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Since my computer's motherboard, video card, and some other parts were destroyed during transport a while ago, I've finally ordered some "replacements", including an eVGA GeForce GTX 285

I haven't been keeping up on the PC gaming situation much in the past couple years, so I'm asking for "must play" game suggestions like another thread on this forum except this one is focused particularly on modern games that will put my new hardware to good use (and I've played most older games anyway).

I can think of a few obvious choices, but I'm sure there are some others I haven't thought of.

CPU: Intel E8400 - Core 2 Duo, 3.0 GHz
GPU: eVGA GeForce GTX 285
RAM; G.Skill 4GB DDR2-1066
HDD: Western Digital 1.25 TB (1000GB + 250GB) 7200RPM
Motherboard: eVGA nForce 750i SLI FTW ATX
CPU Cooler: Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro (so I can OC to 4.0GHz possibly)

There is exactly one game plus a addon/sequel to it which will make good use of your gfx card. I guess I don't have to mention it's name. Stalker will strain your gfx card as well but it is quite buggy and nothing I consider a "must play" game. And that is about it. Lots of nice looking AAA titles around but none which are that demanding for a high end gfx card. Simply enjoy whatever suits your taste with a high resolution and decent AA/AF

If you want to see an example for why a quad core would be nice: GTA4.

Lol, I didn't mean it had to be something that makes the GTX 285 struggle, just some really good games that are relatively modern (like in the last 1-3 years) .

Also, I've thought about upgrading to a quad core CPU but since the E8400 I have isn't damaged it should be good enough for me for a while, especially if I overclock to 4.0 GHz (which isn't unreasonable to expect).

I guess the answer would be "any good game" as you have no high limit on performance...

jjp wrote:There is exactly one game plus a addon/sequel to it which will make good use of your gfx card.

Actually, two: FEAR2 tested my dual 8600GT SLI setup.

I would also have to imagine that Crysis on all-out settings would tax a GPU as well?

JohnJ wrote:Lol, I didn't mean it had to be something that makes the GTX 285 struggle, just some really good games that are relatively modern (like in the last 1-3 years) .

Also, I've thought about upgrading to a quad core CPU but since the E8400 I have isn't damaged it should be good enough for me for a while, especially if I overclock to 4.0 GHz (which isn't unreasonable to expect).

With modern games, "more parallel" is better than "more faster". Especially games that are developed using physics and logic designed to take advantage of as many cores as possible (games that use Havok come to mind, for example).

Get Nexuiz. It's a fun game, I've been playing it a lot recently.

xavier wrote:With modern games, "more parallel" is better than "more faster". Especially games that are developed using physics and logic designed to take advantage of as many cores as possible (games that use Havok come to mind, for example).

Definitely, many-core CPUs are definitely the future, long term, but I wonder how many games actually make full use of more than 2 CPUs. I'm actually working with a project that uses 4+ cores, and it's really not easy to optimize and get the cores synchronized without introducing too much overhead, so I wouldn't be surprised if few games today fully made use of more than 2 high speed cores. I think Crysis does a pretty good job of using 4 cores, and certainly more games will as time goes on of course.

In any case, it doesn't matter. I could spend ~$300 for a nice quad core processor, but as I think I mentioned earlier I'm only upgrading these parts because my old ones have been broken. I'm sure dual 4 GHz will be plenty fast to not be a bottleneck in any case, not for a few more years anyway

I guess the answer would be "any good game" as you have no high limit on performance...

Well then the question would be "what are some good games?" . I guess this probably isn't the best place to ask it though, I should probably research it myself or find a PC gaming forum.

xavier wrote:I would also have to imagine that Crysis on all-out settings would tax a GPU as well?

I was of course referring to Crysis My posting says that there are 2 games. One game whose name I thought does not need mentioning and Stalker.

xavier wrote:Actually, two: FEAR2 tested my dual 8600GT SLI setup.

If you have 2 8800GT 512MB they might be running out of memory at higher resolutions, and of course the felt framerate might not be much better than with a single gfx card due to the nature of AFR. On a GTX285 Fear 2 is mostly CPU-limited even with a Core2 Duo @3.6GHZ

JohnJ wrote:Well then the question would be "what are some good games?"

I don't know how long you have been off pc gaming. If you haven't played Half Life 2 yet I suggest you to get the Orange Box. Bioshock, Oblivion, Fallout 3 and Call of Duty 4 are all worth playing.

Prototype won't strain the card much, it's just an awesome game, so go get it!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V129-5QK86o


Arma2 will probably need something really powerful, the detail is pretty insane and all of their games (Flashpoint and Armed Assault) have needed good gfx cards.

Oh yeah! Arma 2 and Operation Flashpoint 2 look like they could be really interesting, although I wonder how the two will differ? Also, Prototype looks very interesting as well

I don't know how long you have been off pc gaming. If you haven't played Half Life 2 yet I suggest you to get the Orange Box. Bioshock, Oblivion, Fallout 3 and Call of Duty 4 are all worth playing.

I've played Crysis and the COD4 demo, but not much other than that - just BF2142 / BF2, so those are all good suggestions.

it depends on how far back you want to go but some of the best games over the last few years for me have included :

Supreme Commander - RTS very much in the vein of Total Annihilation, with so many units on screen at once this game certainly requires a gfx card with some grunt.

Crysis - It's a bit of a "blond" game - a real looker that lacks any real depth it's a fun shooter though and it's great to show off to friends.

Fallout 3 - An awesome adventure game set in a huge open world with a nice dark sense of humour and tons to explore and do with multiple routes through the game.

STALKER - A superbly atmospheric and even quite scary in places shooter, I prefer the prequel Clear Sky but patching is essential as the vanilla game is so bugged it's unplayable.

I'm looking at Arma II with some interest at the moment .

Dude, seriously, get Nexuiz. We can have some great fun together on MinstaGib.

Oh yeah! Arma 2 and Operation Flashpoint 2 look like they could be really interesting, although I wonder how the two will differ?

From what I've heard, Flashpoint 2 will be primarily a military first person shooter, while Arma 2 starts you like that but progresses until you control the entire army.
There's some fun videos on youtube of Arma 2 doing stuff like mass air battles and a fight between 1500 or so ai units with the player running around in the middle. It kind of sounds like the Spore of wargames.

Of course it's buggy as all hell, but so was Flashpoint and Arma 1.

Also, Prototype looks very interesting as well

I never get tired of watching this video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_1AU_pJf17M
If any game should be turned into a movie, this is the one.

Two outstanding games you may have missed out on: Team Fortress 2 and Fallout

If I had a computer like that then I would buy ArmA 2. I don't really play much games and haven't in many years, so I don't know what else is out there. But this line of games coming from Bohemia Interactive Studio has really gotten my heart with their rather unique and groundbreaking approach.

I am a big fan of Operation Flashpoint made by Bohemia Interactive Studio (BIS). Also now that the Armed Assault has received significant patching (1.16 beta works really well compared to the earlier versions and patch 1.14 was also pretty good) I can call it a game I enjoy playing even on a computer below its minimum system requirements. Just finished playing the original campaign of Operation Flashpoint: Cold War Crisis on Armed Assault - it was converted for ArmA by a community project with support from BIS and I really recommend it to anyone who played it originally on Operation Flashpoint.

Do not confuse the Operation Flashpoint 2 made by Codemasters with the previous "Operation Flashpoint" titles. Codemasters and Bohemia Interactive Studio (the developer of Operation Flashpoint and Armed Assault and Arma 2) are not working together since Operation Flashpoint: Elite (Xbox version of OFP). You can read more about the name issue from BIS developer blog.

I have read comments from the Bohemia Interactive Studio forum that ArmA 2 runs better than Armed Assault. So it sounds like it is not so demanding as Armed Assault, even as they say they recommend a quad-core processor. I will have to try it to really know if this is the case but that's what some people are saying over at the official forums. It is multi-threaded. I guess it's likely so that on old-ish computers it will run worse but on new-ish multi-core computers with good graphics cards it will run better than Armed Assault.

I bought ArmA 2 today and I have to say it runs fairly respectably so far on my system ( athlon 64 X2 3800+, 2 GB ram, Win XP, GF 9600gt ), I obviously don't have the graphics settings maxed out but I was able to turn them up a bit from the default without too much of an impact on performance.


Impressions so far are that it's a very deep and challenging game, pretty much as expected really, there are some rough edges especially where mission objectives are concerned but overall I'm highly impressed with it at the moment, I can see this game eating up lots of my valuable spare time over the coming weeks.

Thanks for the info.

I noticed at the BIS wiki that they say "optimal system" would be a "core" system (I take this as a dual-core) in contrast to what I said earlier about a quad-core. I think they said at some time that the optimal would be a quad-core but perhaps they brought it down after a positive surprise.

http://community.bistudio.com/wiki/ArmA_2

Interesting, I didn't know ArmA 2 was even out yet! I'll definitely check it out when I get my computer back together.

As to Fallout, I've heard a lot about that, but what kind of genre is it? From videos I've seen it looked like an RPG or something, which I'm not usually particularly interested in.

Fallout 3 is most definately an RPG, even though you play the game in 1st person the combat is stat based so even if you are aiming at your target at point blank range you can still miss. It's worth getting if you enjoy exploring stuff, there's a huge world to explore with lots of cool stuff to discover there's also certain amount of replay value because there are a lot of different paths you can take through the game. On the whole I really enjoyed Fallout 3 but if talking to NPC's and doing various quests isn't your thing you might want to give this one a miss, threre's not a lot of grind to this game though and levelling up is pretty easy, there's quite a low level cap of 20, and it does have an awesome dark sense of humour so even if RPG's aren't your thing this still might entertain.

The Orange Box
Fallout 3
Left 4 Dead

JohnJ wrote:Interesting, I didn't know ArmA 2 was even out yet! I'll definitely check it out when I get my computer back together.

http://community.bistudio.com/wiki/ArmA_2

Release date(s)
DE May 29, 2009
CZ June 17, 2009
SK June 17, 2009
EU June 19, 2009
US June 26, 2009

Although I think some people over there already have their copies, ordered from Europe, perhaps a download version even. I would need a new computer and I think I will not buy this game before I have bought a new computer. BIS will hopefully have ironed out the worst bugs before I buy it. Perhaps they will give a demo so I might start from that.

It seems ArmA 2 demo was released already. Downloading.

You can find it from the BIS forum, go to "ArmA 2 - General" and there is a topic with download links in the first post.

Well, I just (finally) got my new setup up and running, and all I can say about the GTX 285 is... amazing. I'm running Crysis maxed out (all High settings) on XP and its running incredibly smooth so far (definitely over 75 FPS because it's exceeding the refresh rate of my screen [I'll check with Fraps later]). It's a huge difference from my GTX 260 before, which is surprising (I didn't think any single card could run Crysis on high this smooth). I guess I'd have to run the Very High hack to really test it, but it looks good so far.

Next I'll have to try the Arma 2 demos and look at the various games mentioned here

JohnJ wrote:Well, I just (finally) got my new setup up and running, and all I can say about the GTX 285 is... amazing. I'm running Crysis maxed out (all High settings) on XP and its running incredibly smooth so far (definitely over 75 FPS because it's exceeding the refresh rate of my screen [I'll check with Fraps later]). It's a huge difference from my GTX 260 before, which is surprising (I didn't think any single card could run Crysis on high this smooth). I guess I'd have to run the Very High hack to really test it, but it looks good so far.

Next I'll have to try the Arma 2 demos and look at the various games mentioned here

Yeah, the GTX 285 is absolutely awesome. The only problem is that, the projects I'm working on and testing on this computer, which run quite fast, might run really slow on others, and I wont even know. Good to keep around old PCs for testing I guess.