650ti vs 660

[fr0stbyte124]

I would like to see more melee-based combat games adopt procedural fighting. Things like body positions and combo animations blending together in a physically plausible way and having some room to adapt the motion if things don't line up perfectly. Right now most games do it by teleportng everybody to their starting places and then playing back some static mocap performance. I think Assassin's Creed is getting there but still falls back on static positioning for combos and keeps the combat AI really basic, though to its credit it has enough variety that can pick combos sutable to everyone's positions.

The only game I can think of trying for the real thing is Overgrowth. Not only does it have adaptive animation, the NPC combat AI actually reacts to your own fighting style and simulates things like reaction times and anticipating your moves. Now how awesome would it be if that went even further, and you could actually juggle multiple enemies by correctly countering and comboing everything they throw at you, or darting between people to make the enemy's greater numbers work against them, like what you might see in a choreographed martial arts fight?

Instead we have a) engage one person at a time (or two if the other guy is standing in the right place) and dispatch them in preset ways while everyone else just sort of looks on in horror, or b) everybody just kind of wails on one another without any awareness or tactics and then the player wins either by kiteing them around or by tanking. I get that it's not easy, and contextual awareness is all sorts of complicated, but surely we can be doing better than what we have.

[Chairman_Tiel]

I just skimmed that, but there's nothing wrong with Skyrim's combat system, nor Oblivion's or Morrowind before that. It's a simplistic interface that's easy on the eyes and gets the job done. But we're talking about weapons here, not the overall system itself.

I myself have yet to fully explore all Skyrim has to offer in terms of weaponry, so you can imagine I'm all but amazed when someone says it's insufficient. If there was something that added weapons other than the generic Iron/Steel/Elven Longsword and integrated into the lore, I'd happily jump on. It's very hard to believe that something produced in, say, the Skyforge, is all but identical to a weapon created in a shanty Blacksmith shop. But as it is, most of these weapon mods are either jokes in themselves or are just there because they're 'cool'. Same goes for armor.

I wouldn't download 20+ item mods for stuff that could potentially break my enjoyment of the game by being too overpowered and/or too accessible. With most other games, you know, sure. If it's an FPS you've likely already completed it five times before. If it's a sandbox like Minecraft, it can only make the possibilities even more expansive. But in an RPG like Skyrim where you're interacting with everything else, adding all sorts of nonsense like the 'giant * of farting' or whatnot isn't going to serve to enhance gameplay.

And apparently fr0st is typing faster than me nowadays.

[hyperlite]

I am usually the last one to say this, but should we make a Skyrim topic? I mean, this was initially about a graphics card.

[fr0stbyte124]

@Tiel
Technically I'm pretty sure this was a PC recomendation thread, so it's all fair game. :p
I just don't like that the skyrim combat system is catered to brawling and kiteing, when I want to play as a technical fighter.

Also, once you've done all the primary questlines, I don't really see any reason not to play with the OP godmode mods. By that point your very existence as that one guy in all of Skyrim who runs every organization and is involved everything that has ever happened in recent memory would seem to strain credulity, anyway. If you want go full angry deity on the residents of Skyrim, it doesn't seem like that big of a leap.

Edit
@hyperlite
probably.

[Iv121]

I just skimmed that, but there's nothing wrong with Skyrim's combat system, nor Oblivion's or Morrowind before that. It's a simplistic interface that's easy on the eyes and gets the job done. But we're talking about weapons here, not the overall system itself.

I myself have yet to fully explore all Skyrim has to offer in terms of weaponry, so you can imagine I'm all but amazed when someone says it's insufficient. If there was something that added weapons other than the generic Iron/Steel/Elven Longsword and integrated into the lore, I'd happily jump on. It's very hard to believe that something produced in, say, the Skyforge, is all but identical to a weapon created in a shanty Blacksmith shop. But as it is, most of these weapon mods are either jokes in themselves or are just there because they're 'cool'. Same goes for armor.

I wouldn't download 20+ item mods for stuff that could potentially break my enjoyment of the game by being too overpowered and/or too accessible. With most other games, you know, sure. If it's an FPS you've likely already completed it five times before. If it's a sandbox like Minecraft, it can only make the possibilities even more expansive. But in an RPG like Skyrim where you're interacting with everything else, adding all sorts of nonsense like the 'giant * of farting' or whatnot isn't going to serve to enhance gameplay.

And apparently fr0st is typing faster than me nowadays.

Work on it a little bit and you will find what you need. The variety of weapon mods is so great that you will always find what you want, the hardest part is probably finding it out of all weapon mods. I should actually go to my museum and take some screens for you, and maybe fix it on the way as I did a cleanup there but never finished it for like a year now .

[Chairman_Tiel]

I was responding to Iv's post, not yours. Also, I didn't say anything about this being offtopic...?

[fr0stbyte124]

Lol, but it is so very, very off topic.

[Chairman_Tiel]

@Tiel
Technically I'm pretty sure this was a PC recomendation thread, so it's all fair game. :p

Contradicting yourself?

Nevar!

[hyperlite]

That monitor only has 1600 x 900 resolution, higher than my current setup, and that resolution had the higher benchmarks on games, as opposed to 1080 x 1920.

(1366 x 768) / 15.6 = 67,250 Current

(1600 x 900) / 20 = 72,000 New

Is this math a fair representation of the resolution of both monitors? Probably flawed due to something I don't want to think of.

So according to hypermath the new monitor should be better.

[Chairman_Tiel]

no d00d just get a mac

[Iv121]

Well it did became off-topic because the topic somehow shifted to modding O.o , this is complicated -.- .

[hyperlite]

@Tiel Be serious, we all have an equal hate for Macs and those who use them alike.
and apparently 4th grade hypermath isn't flawed, so I should be happy.

[fr0stbyte124]

That monitor only has 1600 x 900 resolution, higher than my current setup, and that resolution had the higher benchmarks on games, as opposed to 1080 x 1920.

(1366 x 768) / 15.6 = 67,250 Current

(1600 x 900) / 20 = 72,000 New

Is this math a fair representation of the resolution of both monitors? Probably flawed due to something I don't want to think of.

So according to hypermath the new monitor should be better.

Where higher resolution is going to help you is in web browsing and other Windows-based stuff, and for that 1080p really is awesome. You'll never want to go back.
For games, resolution is less important, with a few caveats. The first is that regardless of what you use, you should be playing at the native screen resolution or in windowed mode, or text and overlays will look bad. The other is that aliasing is naturally more obvious on lower resolution screens because the pixels are larger. You usually get the option to up the anti-aliasing, but this almost always kills your framerate.

A way around this is FXAA, which is a screen-space anti aliasing method and is very very fast. If your game allows you to use it (for instance, skyrim), turn off any other AA and use that. For games that don't, you may be able to force the option in your graphics control panel. It's a post processing effect so it will work on any game. You can even use it with Minecraft, and it works quite well.

Other AA methods of note (for future reference) (8xAA means a screen pixel is sampled in 8 places).

FSAA/SSAA - super sampling AA, also called full screen AA. Samples pixels to a buffer which is higher resolution than the screen, and then downsamples it for the final image. Hugely expensive and not very popular anymore.

MSAA - multi-sample AA. The most common type you will see. A subset of super sampling, but is a bit smarter about which parts it does at higher resolution. Attempts to super sample only in areas which might produce jaggies, using clues about depth and masking. Has the same memory requirements as SSAA, but is faster and is more popular in modern games.

QSAA - a technique made by NVIDIA, it's a faster and dirtier version of MSAA, using a different sampling pattern. 16x QSAA is roughly equivalent to 16x MSAA but for the cost of 8x MSAA. The downside is that textures look kind of smudged.

CSAA - NVIDIA, reduces the number of coverage samples for each pixel to speed up MSAA. If it looks like 8xQ CSAA, that is quality mode. Still uses the rest of the CSAA techniques, but bumps the samples back up the MSAA levels.

CFAA - AMD, samples outside the pixel boundary and uses edge detection to figure out whether those samples should influence the target pixel.

MLAA - Sony, another post processing AA, falls somewhere between 4x and 8x MSAA in terms of quality but very fast. Edge detection works similar to CFAA, but is faster.

SMAA - state of the art. Generally improved shape interpretation over FXAA (much better on diagonals) and is nearly as fast. Also has a temporal coherency step and is better at preserving text.

There are a few others, too, but what I've listed is most of what you'll ever encounter. CSAA and CFAA are comparable to the quality of MSAA but with better performance. You can safely use them in place of MSAA.

The general limitation of post processing AA is the inability to interpret objects too distant or thin to have a consistent appearance on the screen, like power lines. Some developers will go as far as using different AA methods for distant objects to avoid this.

For my money though, FXAA, MLAA, or SMAA if available are still the best choices. They do a great job unless you are being really nitpicky and cost almost nothing.

[fr0stbyte124]

While we are going over this stuff, Anistropic filtering is the other thing most people don't really understand. Essentially, it changes the way textures are sampled so that they look better at oblique angles.

The way it does this is by generating multiple versions of each texture which are squashed along the X or Y axis. Then depending on the the angle of the polygon, the texture lookup will sample one of these alternate textures to get a better idea of what it should look like on the screen.

Normally, a texture unit can only sample a point within a 2x2 patch of texels, so to get anything bigger you have to use a lower resolution version of the texture. AF allows you to take a lower resolution sample in one axis while preserving the image quality in the other direction, leading to a better sample on shallow angles.

AF is rarely very expensive so feel free to go nuts with it.

[hyperlite]

I have seen stuff about these while looking at benchmarks, and had no idea what they were. That helps clear things up.