Topic: PC Gaming

I basically got a PC for Boneworks.

Was it worth it? Yes.
Is the game fun? Also yes.
Is it some of the most painful, stressful, aggrevating games I've ever played? Absolutely.

So um can't wait to play Bonelab.

I played a bunch more Midnight Suns and I am kinda coming around to it. I think combat can be unnecessarily frustrating, there is enough randomness in the hands you pull that a lot of missions where they are based on specific objectives like protect a thing or whatever, it just sorta feels hopeless. But, as my roster of heroes grows, and I pull more and more new cards, better defining who each hero is through their decks, I am vibing with the combat a lot more. Especially during the story missions which are usually just a 'kill everything' objective followed by a boss battle. They seem to save a lot of the frustrating objectives for the completely optional side content.

In terms of the stuff outside of combat, yeah, it feels like I am reading fanfiction written by a socially awkward, lonely, 14 year old and the acting isn't much better but I just... I dunno man, I kinda like the vibes. It feels like everything wants to be grimdark and edgy these days, but this is just like pure good vibes and energy. Sure the majority of the cast are basically stroppy teenagers, but basically all anyone wants to do is be your friend, hangout and fight bad guys together and I dunno, it is just kinda nice. I just settle into the chill. It is also nice that unlike say something like Persona or Three Houses which this is clearly heavily inspired by, there aren't really deadlines or things you can miss as far as I can tell. You just do everything at your own pace, everything is carefully structured for you as a player, so you can just settle in and let it take you on a vibe ride.

@SlashFuture
Eh, you're just as well off watching the game on YouTube as you are playing it. Don't get me wrong, it can still be fun to play through, but the games are heavily, and I mean heavily story driven, to the extent that's really the sole focus.

Game runs fine for me on SteamDeck though, and on my PC, at least from the little I've played anyways, so it could be something on your end? Is your PC powerful enough to run it? If a game is too taxing it can cause a crash from memory overload (not enough RAM) or overheating.

Or, maybe the game just isn't stable, Idk.

Nothing wrong with playing on a PC with limited specs. My first PC was a 1Ghz AMD Duron with 128MB of RAM and a NVidia RIVA TNT2. I later added another 256MB of RAM for a massive 384MB. Forget frames per second, some games even back in the day on that thing ran at seconds per frame!

Joking aside, if you're running Intel Xe graphics my suggestion would be to not go out of the way to buy into high end titles. Put your expectations in check a bit. There are plenty of games out there that are super well optimised. Also with a CPU around that spec you're probably going to be pretty good with a lot of world-sims/strategy type games. Games that are generally more CPU bound

Hmmm, having some annoying trouble while trying to get my gaming laptop working with my TV.

Seems the TV (Sony Bravia KD43XG8096BU) is compatible with 2160p at 60hz, and 1080p at 60hz...but only up to 30hz for 1440p. This is a real pain considering the majority of games I'm interested in playing run fine up to 1440p 60fps, but most have no chance of 2160p 60fps.

Any suggests here? Is it possible to make my laptop output at 2160p 60fps, while rendering my games at 1440p (and doing some upscaling magic in the process)? By my understanding this is how a large number of "4k" console games work, no?

Just very annoying to have to compromise at 1080p 60fps when I can get the extra power out of the thing...

@F-ZeroX I do actually have Compound on my wishlist. But I haven't played it yet.

As for the games I recommend, Boneworks, Half Life Alyx, and Blade and Sorcery.

@Buizel
A lot of games have a setting for "render scale" which will allow you to run the game at a different resolution to the output. So 1080p with a render scale of 200% would be running it at 4K and outputting at 1080p. And 4K 50% would run the game at 1080p and output to 4K. Alternatively you could use FidelityFX or DLSS if its a more modern title, run it at 4K with performance mode or something

Also a lot of recent titles have the dynamic detail scaling carried across from consoles. So you could set a target of 4K/60fps and turn that on and it'll just turn the detail down until it reaches the target. Although this option probably isn't quite as ideal because 1080p "Ultra" generally looks better than 4K "Medium"

@skywake thanks for the suggestion - I'll look out for this in the next few titles I choose to play. A shame its something I have to check on a game-by-game basis but alas, that's PC gaming for you!

@Cotillion oh it's definitely a TV problem. For some reason the thing is built to support 1080p and 2160p at 60fps, but 1440p at only 30fps.*

I'm essentially wondering if I can circumvent this by having my game render at 1440p, but stretch it across a 2160p resolution so that I can achieve 60fps output.

*maybe it's a scaling challenge? The TV resolution is 2160p so it would be a simple integer upscale from 1080p. Maybe the extra processing required for 1440p is the reason the supported refresh rate is lower.

@Cotillion @Buizel
I remember reading about Sony TVs being a bit funky with 1440p when I was doing some reading before I picked up my OLED. Looking it up again I believe it does support 1440p but it doesn't report as supporting it to Windows. So you have to set a custom resolution and support it. Also apparently there are some issues with VRR at 1440p on Sony's recent TVs...

Personally, I feel like 1080p/Ultra/120Hz + VRR is the place to be. 4K with all that if you have some kind of monster GPU that can handle it. 1440p is a nice place to be nice but.... not something I'd bother with on a TV given you're going to do some uneven scaling anyways

I never trust a TV to do an internal upscale if I can help it.

For what it's worth, I find that 1080p looks good enough on the TV because you're usually too far away to pick out the finer details of a 4K display from sofa distance. Those with truly humongous sets or particularly acute eyesight may beg to differ, of course. It's certainly not as obvious as when you've got a 4K monitor on a desk a couple of feet away from your face though.

@skywake @Matt_Barber Yeah I think I'm gonna settle on 1080p for the most part (a shame my TV doesn't support higher refresh rates...but it is a low-end 4k TV so I get what I pay for).

I do agree about the difference between 1080p, 1440p and 4k though. I notice a slight change in sharpness (and strangely even moreso, contrast) when switching between resolutions but...once I'm a few minutes into the game at 1080p I stop thinking about it.

I am on the back half of Act 2 in Midnight Suns right now, and man the difficulty in this game has gotten ROUGH. I swear every tactics game I have ever played hits this divergent point in the middle of the way through where you either end up becoming so OP the back half of the game is a total joke, or the back half becomes a total joke because the designers spike up the difficulty in cheap, bulls***y, artificial ways that are almost 90% luck, and the rest skill, so you just have to either turn the difficulty down or save scum every turn. I'm just turning the difficulty down.

I really do think the main problem is the card system, and the convoluted way you earn effectively like currency to pay for moves during the course of a turn. It is very much designed in a way where players are not meant to use anything as designed, but to instead find ways to break things and free themselves of the shackles this system artificially traps the player within.

For just regular battles where you just need to fight enemies and there are no real objectives the system works, but there are so many time sensitive mechanics introduced in Act 2 that if not achieved in time cause battles to violently spiral out of control, but there is absolutely nothing the player can do to protect themselves from a bad hand. Well there sorta is, because you can just build decks out of lower cost cards, but not doing enough damage then creates it's own problems and just yeah, it isn't very fun.

Like the whole XCOM miss at a 99% chance to hit thing is it's own kind of frustration, but literally not being able to do anything for multiple turns because you keep pulling bad hands, while the game tells you how ***** you are at the game and gives you a bad rating, I just have to turn the game off and walk away.

Help, I've got two monitors and I don't know how to do a dual setup I only got one HDMI port and all the guides I'm finding online are just for the software side of things.

What I'm asking is, how do you connect two monitors to a PC.

@Kermit1 What sort of PC have you got?

Desktop graphics cards typically have one HDMI and three DisplayPort outputs these days. Ideally you'd connect two of the DisplayPorts to your monitors, although - if your monitors only have HDMI inputs - you can use the HDMI port and one of the DisplayPorts with an adapter.

If you're on integrated graphics you might have an older style DVI port as well as the HDMI. These can also be converted to HDMI or DisplayPort with adapters if you can't plug it straight into your monitor.

If it's a laptop, it'll probably only have one HDMI port built in and you'll need a dock to support a multi-monitor setup.

@Matt_Barber Um, no joke after righting that I found a Reddit post where someone explained everything.

I need to get a VGA cable is what I found out.

My PC is an HP Pavillion btw.

VGA will work at a pinch but it gives a noticeably worse picture than any of the other options because the signal is analogue and prone to degradation and interference.

If you've got an older PC it might be your only option though, and it's better than nothing.

I was reminded that Ryse: Son of Rome existed a few days ago, so today I looked it up on Steam and apparently it's only $10 now (not even on sale), so I decided to give it a go.

Having fun with it so far. Combat kinda feels like the Arkham games, just with a sword (you'll usually be surrounded by enemies & combat revolves around getting into a groove parrying/dodging attacks before getting a couple hits in yourself before you have to dodge/deflect the next attacking enemy). Once an enemy's health is low they'll get a skull icon above them which indicates you can finish them with a very gory QTE finisher (I don't think you can fail these, you just don't get as much exp when you press the wrong button).

I tried out like an hour of Forspoken on PC just to see how bad it was, given those meme system requirements they put out and given it seems they seemingly gave out no PC review codes at all, so so far I haven't seen any PC performance reviews from any legitimate sources.

At least in my own experience, stuff is certainly... mixed. My PC isn't *****, but it isn't like high end either. I got a 2070 Super, 32 gig of ram and a AMD Ryzen 7 3800X. I didn't even get to the open world, and even running everything either on low, standard and off completely coupled with DLSS at Quality in a serious of opening environments which are basically just low detail corridors I was only just about able to keep my FPS above 60 fps and it did dip slightly below it at times still. That suggests an awful, poorly optimised PC port, because it is surely going to get even worse in the open world.

However, even with all of this being true, it still looked significantly better than it did when running it on performance mode on PS5. And you have to understand, when I play games on PS5 it is hooked up to my TV whereas on PC I have my face practically smushed against the monitor. So I have absolutely no idea how low all the settings/resolution must be on PS5 to get that thing running, but that suggests to me the game is just poorly built in general, rather than it just being a bad PC port.