Topic: PC Gaming

i hate it. it has become difficult to find products that dont have RGBs. everything has RGBs nowadays. my mouse has RGBs in it. i didnt want them but i couldnt find a better alternative in that price range.
my case only has some blue light at the front though. not RGBs thankfully. and my keyboard has some blueish backlight which is super useful.

Major sale, grabbed all kinds of stuff.

I hate it when games don’t allow a mouse to connect at same time as controller, because properly mapping Gyro needs to be as a mouse input. Mouse-like joystick is an... ok, alternative, but it’s definitely not preferable. Call of Duty WWII has to use Mouse Joystick, fyi.

But Borderlands 3? That takes mouse input for gyro. It feels just as slick as Borderlands 2 and Pre-Sequel on Switch. Love it when games nail it like that.

Then there’s games like Deus Ex Human Revolution and Remnant From the Ashes that accept mouse input for Gyro, but for some reason stutter when moving the analogs while aiming with gyro at the same time. Which means leaving it always on is not really an option. Which is OK because these games work better when you only have it activated when zooming in anyways, but it does mean the minor restriction of not moving while zoomed in. Which is fine I guess.

That Panzer Dragoon remake for PC still hasn't come out yet, it seems?

Horizon Zero Dawn has gone up for pre-purchase.... 7th August release

@Vinny I don't much care either way. I have an RGB keyboard, but I really just wanted backlit keys but just plain old backlit wasn't an option. I have them set at a static, dimmed colour, just right for being able to see them in low light and disabled the effects.
My mouse has the same thing, RGB lights on the 12 thumb buttons. These ones I do like the RGB because it has profiles for the buttons, so it changes colour depending on the profile I'm using, so this is at least actually somewhat useful.

Horizon with gyro. Finally will be able to properly enjoy the game. Coming off Zelda it was tough going to Horizon with pure sticks. Already preordered on Steam.

I think the other thing that put me off was how cinematized they made it. It’s a running theme for PlayStation focused games. They just love to make the camera zoomed up behind the character to show you all that “super cool high level graphical fidelity“ of the sword on their back or the bow they’re carrying... ugh. Final Fantasy VII is even more ridiculous. Not only do they do that very same thing but then they spontaneously take control away from the player as you’re playing the game so that you can’t turn the camera or run, all in the name of “look how good the graphics looks from this angle as he walks for 17 miles!”. Can’t stand it. So many games that would otherwise be amazing yet I just throw the controller in rage because I CANNOT STAND when they do that crap. Perfectly good games ruined by catering to a fanbase that apparently prefers glitz over gameplay. Or maybe the devs just think they do... No, that’s not it. People eat it up and I don’t see a single complaint about it from reviewers or gamers. Apparently people love that stuff. I can’t stand it. I absolutely LOATHE zoomed in cameras behind backs to pander to the glitz and glamour crowd (first thing I did in MH World was go into settings and change the gosh darn zoomed in camera to FAR), but taking control away from the player, repeatedly, without going into a cutscene so you EXPECT to be able to turn a camera or run, but you can’t, then 20 seconds later you can, then 2 minutes later you can’t... it just tests my patience to the limits.

Gotta hand it to the Steam controller once again.

Some games don’t play well with mapping gyro as a mouse input (which is what you want- mouse-emulated joystick kinda works if all else fails, but it’s nowhere near as good- because it maps a circular zone to a rectangle, the more your direction deviates from X or Y, the faster the movement is. 45 degree angle motions are twice as fast as up or down, because of this).

The problem is some games are not designed to detect a mouse at the same time as a controller, so whenever you move using Gyro it “disconnects” the other buttons and analog sticks. And because of that you get a delay and stutter if you try to move while aiming with Gyro and immediately after you stop aiming with Gyro. It’s essentially a dealbreaker. Hence why mouse-like joystick was created to emulate mouse.

But here’s the thing.

Using Steam Controller, you can map everything as mouse and keyboard. Literally everything. So it never detects a controller. Only a mouse and keyboard. And because of that there is no stutter when using Gyro. Now, you do have to make sure you choose the template that says “Keyboard and Mouse” and not the template that says “Gamepad”. Or when choosing a community file you should choose one that is using entirely keyboard and mouse mapping’s rather than gamepad mappings or a mixture of the both. You don’t always have to do this because a lot of games do detect both a gamepad and a mouse at the same time without issue. But some do not. Halo Master Chief Collection is one of those games.

And the first time I tried playing I ran into that issue. Because at the time I didn’t have knowledge extensive enough about how bindings work to understand how a Steam controller could get around this issue. I tried with a SC, but I experienced the same problems because I was using it to map to a gamepad and then map the Gyro to a mouse. Now I understand you have to map everything to a keyboard and mouse without any gamepad bindings at all. If you do, it works flawlessly. Absolutely flawlessly.

Do you know what this means? It means that literally any game on steam can be played with proper Gyro without issue if you have a steam controller. I suppose you could try to map keyboard and mouse to a gamepad but I’m not sure how that would work out with the right analog stick mapping to a mouse zone (an ACTUAL mouse mapping, not mouse joystick- it may present similar issues, or not even work at all). But who knows, maybe it works great.

But the key take away here is this: every gyro-loving PC gamer needs a Steam Controller. It’s absolutely essential for console gaming on a PC.

Yay, free games .... Ghost Recon Wildlands & Breakpoint, from Ubi's pre-show! Anyone here play either to tell me more about them?

totally free? breakpoint has a free weekend i think.
only free game was watch dogs 2 but their servers were down due to high demand

They had codes during their pre-show & they're allowing people to register for WD2 now .... EDIT, https://support.ubisoft.com/en-US/News/000056669/Ubisoft-Forw...

Can’t say I care much about Watch Dogs. Didn’t like the first on Wii U, and didn’t like the second on PS4. Never bothered getting them on Steam. Being Uplay versions, I‘d just rather not waste the precious SSD space. That said, I probably should’ve claimed it just to have the ownership. No reason not to. Oh well.

Played some Death Stranding the other day. I had played it a bit on PS4. Didn’t really like it then but since I’m migrating my collection from Xbox/PS to Steam, I went ahead and bought it.

I do like the cutscenes, the graphics and the intriguing story. It was enough to keep me glued for the first chapter or two. But the gameplay... just not my thing. It really and truly is of the walking sim genre. It’s not even hyperbole. It’s the single biggest high-budget AAA walking sim that has ever, and likely will ever, exist.

And that’s not necessarily a bad thing if that’s a genre you love. If you’re into walking sims, this is gonna be GOTY for you. It puts other walking sims to utter shame lol. I mean, if you’re gonna make a walking sim, go all the way at least, and that they most definitely do. Though, I suppose it’s more accurate to describe it as a post-apocalyptic on-foot USPS sim. Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds Salute.

Yeah, I definitely am not getting Death Stranding .... Recently finished off Watch Dogs 2 & liked it a lot, so I'm definitely hyped for Legion!

anyone like battletoads?

Here's a monitor question for you PC guys. I'm really looking for console use (for now) but that's a non-issue. My current gaming setup is a 23" IPS 1080p display...I sit within .75-3ft away from it.

I'm currently looking at either a 27" 4k IPS or 27" 1440p curved VA.....

I've always always always bought IPS whenever possible.... The last "VA" I owned was a 4:3 PMVA early generation LCD. It was ok, but had horrendous viewing angles....that was 15 years ago or so so it means little. But IPS "gray blacks" and lack of contrast annoy me. Everything always looks kind of flat color. I hate TN and the color/contrast falloff at angles, and I keep hearing horror stories of motion blur on VA monitors, especially running them at 60hz if it's a 144hz panel.

Yet, at my close viewing distances, the curve really appeals to me (as does the higher contrast.) Though I would likely be sitting slightly off-center so it might make the curve a con rather than pro.

Anyone with experience with curved VA displays vs 4k IPS?

(FWIW, I don't REALLY care about 4k gfx...and think it's largely a waste, but at close distances, the "screen door" annoys me, even at 23" 1080p. Scaling 1080p to 4k is still an improvement to me, as the smoothed over lack of the screen door is a big thing to me. I assume 1440p has a significant improvement to me as well.)

Just a PSA to everyone in the PC-verse, I suspect there's some level of brute forcing attempts at least for Blizzard/b.net going on or some other company that was compromised somewhere - possibly Blizzard/Activision. I'm getting a bunch of emails about login attempts and password reset requests for my account. I haven't logged into battle.net in a decade or so, so that was a surprise to see. I changed the password to that account to a very high entropy one, but I still see a few login attempt emails. Considering I haven't actually used the account since the original launch of Starcraft II, it's safe to say someone is trying email addresses recently obtained from "somewhere" - and the fact that they'd aim to try on b.net specifically makes me wonder if that's the source of the email leak - but presumably without passwords leaked. It could be just a personal, targeted use of my info from somewhere else, but it seems odd that I'd be in any way connected to a Blizzard account when I haven't played any Blizzard games on PC where the account is used since 2010, from before Blizzard was even Activision, so I'm guessing it's just a list of email address obtained from somewhere.

@NEStalgia
IMO, 4k isn’t necessary for monitors. For huge TVs, it makes sense, but monitors, my brother just uses 1440p. The big thing to look for is whether it has adaptive sync (or g-sync if you have Nvidia GPU). This adapts the frame rate of the monitor screen to match the game as it fluctuates so that you don’t see stutters or drops as the frame rate fluctuates. If you really want to go for 4K I suppose there’s nothing wrong with that, I think 1440p would be just fine.

Btw, I get emails for Steam login attempts all the time. But I have two factor authorization turned on so I don’t worry about it.

Can’t comment on curved, but I would just get what you want. If the curved screen appeals to you then go for a curved screen. If you’re going to sit off-center from it then I would probably just get a normal screen, or you could just turn the screen to be perpendicular to wherever you’re sitting. Problem solved.

https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey

where do you guys sit? planning to upgrade in the near future?

list it !

have you looked at the usage of cpu/gpu/etc while playing?

Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon Wildlands I love it. The graphics make look everything realistic. But it works on high-quality graphic card. They have fixed some freezing issues.

@JaxonH Thanks. Better late than never! But I ended up going with a 27" 4k/60 panel a few weeks back

Regarding 4k I've had 2 observations over time. While I don't believe in "4k detail!" at all, and think that aspect is overhyped, I think 4k, when playing on a monitor, has two distinct advantages. First, I think 4k RENDERING is more important than a 4k display. That is, supersampling has such a positive effect on AA/jaggies/sparkles without smearing/blurring like most FSAA that for close playing on a monitor, even a 1080p monitor, 4k rendering has significant value in the IQ.

On the flip side, I don't think going over 1080p has any real advantage at all on a TV at normal viewing distances. I have a 55" DLP RP and a 100+" front projector at at 1080p. Even at that size, at the distance I doubt I could make out significantly better picture even at 8k. Monitors need the res/higher dpi more than TVs IMO, but the marketing and manufacturing puts it all into TVs and rarely into monitors. It's weird.

The second is, that once you get to 24" or above, the "screen door effect" starts having a serious impact on image, at least to me, at 1080p. Maybe 1440p is more than fine to solve that, though. Honestly I've never been happy with 1080p LCD displays. I used to have one of those great Diamondtron aperture grille CRTs, and switching from that to a 1080p panel felt like watching the whole game (and even text applications) through a screen door. I never felt 1080 was enough for a matrix technology you sit close to.

All that said, curved displays intrigue me greatly for a variety of reasons, however it seems like the main reason curved monitors exist isn't really because of the advantages of a curve (other than ultrawides), but to counteract the colossal problems of VA panel tech and the uneven contrast/color. So it's a solution for a panel limitation, not an improvement for ergonomics, primarily. Though there is a secondary benefit to the latter.

All that said, I'm focusing on console more than PC (but asked in the PC thread because it's a PC part most console players aren't using ). Despite the 120fps hype, we all know most games will be 30/60 fps. And even on PC I'd probably emphasize res over 120fps. It seems like the VA panels all have some ghosting/motion problems even at native 144, but apparently the lower you go from their native refresh, the worse the ghosting/motion problems become. The high contrast is cool and all, but to me it seems like VA is still a screwy tech that probably doesn't belong in gaming, despite all the gaming monitors. I assume the prevalence of those has more to do with getting very high refresh rates cheap than it does about it really being great display tech otherwise.

So I went traditional. I could have gone 1440p flat IPS 144Hz for the same price, but I'm not going to be pushing 120Hz even for years I imagine, mostly 30-60fps. So I went with the traditional. 4k60 IPS HDR400 (no monitor does HDR very well, so...it is what it is.) It was the best 4k panel around for a few years ago and is like 40% cheaper than it was originally, so that's not bad at all.

I'm pretty impressed with it so far. Haven't used it so much yet. It's still switch handheld season for me. I did some loose tests of a few games and the display is quite beautiful. HDR isn't going to compare to HDR1000 (do you really want 1000 nits 12" from your face, anyway?) on an OLED or with full array dimming but it does OK, mostly benefiting from the wider gamut than anything else. Decent picture, decent scaler. Looks good, no screen door, more brightness than I can handle, at "only" 400 nit (or less, energy saver is on low.) I'm pleased.

Played some Splatoon on it....looks amazing. My charger skills got a boost That's using the internal scaler, albeit with an mCable outside the Switch, but the mCable does no scaling. Switch is set to 1080p, game is native 1080p, and the mCable can't scale 4k/60, so it does nothing, it's just the monitor's internal scaler working with the improved edge contrast from the mCable.

TECHNICALLY 720p to 1440p and 1080p to 4k should be trivial in scaling, it's just pixel doubling. It's when you go between uneven multiples it becomes interpolated disasters.