testing HL2Ep2, the UT3 Demo beta was unleashed and we immediately shifted focus. I've been playing with the UT3 demo beta for the past couple of days and wow does it look pretty. I'm not really impressed with the graphics in Episode Two, and I think testing it back to back with UT3 has really made me appreciate UT3 all that much more. It still doesn't look nearly as good as Gears of War, but at high res it's really a good looking game.
It's unfortunate that the vast majority of developers have to make PC games for relatively low minimum system requirements in order to justify the investment, because we could really have some amazing titles with something like the 8800 GTS 320MB as a reasonable minimum requirement. It'll never happen, but it'd be nice to have a PC-gaming driven industry rather than one that is very console focused, at least in order to get better looking games, quicker.
It is ironic that I'd say that however, given the most beautiful game out currently in my opinion continues to be Epic's Gears of War, which is currently Xbox 360-only. The PC version will finally be out this year and that should give us something nice to gawk at on our computer screens.
I've been wanting to talk about Halo 3 since its release, I just haven't had the time to. Halo has always been heralded as a first person shooter with a real story, very much like Half Life in that sense. I always felt slightly dumb that I could never really follow the Halo story, so I was happy when Gabe over at Penny Arcade said the following:
"I never really got into the Halo story. I thought it was because there just wasn't much story there to get into. I got this link last week though and I realised that there's actually a really cool story, the problem is the games do a terrible job of telling it."
I still haven't had a chance to read through the thread he mentions, but I'm sure it would clear up a lot of confusion I had about the Halo stories.
The game itself is a lot of fun, the matchmaking is on point and it's great to be able to play with my friends spread out over the city/state/country. Halo 2 was basically a way for a lot of us to talk to one another and also play an entertaining game at the same time - Halo 3 continues the tradition.
Graphically, Halo 3 isn't bad but once again, no where near as pretty as Gears. It's slightly disappointing when you get a load of the aliasing everywhere, but it doesn't make the game any less fun. It's exactly what you'd expect a Halo on the Xbox 360 to look like. I'll cut my Halo-lovefest short, but I do like the game.
Right now I'm working on the CPU side of this UT3 article, as well as toying with the idea of doing an integrated-graphics look at HL2: Episode Two. The game's GPU requirements are low enough that you could actually play the game with integrated graphics, the question is: would you want to?
Unreal Tournament 3.
Just as we finished testing HL2Ep2, the UT3 Demo beta was unleashed and we immediately shifted focus. I've been playing with the UT3 demo beta for the past couple of days and wow does it look pretty. I'm not really impressed with the graphics in Episode Two, and I think testing it back to back with UT3 has really made me appreciate UT3 all that much more. It still doesn't look nearly as good as Gears of War, but at high res it's really a good looking game.
It's unfortunate that the vast majority of developers have to make PC games for relatively low minimum system requirements in order to justify the investment, because we could really have some amazing titles with something like the 8800 GTS 320MB as a reasonable minimum requirement. It'll never happen, but it'd be nice to have a PC-gaming driven industry rather than one that is very console focused, at least in order to get better looking games, quicker.
It is ironic that I'd say that however, given the most beautiful game out currently in my opinion continues to be Epic's Gears of War, which is currently Xbox 360-only. The PC version will finally be out this year and that should give us something nice to gawk at on our computer screens.
I've been wanting to talk about Halo 3 since its release, I just haven't had the time to. Halo has always been heralded as a first person shooter with a real story, very much like Half Life in that sense. I always felt slightly dumb that I could never really follow the Halo story, so I was happy when Gabe over at Penny Arcade said the following:
"I never really got into the Halo story. I thought it was because there just wasn't much story there to get into. I got this link last week though and I realised that there's actually a really cool story, the problem is the games do a terrible job of telling it."
I still haven't had a chance to read through the thread he mentions, but I'm sure it would clear up a lot of confusion I had about the Halo stories.
The game itself is a lot of fun, the matchmaking is on point and it's great to be able to play with my friends spread out over the city/state/country. Halo 2 was basically a way for a lot of us to talk to one another and also play an entertaining game at the same time - Halo 3 continues the tradition.
Graphically, Halo 3 isn't bad but once again, no where near as pretty as Gears. It's slightly disappointing when you get a load of the aliasing everywhere, but it doesn't make the game any less fun. It's exactly what you'd expect a Halo on the Xbox 360 to look like. I'll cut my Halo-lovefest short, but I do like the game.
Right now I'm working on the CPU side of this UT3 article, as well as toying with the idea of doing an integrated-graphics look at HL2: Episode Two. The game's GPU requirements are low enough that you could actually play the game with integrated graphics, the question is: would you want to?
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Iger - Friday, October 26, 2007 - link
Hey, not exactly fresh news, but I've had the same problem with HF-2 and at least one friend of mine... Had to stop playing original HF-2 because of that... :) I wonder how did they achieve such a glamorous effect :))eetnoyer - Sunday, October 21, 2007 - link
I've always had the same problem with any FPS. After awhile, I start to get a headache and nausea, sort of like when I read in a moving vehicle. Eyes telling the brain one thing, inner ear saying another. Those are the only times I've ever experienced it. Any other time, I'm perfectly fine....flying, sailing, whatever. If changing the game settings doesn't work for you, what I've found, is that if I'll be spending a decent amount of time doing either of those activities, I'll take some dramamine (generic equivalents are cheaper) about 1/2 hour beforehand. Problem solved.Syran - Thursday, October 18, 2007 - link
I thought Halo 1 had a decent story, I enjoyed it. I've actually read all 4 of the Halo books. I think Eric Nyland did a great job with the 3 books that take place outside of the games.* Halo: Fall of Reach (Novel)
* Halo: First Strike (Novel)
* Halo: Ghosts of Onyx (Novel)
There is also a novel based on the game, and it reminds me of a lot of the game I didn't like; it got very repetitive quickly, esp when it covered the Library level of the game. I did like the backstory it gave on what happened during the events of the game however. If you are a fan of the game, or would like more on the storyline, I would highly recommend reading them, I was more then surprised personally.
Ne0 - Thursday, October 18, 2007 - link
I used to get nauseous after playing half-life 2 or source engine games for 30 minutes or more... but I fixed it by changing the default_fov (field of view) from 90 to 120 in the command line and it's much better now.Spacecomber - Thursday, October 25, 2007 - link
The Orange Box was my opportunity to finally play through the whole HL2 game (previously, I had only played the demo). Although I don't recall any motion sickness playing the demo, after playing the full game for several hours and getting to the airboat portion, I experienced the nausea that many people have described. Apparently, HL2 uses a field of view setting of 75; most games use a FOV set to 90. Changing the FOV to 90 seemed to help enough that I could finish playing this game, which included some fairly long stints at the keyboard. I also turned on vertical synch; so, this may have helped some as well.I haven't checked the FOV setting for the HL2 Episodes One and Two; so, I don't know if they also are using a narrow FOV or not. Portal didn't give me any trouble; so, I assume it uses a more normal FOV setting.
Here's one reference on HL2 and its FOV setting.
[L]http://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Field_of_V...[/L]
Spacecomber - Thursday, October 25, 2007 - link
http://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Field_of_V...">http://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Field_of_V...Operandi - Thursday, October 25, 2007 - link
A friend of mine had the same problem with HL 1 & 2 and only HL, not other FPS. Strange indeed.werks - Wednesday, October 17, 2007 - link
Your pretty much on the money with Halo and it's story but the hype surrounding the game & the fact that it is a great multi-player game gloss over the fact that it has a terribly confusing story that tries to be more complex then it needs to be as it is essentially American space marines kick alien ass & thats about it. It was funny to see that Africa (one of the games settings) was populated largely by Americans too, I think I heard one human foreign voice in the whole game which was British.The game single player element is so utterly ridden with cliche's that in many ways it is the video game equivalent of the movie Independence Day though that was a lot easier to follow.
As for Gears the graphics in the set pieces are very impressive indeed but Epic use a lot of tricks (with lighting/shadows/motion blur) to hide the low visual fidelity and draw your eyes to the set pieces. I definitely would not give it the title of most visually impressive game overall. Personally I cant think of anything that really shines and blows everything else out of the water.
jebo - Tuesday, October 16, 2007 - link
The thing about benchmarking HL2 is: most mid- to high-range hardware will chew through the Source engine like candy. Even an 8600 with a Core 2 E6300 is plenty for this game at 1600x1200.So, your plan to benchmark integrated graphics is probably more "interesting" from that standpoint, in that the competition won't be between 100fps and 120fps.
I'd also be curious to know if a low-end dual core (say, a Pentium D 805) would take advantage of Valve's multi-threaded optimizations in those scenarios. Benchmark an 805 against a 3.8ghz P4?