Tomb Raider Underworld

[TooBoku]

Let this be a lesson to all you young boys out there...

NEVER FALL IN LOVE.

EVER.

Especially when you're a full-time student in university. All you'll ever do is think about her all day, want to be with her all the time, go places and see the world with her, and do whatever it takes to spend time with her. You'll just sit with her for hours doing nothing but looking at her ass all day when you should be studying. You'll spend money you shouldn't have spent on her but you were happy to do it anyway.

That right... I pre-ordered Tomb Raider Underworld and downloaded the demo to see how it runs on my computer. Should have been no problem. We're talking Athlon X2 4200+, nForce 570 chipset, 2GB of Crucial DDR2 PC6400+, Dual nVidia 7300GTs in SLI, and a 10,000RPM Raptor X. Parallel graphics processing, a CPU without a front side bus to hinder it, specially timed memory to run perfectly synchronized with each other, the fastest consumer grade hard drive available. This will kill any game out there no problem.

Except when I tried to run the Demo, it would crash my beautiful PC each time. Oh how I could not bare the irony of not seeing Lara. We've been together for over 11 years now but still, the sound of her voice is every bit as exhilarating as when we first met. Possibly even more. So unfortunately, for my wallet, I did what any guy would do... too overwhelmed by the fuzzy feelings that only the most wonderful woman in the world can give you, I went out and bought some upgrades. I got myself an Sapphire HD4670 and a pair OCZ 2GBs with heat pipes...

The game runs perfectly. This is some of the most intense graphics I've ever seen in the game. It's so much more than high bit texturing. We're talking polygons in the billions per map. Actual ocean waves in the water... ripples even. Lara actually gets dirty when she rolls around in the dirt. She gets sweaty. Her movement is more realistic than ever. She'll put her hands in front of her face if you're running her through a bush. She can shoot two targets at the same time now. She can jump on a tiger's head, do a back flip off of it, and shoot it. She stomps on giant spiders. That's right... actual melee action. It's rumored she has over 2000 animations in this game. I believe it. I took her to a cliff overlooking a cove and kept jumping into the water from like 50 feet... cannon balls, belly flops, swan dives, double twists... they actually got some gymnasts to come in and do motion acting for Lara.

I'm so friggin excited for this game.

It's coming out on XBox and PS3 too... not too sure about Wii. Wii barely ran Tomb Raider Anniversary.

Too bad I don't have time to play it

[alien777]

LOL, funny you should mention this. Just yesterday I was about to download the demo . The tomb raider series is a good one to have on the shelf. I will have to check and see if my system will run this resource hogger. The requirements are a bit high. What the hell, let me go download this now . Have fun!!!

[TooBoku]

hows your hardware bra?

[alien777]

I'm rocking a alienware area 51 7700 laptop. I've got a 3.8ghz Pentium 4 processor. 2gb of ram, wish I had more . An NVIDIA GeForce Go 7800 GTX Video card with 256 Ram. Uhhh two HD's running on Raid 0 200GB total, and a 17 inch screen. Most games run well, but some of the newer ones are a bit of hassle. I will have to try this game out though, its awesome! LARA RULES .

So whats the verdict, hows the game going along?

[TooBoku]

I haven't opened the shrink wrap yet

Studying...

The demo runs excellent though.

I'm not sure if underworld will run well on that

It was slow as heck running on my Dell E6400 with min settings. That's Centrino 2 Duo, 3 GB PC5300, 7200RPM HD, and Intel GM45 chipset.

[alien777]

Awww I see. Yeah its sad that we spend so much money on our setups, and within a year or two we are left in the dust. Oh and my HD's are at 7200 rpm's, forgot to mention that. Hmm maybe later on I'll get me a PlayStation 3, and not worry so much about these things. It tends to be more work than fun having a computer . The machine I have now is upgradable, only ram, HD's and I think there's a 512mb version of the video card. Easily a grand on all that! Way too much to play a game.

[TooBoku]

Tomb Raider is no mere game!

It is the feminine divine appearing to us in the form of pixels and polygons!

lol. Yeah... I'm not gonna upgrade again until 2010 or so...

http://www.hardware.info/en-UK/articles/am...and_Intel_CSI/1

[alien777]

LOL, yes I know! I think all of us when we were kids dreamed of having Lara as our girl hahahah. I guess were on the same page here, I will upgrade later down the line as well. There's allot of new technology that is progressing as we speak

[TooBoku]

So.... who you gonna be rooting for when you upgrade?

I'm partial towards AMD... at first I was kinda bummed they had to take over ATI because I'm also partial towards nVidia but the new ATI X2s are just killer. They do alot of special calculations hundreds of times faster than CPUs that either Intel or AMD x86 chips can ever dream of right now. They even have a special version of Folding @ Home just for ATI chips. It's insane.

It's litterally going to be millions of times better when Torrenzo hits the market.

I don't think Intel's CSI development is gonna realistically be able to compete with Torrenzo... It's prolly gonna hit the market at least a whole year after Torrenzo comes out and by then HyperTransport is gonna be on yet another generation ahead.

It's gonna be sick. ATI X4s running in AM3 Sockets... Direct access to the CPU. It's gonna obselete EVERYTHING including PS3.

[TooBoku]

Waaaaaah!! :'(

I'm stuck in Mexico and I'm farther ahead than anyone else I know so no advice from them. Boo boo boo. I think I'm farther ahead than the folks writing the walkthroughs too.

[TooBoku]

Yay! Toobs beat Tomb Raider...

It was kinda short actually. Only took 6 hours of good game time.

[TooBoku]

I'm actually kind of disappointed that Underworld is lacking a lot of features that the previous versions had.

First, the most important is that you don't have the option of replaying a certain level after you've beaten it. It's very discouraging if you've missed a few artifacts or the relic in one level, and have them all in the levels before. You've got to replay the entire game up to that point if you want to find one relic.

Next, they don't show you your stats at the end of each section or even level. I don't even know if there's a time trial or not but the older games used to say how many secrets you found, how much time you took, how many bad guys you took out, if you've made the time trial or not.... nothing in this version. It just pushes you on through to the next level without giving you the notice that you've passed.

And, I'm kinda pooped out that you have a limitted choice in skins when replaying a level. In Legend if you were able to unlock Amanda, you could play the game as Amanda... Who happends to be quite hot in her own right in this game. You could even be Natla or the Doppleganger. Nada.

You don't even have the Croft Manor side quests. BS.

[alien777]

Ohh you beat it!! That's really great man. Oh well to be honest with you, I'm usually geared towards Intel based processors. I guess it all depends on the technology and which one has something better to offer, and is available with the computer I'm purchasing. Usually I prefer to buy a machine already built. Getting it custom built is a good idea especially to save some cash, but warranty is very important especially with all the money involved in getting such a setup. Besides that, as far as video cards go...Nvidia is a good company, but then again like you mentioned before ATI is making some sick cards, so opinions do change ... For now I'm pretty happy with my machine.

By the way, I went to this website http://www.systemrequirementslab.com/referrer/srtest

And my lappy seems to be able to run tombraider, probably not at high resolutions though . Well I shouldn't say that, I was able to run FEAR at 1920x1080 with full detail. The only problem is heat, this thing starts to produce tons of it! Even with 4 fans! It starts to get kind of laggy.

I actually thought PS3's were going to dominate the gaming industry, but it seems PC's are still in the fight to make systems faster and better (Obviously). Now with SSD Drives OMG that's going to be killer. I always thought that would be a great idea, but I guess the big companies beat me to it Oh well. I'm going to wait a bit more until this technology, and the one you mentioned earlier is a bit cheaper, so I can start dishing out some dough.

Cant wait :D

[TooBoku]

So how do you game with your laptop? Do you hook it up to a dock or something? Have you tried cooling the air before it hits the fans? I personally don't do any hardcore gaming on my laptop. I even had a crappy video card put in it so I don't get tempted to game in class. It's just too much of a hassle upgrade, unlike in a desktop where every part has a standardized interface. Watercooling is easier too.

Yeah, nVidia is a half decent chip maker. They used to be the best, they even have the Agiea PhysX accelerators. Too bad it's outdated though. When ATI got bought out by AMD, they just got access to three of the best technologies out today... X2 architecture, HyperTransport, and Direct Connect.... I also highly doubt nVidia will have anything great out when AMD releases Torrenza.

I wouldn't hop on the SSD bandwagon just yet... They're fast but none of the Operating Systems actually support them quite yet. The memory has a finite number of writes on it and is prone to wear out much more quickly than the regular old platters.

2010... that's when the good stuff will be ready. If you could hold out with just minimal upgrades until then, you won't regret it. Windows 7 should be somewhat stable by then, hopefully with reasonable SSD support, and the OEMs will have specialized accelerators available for multi-socket HyperTransport systems.

[alien777]

My laptop actually has some function over the way the fans run... So what I do is higher the velocity of the fan when I'm playing games, and I just put on some earphones to block out the noise ... there quite loud! Usually I don't really do any heavy duty gaming, so it really isn't necessary.

Yeah Nvidia is decent, hopefully they will come out of the shadow of ATI one day and surprise us once more. For now there just playing it cool.

I couldn't agree with you more, buying a new machine right now isn't really worth it, there are too many technologies out there that need to be bug free. SSD is one of them that need to be standardized as other parts of the computer. Hopefully as soon as possible, I really think its a great idea. At the mean time I will sit back and enjoy whats in front of me for now...

P.S I'm actually thinking of making the transition to MAC. I know it sounds crazy for a windows user to say it, but I actually like the way they work. On the plus side I'll learn two operation systems. As for gaming, who knows maybe by 2010 there will be a wider variety of games out for it . Let sit an watch

[TooBoku]

Mac is actually a decent platform. It's really easy to learn and unlike Windows, it actually follows the conventions of proper interface design. Windows just needed to make their OS different enough so they didn't get hit by patents. The thing about new Macs though is that now that they're no longer RISC processors and they've moved on to the x86 based Intels, they can now also run Windows. Still don't be expecting to be gaming on your Mac. That's old news. Believe it or not, despite Mac's gaining popularity, there's fewer games for it now than there was 10 years ago. If any exist today. I used to play the original Unreal Tournament on Mac and that was about 10 years ago. Blame it on Microsoft and DirectX. Despite OpenGL just being plain all around better performance wise, DirectX was easier to program for. DirectX 10 now, along with the Vista kernel are actually a great improvement. You actually notice a great difference between running DirectX 9 on an XP machine, hacked up DirectX on an XP machine, and DirectX 10 on a Vista machine that have the exact same hardware. Hence all the PC games now coming out with that "Games for Windows" logo.

I'm kinda hoping nVidia comes out with something good soon too. Realistically though, they really need to be working closely with Intel on this. They need to get heavily involed in the CSI and Geneseo projects. If not ATI will crush them. They're already producing double performance at the same price range. ie. 9600GT vs HD4670

[alien777]

That's interesting, I had no idea macs had less games now than before, I could of sworn they had more now. Well there is always the possibility to partition the HD, and dual boot Vista and Leopard. I saw some youtube videos of guys doing this, and there machines run flawlessly. Who knows there may be some flaws I didn't notice, or some issues with hardware compatibility. Yeah "Games For Windows" all the games have that, I wondered why they labeled the games like that.

WOW double the performance for the same price! This is really bad news for them, they gotta be hiding something really amazing in there labs. Maybe there waiting for just the right moment to release it. I heard a while back that they were embedding there GPU's in cell phones for gaming. Doesn't look like that took off you really don't hear about it at all.

My ultimate dream would be to have a decent sized laptop, partially a 17 if not 15 inch with SSD technology up and running (1 tereabyte of space) , a blazing processor, and one sick ATI GPU. If only Mac would release such a machine. Oh and not to mention tablet style screen for some Photoshop work. LOL I guess everyone dreams of stuff like that, but when it gets released we want 20 terabytes and a hologram screen for next year

[TooBoku]

Yeah "Games For Windows" all the games have that, I wondered why they labeled the games like that.

Because everyone makes games for XBox... which just so happens to use DirectX. Something Windows uses anyway. Microsoft dudes are geniuses.

Unfortunately, I think NVidia used their last trump card when buying out Ageia. No more tricks up their sleeves until the CSI thing gets rolling... which I think is just a bluff from Intel to be honest. They have a lot of research and development to do to get where AMD is with Torrenza... and I suspect in late 2009 to mid 2010 AMD will have another year or two of superior products while waiting for Intel to catch up.