pyide

Once the goofy skits from the earlier days went away, my favorite part of GB's GOTY stuff were the daily video recaps & text posts of categories and winners and runners up from the deliberations and podcasts. Real bummed to see those gone (maybe I just can't find them?) as I personally don't like to listen to hours and hours of discussion with spoilers strewn about, but still very curious to see what was picked!

If they are really gone and not just hidden to me, did anyone here in the forums do their own summary for those this time? I've looked and can't find anything there, either.

Gaming Vice

Been like this since the other day.

@bigjeffrey: Digital Foundry's Update 3 says it can. They're the ones who did the comparison video embedded here, they did another comparison showing what it's like with Install disc on the HDD the Play disc on a USB flash drive.

Doing so appears to eradicate the performance issues found when both discs are installed to the Xbox 360 hard drive.

Worth looking into if your 360 is noisy and / or you don't like wearing headphones.

@andorski said:

The issue is not that it can't stream from the HDD quickly, it's that the 360 version was designed to both pull data from the HDD and DVD simultaneously, same as with the PS3 BD version. Because they made the mandatory install only one of the discs (presumably to keep the install size down for folks with smaller 20GB HDDs), installing both would mean separate game data for both discs in separate areas on the hard drive. As certain assets get priority, there would be fighting back and forth on the same HDD or certain things that would be otherwise coming in off the DVD would have to wait, or vice-versa. Which is probably what's causing the delay on some of the higher level of detail stuff appearing in these scenes and no other real performance issues being reported thus far.

Most 360 games are just one disc and often load quite a bit faster when installed to the HDD, there's only been a couple exceptions where issues cropped up in the past, usually due to developers packaging data on the DVD in specific areas to load the more requested data more efficiently. I think GTA4 was one of them, and one (or more?) of the Halo games.

If the entire game was designed to be installed and packaged efficiently on the HDD, it probably wouldn't have these problems. Just look at any downloadable PC / 360 / PS3 game that's only running off a single hard drive, GTA4 PC was all on a hard drive and didn't have any of the pop-in of the 360 version, although that could be because of the increased amount of RAM. GTA4 360 was released before the 360 even had the manual HDD install option, was designed entirely for disc loading and had the most pop-in issues, both before and after the addition of the manual install to the Xbox 360. And GTA4 PS3 had an install and still pulled data from the blu-ray, like GTA5 is doing on both consoles. With considerably less lod pop-in than the 360 GTA4.

I guess we'll know for sure when some people start reporting whether or not the PS3 digital download version of GTAV has the same pop-in issues as when both DVDs are installed on the 360's hard drive.

@thefriend said:

Some of the textures do look rough, but 8GB is the install size from one of the two DVDs. Not the entire game.

I found the d-pad menu > players > mute option fairly on, but what I don't understand is why there are absolutely no settings or configuration options for voice chat on PC. It's like it doesn't exist, yet it works for some people and they may not even know it. My mic doesn't though. For all the sounds that it picks up, I wonder if it's using webcams for chat. It's so strange.

@MikkaQ: Well, there is a demo you can try first and see if it bothers you. Most people don't even care or notice but I know exactly what you mean about wanting racing games to feel fast, in Horizon it stood out to me immediately having just come off a long stretch of Forza 4. It's still perfectly fine and playable at 30fps, but it does feel like it's missing something when driving fast.

Get up to 170+ on the third race with the Viper in the demo, and it's like you've barely cracked 100mph. The game also has a heavy and artificial camera shake setting on by default which gets crazier as you go faster, the only purpose that it seems to serve is to mask the lacking sense of speed. When you turn it off it'll feel like you are going even slower when pushing top speeds, less annoying and headache inducing when turned off though.

I've seen people claim that the 30 frames per second gives Forza Horizon a greater sense of speed the previous Forza games, so yeah. Take any of this with a grain of salt until you play it for yourself. I would call those people crazy but in the end it's not a dealbreaker even for someone like myself who really cares about a solid 60 in a game where you are driving and racing fast cars.

@MikkaQ said:

I think it's a damn feat that those games run at a smooth 60 FPS while looking as good as they do. A PC version would have a lot of potential, that's for sure.

Still, that would kinda give me another reason to stop using the Xbox, so I don't mind it having an exclusive now and then. Sure needs 'em.

Horizon is only 30 FPS unfortunately. They had to scale it back from Forza proper's 60 to do the open world and day / night cycle stuff in this one. Which kills a lot the game's sense of speed when driving fast in my opinion.

I'd love to see a PC version running at a higher res, better framerate, and even just for some freaking anisotropic filtering. The textures on the roads and signs are so blurry when you aren't right on top of them.

@vinsanityv22 said:

Meh, grumbling over nothing. Game resolution has been fine ever since we hit 720p. I mean, higher resolutions are always going to be great. But c'mon; we all lived through consoles like the N64, and that late 90's era of PC games. If you were to play a game like Jedi Knight in it's native resolution in a window on your current desktop, it'd be the size of a postage stamp. AND WE PLAYED GAMES THAT LOOKED LIKE THAT! This is silliness.

However, a modding community coming together to redo the textures in Dark Souls would be great. A true HD texture pack... that would be amazing. Can't wait until artists tackle this thing. I'm sure From Software would be fine with it, since they are inexperienced on PC.

As I'm sure others have already said, it's not nothing. There's a big difference between native resolution on a PC and an lower one that's being upscaled or stretched to fill the native res. Doesn't matter if it's a game, program, or the OS itself. Running anything in non-native resolutions is going to be blurry and muddy and not desirable since LCDs replaced CRTs in the PC space. Go drop your computer down to 1280x720 (or 800 if it's 16:10) in Windows or any game and compare the results to the native res.

It's a bit different on an HDTV w/ consoles where better hardware scalers are involved and you aren't sitting 2 feet away from the screen to see the ugliness up close and personal. PC monitors generally don't have the best scalers built into them, and there's sometimes an option for GPU scaling via video drivers. But when a game has forced software scaling built in like Dark Souls does, it's always going to look worse than those other solutions, especially when it's that much lower of a res than your LCD's native.

It's hard to believe until you see it running first hand, but default Dark Souls PC without the hack on a high resolution LCD looks much worse than if you were to output the game (either from the 360 or PC) at the standard 720p on an HDTV.