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description= Originally a pair of views on gaming, it s now musings by Redbeard on video games (mainly MMOs), board games, RPGs, and other geeky hobbies.;
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rloom gear gives a player compared to those without heirloms i mean you not only have to be max level to buy them but you have to have enough badges from running heroic group content at max level to afford them you can t just walk in and buy them with gold then when you get them you have a built in advantage of having gear that levels in quality with you still a couple of my toons do have heirloom gear because they do make it easier to forget about trying to scrounge for the best gear on several of your item slots while questing out in the field and this is coming from someone who tends to forget about selecting talents on a talent tree for oh five levels worth of talents at a time eta corrected some grammar posted by redbeard at 1 09 am 7 comments email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest labels blogs graphics parallel context saturday june 18 2022 when the game betrays you okay that title may sound melodramatic but hear me out on this as everybody knows wow classic and its descendants aren t exactly graphics heavy as a salesperson at microcenter snarkily put it you could use a graphics card powered by a potato and some metal strips and run wow classic still you can crank up the graphics and get a rather nice modern experience while running classic everything is sharper the woods and fields are denser fuller and even the obnoxious parts of the gear are well more obnoxious indeed cardwyn but there are times when the graphics make what is on the face of it a simple quest into something far more difficult i ve explained this to in game friends more than once but it s better understood seeing it instead in the nagrand zone of outland there s a quest called a rare bean you re sent on to do something pretty disgusting hunting through animal scat for undigested caracoli now on the face of it the quest is simple find animal scat that is conveniently located near to the quest giver click on it and get the caracoli this is out in the plains so it should be easy to find right well this is at max graphics setting one is right in front of me do you see it what kind of hard to find okay let s lower the graphics to the classic setting there we go better or you could lower the graphics alllll the way down and get this instead yep it s right in front of me now you see or rather didn t at first what the problem is the graphics look fantastic until you have to go hunting around on the ground for the scat and there s no little sparkly stars floating above where the scat is to find it easier then you have a couple of options lower the graphics until you can easily find it create a macro you spam while running around the fields to target the scat or utilize and addon such as questie that makes the scat stand out when i was out by myself it was a no brainer i just dealt with it as a side effect of having nicer graphics however when i was grouped up i quickly discovered that my friends thought i must have been going blind or crazy or both because how could i miss these right over there and why aren t you using questie at that point i had to explain the graphics was too good and it hid the stuff not on questie sigh i would much rather lower the graphics until i could see it rather than use an addon designed to get me through quests more quickly without trying to solve anything sure a rare bean is supposed to be an easy quest but when the graphics give you lemons you make lemonade adjusting the graphics fixes the problem for this quest without sacrificing my entire philosophy of playing the game and now you know i m not crazy this time and if you thought hunting through scat for caracoli like a parent hunting for a penny that a kid swallowed is bad enough you probably don t want to know what the shaman does with those caracoli afterward posted by redbeard at 11 51 pm 13 comments email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest labels graphics musings tbc classic monday august 13 2018 a gamer s other pastime i ve been doing some tinkering over the past week or so on my system because that s what a computer nerd does i suppose the reason for these little tweaks were patches to my radeon rx 470 graphics card that fixed the performance issues i saw after the last windows 10 creators update i figured that if those patches did the trick maybe this six year old pc can still pull its own weight for a few more years without needing major upgrades apparently somebody is a corsair fan from pocket lint com the system is what was in 2012 a top tier i7 3770 system although with a slower hard drive a mid tier graphics card and a good 1080 resolution screen don t get me wrong it s light years faster than the old 2007 era 32 bit intel core duo running vista no less that it replaced but i realized that eventually the i7 3770 would be eclipsed by faster cpus with better surrounding architecture honestly i didn t think it would take this long but i d argue that s the state of pc development these days unlike my experiences at the turn of the century where the brand new amd athlons were top of the line for a scant 6 8 months and totally eclipsed after 2 3 years the i7 3770 based system has only recently been knocked off of the recommended specs for pc games even pc cases have come a long way from when i started building machines from gamers nexus obviously the machine still functions perfectly fine for non gamer activites although my wife complains a bit about the loading performance when i start it up so if i had to perform major component upgrades i d be very likely to keep this system as primarily her system and just build a new one for myself instead however what really caught my eye were my experiences playing games that you d think would have major issues stressing the system but actually don t i figured that newer mmos such as archeage wildstar and eso or regular games such as the aforementioned rise of the tomb raider or mass effect andromeda would have issues with the old pc much to my surprise however none of those games after accommodating the increased loading times stressed the pc much at all a good part of that is i believe due to my insistence on sticking with 1080 resolution rather than trying to run on 4k without the 4k performance sync to push the rx 470 to its limits my pc has an easier time of it than it ordinarily would have but i also think that the biggest difference between the newer and older games is the architecture behind the games nope no problems here go figure from origin com take lotro for instance at 11 years old it is a fairly ancient mmo by today s standards and you d think that a top end pc whose guts are 8 years old but a 2 year old graphics card would be able to run this at max settings without an issue however the lag when you enter into graphics heavy zones with lots of toons such as bree lotro struggles on my pc i pulled up the windows resource monitor and ran lotro with it in the background for a little while just to see what the results were and i discovered that while lotro wasn t stressing my cpu much about 15 20 so it was active on one core most likely or the gpu it was hitting the hard drive and network quite a bit some network activity is to be expected it s an mmo after all but the amount of activity suggested that lotro was busy getting data from the network servers and then either transferring it to my disk or memory even if it was placing the data straight into memory and the gpu lotro was referencing data on the disk to an extent that wasn t necessarily the case in other mmos back in 2007 turbine likely decided to utilize their own version of memory swap to get around the 32 bit memory limitations and in the age of 64 bit pcs this isn t necessary however the old architecture remains and you only notice it when your pc bottlenecks in swtor released in 2012 a similar issue is the case as well the windows resource monitor showed that my gpu was pegged when i ran about alderaan the locale that has caused the worst performance issues outside of an ops run for me and cpu was at 25 likely an entire core the thing is the rx 470 was sitting at 1 gb of memory utilization when it had 4 gb to play with so it was being artificially constrained it s only when i pulled back on quite a bit of the graphics resolution that the gpu was no longer pegged but the cpu was in a near constant state of activity this suggests that a cpu upgrade would help a bit but with only one core being utilized there s only so much that motherboard cpu upgrade can do again swtor is an older game that needs to be rearchitected to spread resources around to take advantage of newer pcs capabilities i was about to mention that the older machines run on directx9 but i don t think that s as much of an issue as at first glance age of conan runs perfectly fine in either directx9 or directx10 and switching between 9 and 10 in lotro doesn t have an impact and i do play gw2 which runs in dx9 and the only issues i have are loading once the zone or locale is loaded into memory everything plays fine so what does all this mean basically it means to stop worrying and just relax there s only so much you can do without doing a complete rebuild so fretting over whether an 8 year old pc can handle games at highest resolution without hiccups is a bit of a fool s errand that doesn t mean that a guy can t dream or tweak or whatever it does mean that i m likely going to have to build a pc of my own because the old battleaxe isn t going to give up the ghost anytime soon and i can t see my wife saying yeah we need to upgrade the pc either if anything getting faster internet speeds is what she d want and in a few years that ll take care of itself with the mini reds all off to university and that will cause it s own problems and here i thought the performance issues were long term degradation of the system oh well rise of the tomb raider had the i7 3770k as the recommended setup in 2016 and i can t imagine that in 2018 that s still the case the specs are tba at this time however replacing the old had drive there with a ssd or a hybrid would help out a lot but i m not so sure i want to do that if it means a ton of work breaking the old hard drive into a ssd for the os and traditional hard drive for games and other applications if i d go with a 4k monitor i d want one big enough to really appreciate the 4k difference such as 32 or larger but i m not about to blow that sort of money on a system at this time because priorities yes i ve been in ops runs before almost totally during special events don t look at me like that i kind of expected there to be disk activity like lotro has but that wasn t the case my old barracuda was doing a good enough job of keeping up with the system although i did notice that when chrome was on in the background but only when swtor was running i saw disk activity while i was running at around 9 12 gb of ram once i killed chrome however the disk activity vanished as another test i killed swtor instead of chrome and still the disk activity went away therefore the two combined must have led to some disk swap activity posted by redbeard at 10 28 pm no comments email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest labels computers graphics lotro musings swtor upgrades video games tuesday november 22 2016 now that s more like it don t know what you got till it s gone don t know what it is i did so wrong now i know what i got it s just this song and it ain t easy to get back takes so long don t know what you ve got till it s gone cinderella the adventure i ve been on the past month began when the graphics card in the main pc went belly up i d been thinking that we might want to upgrade some of the components over the holidays if the bonus gods were willing to smile on us that is but i d been thinking that a new graphics card would be 2 on the list behind an ssd but that idea got thrown in the trash heap on november 4th yeah like this only with fewer cows from quickmeme com i ve already covered my adventures dealing with the intel integrated graphics for my 3rd gen i7 system spoilers they weren t happy ones so i knew i had to shell out for a new card and yes i warned the boss just how much one that would be a bit better but not top of the line would cost 200 us so with a budget in hand and potential specs a plenty i sallied forth to do battle with the mighty graphics card market i used to be an nvidia fanboy from way back in the day but i had some bad experiences with the gs series of nvidia cards in the late 2000s so i d switched to amd s radeon offerings when the current pc was built i saw no need to change that particularly since the amd integrated graphics on the mini red s laptops ran rings around intel s integrated graphics if they can do that i figured then their dedicated cards will be good enough for me what i saw in research only confirmed my suspicions as i zoomed in on the rx470 as the potential card to have the 4 gb option in particular hit that 200 price point and i had a traditional hd monitor so i had no need for either the 8 gb or the rx480 cards i also had a quirk of the system in that i only had a 6 pin power connector available for the graphics card not an 8 pin so that ended up limiting my selection to only a couple of cards namely this one the sapphire radeon rx470 4gb from pcworld com courtesy of my living close to newegg s warehouse it s only a state away it arrived several days ahead of its original delivery date which meant that i had an opportunity to install the sucker a lot sooner than i expected nah man if i can figure out how to get a refrigerator to fit in a small kitchen i can buy the right sized graphics card from catplanet org the only surprise i had during installation was that the power connection was on top of the damn card not on the side which meant that i had to get creative in terms of making sure the card fit around the case frame still the installation and driver updates went fairly smooth and the card itself is quieter than the old hd7700 i had in the pc over the past week i ve had a chance to sit down and try a stable of games with the new card to see what sort of difference it made to the graphics settings now i don t have a game that s less than two years old wildstar and mass effect 3 are the newest from 2014 so the games i have don t really stress a game card like a current gen game such as say witcher iii or black desert online still this card ought to handle both current gen games without much issue as for the games i own let s just say that one game in particular surprised me a lot lotro experienced some lag when entering certain areas such as around emyn lun in mirkwood as if the game were busy loading data from the lotro servers given that lotro is closing in on its 10 year anniversary next year i wasn t expecting the graphical lag like i got but once that initial lag was over the game ran smoothly i ve checked online a bit and discovered th...
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