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Half-Life 2 Articles and Screenshots [16636]
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devilhood
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Joined: 09 Jun 2004
Posts: 697
Location: Cydonia

PostPosted: Mon Aug 16, 2004 11:37 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

I know a great number of people that don't have poorly maintained PC's (trust me on that account), they even have their BIOS updated and it still causes lockup issues. The game is severly buggy for some, you're just lucky enough to have hardware that isn't causing issues Wink
For me personally however, the game runs perfectly smooth with no issues.

I'm not as excited about the sound as you though, the resolution and quality of some of the samples used are pretty low at times, and quite franky, a game without full EAX support is almost criminal.
It could have been just that 'little' bit better; they had more than enough time to consider such an option as well.
There's no option to even manually change the output sample frequency either (very minor issue for the majority of gamers). A game like UT2004 for example has superb sound drivers for it with far greater flexiblity.
I'm only saying this because I hold sound and music as a very important factor for games, I am a producer myself and write my own material, and because of my experience with Music Technology you can safely categorize me as an Audiophile hehe.
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Sabot
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Joined: 11 Jun 2004
Posts: 2071
Location: The Dark Side of The Moon

PostPosted: Tue Aug 17, 2004 12:04 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

LOL the permutations of hardware eh?

XXXX, the sound for me is quite incredible, it does truly surround me and the screams have a very 'surround sound depth' It's the nvidia SoundStorm APU that i have (good review here http://www.3dss.com/reviews/nForce/nForce.html , it's dedicated hardware -not all nForce boards now ship with the SoundStorm, seemingly the cost put paid to that as it has an official Integrated DSP based Dolby Digital Content Encoder (DICE) onboard.Because there is licensing cost (Dolby) in the APU part, and in the MCP2-T there is also additional technologies (3Com Ethernet and Firewire) 3COM was also dropped from future boards as it added to the costs (thank god i bought 2!!! Cool )

The 'SoundStorm' isn't a sound card it's an integral part of the first- and second-generation nForce media and communications processors. Utilizing five DSPs (three fixed, two programmable) dedicated to audio processing, the NVIDIA nForce APU is both the muscle and brains behind the nForce audio system. http://www.nvidia.com/object/apu.html

http://www.nvidia.com/object/feature_soundstorm

Anyway, i have 512mb or RAM along with an XP2800+ Barton and the 9800 Pro. I do build my machines so maybe that's a factor?

Has Captstar tried lowering his sound hardware slider and see if that stops the crashing? If it does then it most likely is his sound card. I had terrible crashes with OFP and couldn't put my finger on it until i lowered my hardware slider on my (then) SBLive! When i bought my present board it *was* my SBLive! that was the problem as the older sound card was causing a bottleneck.
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xxxx
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Joined: 07 Jun 2004
Posts: 1755
Location: Canada

PostPosted: Tue Aug 17, 2004 1:51 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

thanks for the info, and true, i didn't check if he had a sound hardware acceleration but I don't like messing with that because then it requires you to go back and adjust it again for proper performance in another game. but ya, Capt.Star should change that in the audio properties. by the way, as funny as it sounds, i always build systems for people with top rated parts. currently my p4p800 SE is performing quite well.Capt.Star has a P4P800, both rewarded boards...and ya i really likfe nforce and it will likely be on my next board..Creative is another company not setting a foot in my pc from this point on. My feeling is nforce and that have caught up to them now and there is no need to rely on this monopoly anymore, especially more so that developers are designing games more for 5.1 which is standard pretty much on sound cards today..

devilhood, i don't agree it's severely bugged, i think the game upon release was actually very stable and I expected nothing less from Carmack and crew. If one thing Carmack does is ensure his engines are very stable. It's actually quite odd nobody came up with this crashing..there is a few things i learned. it's not that drivers are not current and chipset drivers are not current and it seems to be nothing to do with XP in general. I was thinking perhaps that it was a memory issue dealing with those with faster ram, dual channel in particular or bios settings. In Capt.Star machine I am unable to see all the settings in his bios..I could use the phone to confirm, but i'd rather wait and see what iD says as there are numerous threads on their forums about the same thing.

anyhow..

Hey stumpus, your board is really nice, check out the P4P800 SE, it is also very very nice. I still have a lot of life left in this board. Also, is the 5.1 standard across all cards? I have most of what you got, but probably no competition in sound but then I got and Audigy 2 that counts for something..Mmmm, nforce...

wow, this is a relatively clean conversation. Cool
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Sabot
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Joined: 11 Jun 2004
Posts: 2071
Location: The Dark Side of The Moon

PostPosted: Tue Aug 17, 2004 5:40 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Hey XXXX, here's a brilliant comparison review of the Audigy 2 V nVidia SoundStorm http://www.firingsquad.com/hardware/audigy2_versus_nforce2/default.asp

Just get CaptStar to type 'Dxdiag' (without the quotes) in the start/run box. Click the 'Sound' tab and slide the hardware slider down to 'none' or 'basic' You don't need to restart the machine to do this Wink

Then run DOOM3, if it works then cool, if not then just reverse the above.

That's a nice board you've got, but then it's made by ASUS as well! Cool The stability of the boards are excellent eh? You should bung in a 9800 Pro and you would be REALY flying with your games xxxx. Especialy now it's so cheap. The DOOM3 card review on the main page says "the 9700 Pro stumbles a little with Medium Quality and 4X antialiasing." Consider i can play DOOM3 with x2AA X2AF and HIGH textures and it's smooth should give you an idea what you'll get AND what HL2 will be like!! Shocked

What RAM do you have in your machine ie PC2700/3200?
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