unr3al

You'd be surprised at what that can do sometimes. I remember Modern Warfare (the first one) giving me issues way back when. I installed/uninstalled it 3 times on my main HD. Nothing worked. Installed it to the D drive instead, and what do you know: worked fine.

Not sure what to say, man. Did you turn off VSync? Do you have forced AA on or anything like that?

I hate to say it, but I'm convinced kids are usually the problem among the masses of people in these video games. There are very rarely adult trolls or troublemakers causing these problems. They're the ones who whine in game chat, they're the ones who accuse of hacking, their the ones that try to spam websites, they're the ones that behave like an idiot on forum boards. Kids who weren't raised right by their parents are like a plague. It's too bad there is no one single guide that all parents can follow to get their kids to turn out right. Because as petty as video game nonsense may be, crappy kids grow up to be crappy adults who ruin more important things. And k9police 9, this topic didn't even need to be created, never mind when it could have ended.

Taking an indignant tone with me is a bad way to start off talking to me, friend. Consider that before you respond to me, if you're going to. Back to business: 1.) Today's high end games and multimedia applications make extensive use of dual core CPU systems, and in many cases can take advantage of three or four physical CPU cores. Cases in point would be modern video games such as Battlefield, Call of Duty, Max Payne, Crysis, Hitman, S.T.A.L.K.E.R., Counter Strike: GO and Elder Scrolls, to name a few. High end multimedia applications are making extensive use of systems with high core counts, and in programs such as Audition, Photoshop, Premier, After Effects ProTools and Acid, there is a huge difference for loading time, saving time and compression. Your point is valid for older titles, but multi-core software isn't going away. 2.) You're referring to Scaleable Link Interface or CrossFireX? Yes, I had a CrossFireX setup no more than two years ago, a ball bearing in one of my fans broke and forced me to switch out my graphics card setup, otherwise I'd still be running it now. It greatly improves performance at high resolutions and is a wonderful way of getting cutting-edge performance in games that support it with a couple of 600 series high end graphics cards as opposed to buying a $1000 GTX TITAN, as an example. 3.) As you said in your first point; it depends on if the program can take advantage of the other cores, So the choice is up to the developer. 4.) This is only true in a single threaded application. Most new games today are not single threaded, certainly not the blockbuster ones everyone likes to talk about. Today's gaming consoles are also multi-core in their CPU design, and as a result, nobody's going to port over one of those titles to a PC and attempt to redesign the game engine to use one core, even if the instruction sets are better or whatever advantages an Intel would have over a PowerPC CPU or a Sony Cell CPU. 5.) Where did you get that information? Even a simple task managing application could show you differently. Or maybe you can look up some PC tech demos back from when quad cores were new. Alan Wake was originally supposed to be designed for a simultaneous PC release, and the developers suggested you should have a dual core at a minimum, or quad core for optimal performance. As in certain scenarios, the active weather system originally designed for the game could take up an entire core's usage by itself. I'm not going to sit here and tell people that every single application benefits from a multi-core CPU, and it's because they don't. As you and I have both already said, it depends on if they application in question is written to take advantage of them. The number of those applications are on the incline, not the decline. And although there will likely be a limit to the number of cores we can fit onto a piece of silicon, multi-core CPU's with better instruction sets are going to be what we see as technology evolves until we can move on to another material that can achieve the higher clock speeds you want, like graphite. IBM made a graphite processor that clocked in at 100Ghz. The problem is nobody from Intel or AMD wants to re-fit their entire factory for production line using graphite and re-train all of their engineers to design using that material. Just as car companies behave with gasoline, they probably won't move away from oil until there is none left. Only then will they change how all of their cars operate. When they have no other choice. Technology companies will behave in kind. They won't change their design and assembly philosophy until they can't avoid it any longer.

U.S. copyright laws also suggest that vehicles have to have at least a couple of subtle differences in them too beyond the brand on the hood/trunk. It's the reason why the CVPI "Vapid" in GTA IV has the 1990's style Crown Vic tail lights instead of the ones from the early 2000's and after, and why the Chevy Impala (DeClasse) has square tail lights instead of the round ones.

I don't understand it. Can't there be a popular video game without politics involved? This one isn't even a competitive multiplayer game where egos commonly get in the way. This is an offline mod for a low population game. Just play the game.

Responding first to sgtdonuts; speed is not always better. A single core can only process one instruction at a time, and higher clock frequencies produce insane amounts of heat, which is why gamers often have to resort to aftermarket cooling solutions using precious metals and minerals, or liquids. Multicore processing is a huge part of the future of computing, and for that matter, the present. Graphics cards can have hundreds, even thousands of cores that can process many instructions at once at a slower pace, putting less strain on the hardware while actually being able to improve performance. Granted CPU's are better than GPU's at processing some information. But there's a reason GPU's can be used to crack high security level computer passwords in mere seconds and CPU's aren't. Parallel processing is great. As for our dear doctor up above, usually it's a simple toggle switch listed in your laptop manual, or something in your nVidia/Catalyst control panel. You can usually also force the integrated graphics option of your CPU to be turned off in the BIOS. That last scenario is on a PC desktop with a BIOS you can easily tinker with, though. Laptops are far more limiting due to their proprietary design, and therefore may not allow that. In some cases this may not be a good idea in case your main graphics card fails. It's a quick replacement on a desktop, but a laptop without a graphics card is a paperweight, and would need to be sent out for a week or two for repair. Also you shouldn't have to turn off your AV's to play a single player game. The only time you really need to worry about that is when you play multiplayer, technically, since some anti-viruses inspect packets of information sent from the server in real time as they're being delivered to your system. Even then it shouldn't make a noticeable performance difference. I've only had a problem with it one time, and it was with Norton Anti-virus back when Call of Duty Modern Warfare first came out. Installing the game to the D: drive instead of my C: drive fixed it for whatever reason.

You might be able to disable the on-board "GPU" Intel in the BIOS, if your laptop allows you real access to it.

1.) Intel processors use TurboBoost and HyperThreading in a manner where it auto-judges what programs benefit from cores, and what programs benefit from clock speed. Your mobile Core i5 chip seems to think that maxing out one core is more effective than trying to run on both cores at a lower clock speed. And it may be correct in thinking so. A mobile chip usually won't have clock speed or other cores to spare, so you might be out of luck there. HyperThreading also does absolutely nothing to help performance in a lot of cases. It only helps when programs are written to take advantage of it. And even then a CPU with 4 cores usually won't need the "extra" four virtual cores you get. Hell, some programmers even suggest you turn HyperThreading off and that the technology is a bunch of marketing crap. AMD doesn't even believe in the technology. 2.) The fact that you mentioned you have an Core i5 2450M means that it's a Sandy Bridge generation CPU, meaning that it has an onboard GPU (technically). That means you have toggle-able dedicated graphics. Your game may not understand that you have a graphics card beyond the one the CPU has built in, and therefore may not be using it at all, meaning you've been running the game on your CPU alone the whole time. Toggle-able GPU's are pretty rare, and an older game like GTA IV may not know how to deal with that. Or for that matter, you may simply have not turned it on yourself, and you've been using the computer with it switched off since you owned it.

Which is why I said I'm lost. That was supposed to prompt you to reveal the reason(s) why, as aside from the start screen, it's essentially Windows 7, except faster.

I wouldn't hesitate to call Americas Army a sim. That game and ARMA were built off of actual military simulators. They don't "play" well, because they weren't originally designed as games. Americas Army was kind of addicting at first, but I don't know how anyone can stand to play it any longer, or how anyone could ever stand to play ARMA at all. The first one was so terrible. It ran like crap even on high end systems, the aiming system sucked, the controls were way too complicated, the graphics were dated and bland, sounds were awful, the install size was huge for maps that were virtually empty and it was full of glitches. It's a sim. Not a game. America's Army rubbed me the wrong way politically because it was used as a recruiting tool. Regarding the whole community thing, more people are gonna show up here, like it or not. So really it will be up to the moderators and administrators to do their job and weed out the bad from the good. Luckily, as anticipated, this community hasn't "exploded" since the start of this topic. So I don't think we're in very much trouble.

Sometimes they do. People have different results, too many can "break your game". I can't run them at all anymore without severe texture loss and frequent crashes.

So you intentionally got rid of the start button, and agree that almost everything you care about you have pinned to the task bar, yet you hate Windows 8? I'm lost, since that's usually the #1 complaint. lol

All big companies are evil. A consumer needs to be an opportunist to truly enjoy themselves, I've found. I have a Verizon Wireless smartphone, and they've been great to me and made me a loyal customer for two very big reasons: 1.) After signing up with them and getting a DROID Bionic, I returned it three or four days later and got a DROID RAZR instead since it was a bit faster, and it was thinner. The moron at the cell phone store I got it from forgot to re-apply my texting plan, so at the end of the month I had a $400+ texting bill on top of my cell phone bill. Verizon had absolutely no reason to take care of me, as it was the cell phone place's fault, not theirs. Verizon paid my bill for me anyway. 2.) Shortly after that, there was a commercial on TV advertising 4GB data plans for the same price as I was paying for a 2GB data plan for a limited time. I happened to run into a Verizon rep at my former place of work and mentioned it to her. She nonchalantly stated that I should just call them up and simply ask them to upgrade my data plan for free. I went home and called them up, 45 seconds later my data cap was doubled for free, and the customer service rep simply ended the call with "Anything else I can do for you today?". They've made a loyal customer out of me for going out of their way to do two things they didn't have to. Having years of retail experience myself, I'm extremely grateful for that. People have crappy experiences everywhere, but sometimes the good sticks with you more. A recent Microsoft example: I was installing a digital (as is now common practice) copy of Office 2013 Home and Student for a customer of my own. After registering the serial key on her Microsoft account, I remembered that I had to uninstall her free trial of Office 365 first. I did, and it prompted me to restart to finish removing all the left over files. Upon restarting, and logging back into her account, her registered copy of Office 2013 Home and Student was mysteriously missing, and I couldn't figure out where it went. Frustrated, I had no choice but to call Microsoft, and figured I'd have to beg for a new serial key which I probably wasn't going to get. I got an American lady, who validated my key, gave me a ticket number (with one digit missing) and bumped me to level two tech support. The level two guy was from India. After learning the American lady screwed up with my ticket number, he made a new one himself, and reinstated the Office 2013 account. He then asked me if I'd like him to install it for me. I entertained the idea and he promprtly took remote control of the laptop I was working on and installed the software for me, even deleting the temp files afterwards. I didn't have to pay a dime for this. And this was the "feared" Indian guy that people can't understand (he speaks English better than a lot of people I deal with day to day). The American lady was the one who screwed up. This guy was great. That was another experience with Microsoft where the good outweighed the bad, so I haven't lost any faith in the company. Does this mean I forgive their XBOX One crap? No, and I will probably still buy a Playstation 4. But you won't catch me buying an Apple Macbook or a Google Chromebook any time soon. A more brief note about an experience with Google's customer support: I bought a digital copy of an album from them, later on I find out not all of the songs were downloaded in their entirety. It took them one month for them to "process" giving me my $10 back, and I got no notification of it in my GMail or even Google Wallet account. I had to check my banking statements apparently, which they didn't tell me about. I had to e-mail them to ask me about it. The first one was after two weeks, and I got "be patient, it takes time" (more or less), then after a month, I found out about the bank statement thing. Was that a terrible customer experience? No, it's not as if I didn't get my money back, and it was a pretty minor issue, but I'd be very upset if I bought a Nexus phone or something else that's expensive from them, and it took one month to get my money back.

Game boosters don't really do anything you can't already do if you know how to use Windows Task Manager. They just end unnecessary background processes to try and lower RAM and CPU usage. You're gaming on a notebook that's intended for mid-level computing. You'll need to either lower your graphics settings or buy a better computer if you want to improve your performance.

What about it? Windows Phone OS is actually a very good mobile OS. It's fast, easy to use and syncs with other Microsoft services very easily. I swear, some people like to dump on anything with the word 'Microsoft' on it, and other people who see those people go "me too!" for the sake of it.

If I had to pick one to protect myself with, I'd pick a taser since it's usually a guaranteed take down if both barbs hit. Some people are immune to pepper spray or will still fight with it anyway. A taser is meant to immobilize someone to stop resistance to arrest and it does just that. You could argue that someone on crack could be resistant to tasing, which is true, but pepper spray wouldn't fair any better on that same guy. Ideally having multiple tools (gun, taser, pepper spray, baton, hands & feet) to do the job is best.

That would make sense, but only if your cursor didn't increase in size too. That 1080p resolution stretches everything on the screen, not just other player models. Plus if you sit up close I'd imagine that would kill your eyes after a while. Anyway I've never heard of a CPL champion using a TV. lol Oh well, it's a viable entertainment combo though, I'll give you that.

I didn't really do anything strange, no. GTA IV = crappy PC port. That's all I know. lol

Don't look at me, I clearly said that if the XBOX tanks Microsoft won't die. But it's a big part of their business that they need to grow if they want to survive long term. Margin aside, remember that all of those lovely tech products services of theirs revolving around PC computing need a lot of money to be dumped right back into them immediately, which you likely won't find figures for. A support & troubleshooting staff, an army of programmers, a well staffed legal division, a huge marketing team (which they dump tons of money into to no avail), a retail store chain of their own they're dumping more and more money into each year, displays at retail stores (including new Microsoft stores within a store which you'll find at many new Best Buy locations in the coming months), a huge PR staff, a security team, tech engineers and many, many more things I'm probably not thinking of. A lot of the money made has to go right back into up-keeping their products and making sure they're supported which is going to offset a good bit of that margin (different than revenue by the way). XP is well over a decade old (2001 release I think?) and they're still supporting that until 2014. They've given it three extensions from what I remember. Windows 7's "road map" leads to 2020. Physical copies of their things do cost money to manufacture, which is why they're trying to move to all digital "key-card" activation of their Windows and Office products now. Meanwhile on the gaming side of things, Microsoft can be relatively "hands-off" with their gaming console once its released, unless they choose otherwise (IE: the slimmer XBOX, special editions, etc). Game companies advertise their own games, and even give Microsoft a 1-2 second logo display at the end, plenty of 3rd party companies make accessories which give kick-back money to Microsoft, developers need to pay for testing and development equipment, XBOX Live subscriptions are anything but on the decline and if they have their way; their always online mentality will likely merge XBOX Live with their PC services like SkyDrive and Windows Live, so in the end this may all end up being tied together. That's their Utopian vision, anyway. The gaming and entertainment section of their business is vitally important going forward as more consoles and devices are starting to be released by more, and sometimes arguably bigger and stronger companies. There are now two Google Android consoles that I know of with more on the way, Apple has an actual TV in the works, ASUS has a proof of concept one and said they could produce it full scale, they're just too lazy to go out and get licensing deals from all of the game developers, etc. If they stopped making XBOX's flat out, their mobile division stays just as irrelevant, and their next couple of operating systems are failures, they'd be going the way of AMD; hanging on by a thread and making inferior products to their competitor. To be clear; I'm not an all Apple or all Google person, not by a long shot. I'm an opportunist consumer. I buy what benefits me the most. So for my device lineup, the best PC for me is Microsoft Windows based, the best phone for me is Google Android based, and the best MP3 player for me is Apple iOS based. Competition is also what keeps these companies innovating and keeping prices of equipment and software reasonable, so I support all three in some manner. But I'll tell you that for what I spend, the only reason I have a Windows PC is because it uses DirectX to render games in its native form, and other OS's can't.

Every XBOX has been a PC. That's how the original one was built. It was assembled using parts picked up from a local custom PC shop. The famous 360 is a triple core PowerPC Xenon (often a broken quad core with one core disabled to make it stable) 512MB of RAM and an ATI (AMD) graphics card. Technically the Playstation 3 and the Wii are PC's too. They just render games differently and the PS3 has a different type of CPU architecture. The thing that makes gaming consoles what they are is flat pricing, low or no maintenance and standardized hardware for a unified experience among all gamers. It takes away individuality from your computer but it gives everyone a level playing field and parents feel more comfortable knowing what they have to spend on their kid. They buy a box, leave it alone for 5-7 years and just buy the kid games and controllers when they break until a new console comes out. PC's are much higher cost, but I for one feel that they're more rewarding and far more flexible. But most parents care about "price" (which is different than "cost" aka the bottom line) and see $500 over 5-7 years vs. $1000 every 3-4 years if you want to keep your graphics settings maxed out on all games. All I can say is thank god I'm an adult and I can spend my money how I like.

How badly do you lose in Battlefield? lol I can't imagine that screen being a help to someone, nor that posture. Stuff like that looks cool and all, but there's no way that would actually help you outside of a virtual reality room.

Can you use this when you get to 101,000?

Hmmm...

I tried car mods the other night in EFLC. It gave texture/complete ground loss and then crashed almost immediately. I think the new CPU & GPU combo is going to force me to retire any car mods, which is a real shame. That was half of the gameplay for me right there.