How the hell can you play games on the PC? (rant)

Communities Gaming
21

Meh

The odd few hiccups for me on pc gaming but other than that well worth it.

Dead island runs perfect on my machine although i did have to tinker with it on the radeon pro software to get it to what I would deem playable (disable core 0 & 1 and frame lock).

Even dead rising 3 runs flawlessly (with no tinkering - except the .ini unlock to get 1080p/60fps) for me so I guess I must be lucky.. not many people with titans+ strong single thread intel cpus are getting that game to run properly :P something dodgy going on there

Wasteland 2 was an awesome experience, took me back to my fallout 1 & 2 days.

Modded skyrim just destroys playing it on anything else other than pc.

My only games that have ruined my pc gaming experience are

  • Wolfenstein
  • Rage

Poxy tech 5... hates amd gcn with a passion

22

"So does Windows 8.1 by the way, it crashes applications randomly. "

I must be one of the lucky ones

Running 24/7 with windows 8.1 and hardly any crashes at all

23

That's so polar opposite because Wolfenstein (the new one) is one of THE BEST experiences I've ever had with PC gaming, not a single thing went wrong, and I am quite nit picky on the PC, as you be able to tell haha.

24

Am I the only one who likes it when shit crashes? means theres something for me to fix.

To be quite honest however, I have had more issues playing on consoles than on PC. Been playing on PC and I might see a few crashes with programs a day, A game crash once or twice a week but usually they fix themselfs or there is an easy work around. The main games that i have had issues with in the last 6 months has been modded skyrim for obvious reasons, watch dogs and league of legends. All three are notoriously bad but for different reasons. The vast majority of other games work fine. If I boot up one of my consoles, Its crashes, freezing and artifacts all the way. The amount of times cod or forza or battlefield crashed was rediculous on my xbox yet boot battlefield on my pc and I have never had a crash or freeze outside of the beta.

The only real games I have problems with on PC are games published by ubisoft of activision. Most other games I havent had crash once. Mind you I built my system on essentially the best Z87 motherboard you could get for stability. I have more issues with hardware of all things. That and mobile devices including laptops.

My phone crashed well over 20 times today and its running a fresh instal of cyanogenmod. Both my laptops died earlier this week and my Nas also went bang hours after the laptops. Mind you the nas was 7-8 years old

25

Not worth arguing with Zoltan. he is the definition of Windows is trash, All hail Linux

26

+1 Here, Wolfenstein TNO was amazing. 

27

Thanks for the link and the input!

Haha yeah i'm quite surprised too, I think i might sell my GPU for a PS4 and a lower end GPU. sadly.

 

I'll keep a few games on the PC that I will tinker with, because i do like doing it, but not for every single game.

 

Oh and MW2.. umm, well this is embarrassing hahahahaha.

28

To me, it sounds like there are some other problems here, not the games. Other than the known shit games (eg rockstar games, which run poorly) I literally have no problems with games, other than in-development titles or games thats requirements surpassed my machines specs (hasn't happened for a long time now :P )

The only times that I have crashed a game on a PC (that wasn't an in-dev state) is that I over saturated the computer with such things like render tasks in the background.

29

i love the game... it just doesnt seem to like gcn (7xxx or 290 etc) :(

30

I feel that part of this issue comes from the general purpose vs ASIC argument. I find the reason why PC games can have more problems comes from the fact that PCs aren't made to just play games, they are designed to do everything and because of this a lot more work needs to go into optimization, but as we've seen before many developers choose not to put in the effort to properly code their stuff. There is also the fact that there is no such thing as perfect code. So I'd say its just something you need to be careful of

31

I see what you mean, but when I want to just sit back and relax and play a game but then find out i need to google for half an hour, download an unofficial update, do some coding and then after punching the wall try enjoy and relax in a game it doesn't really work haha.

If it were just a couple then i'd be fine, but it's almost all unfortunately.

 

Interesting, i've had, over 5 years, maybe 25-50 full console crashes. For 10,000-20,000 hours across all my games that's pretty good! haha

32

Or you know, folding@home to help others, or bitcoin mining (even though it's a waste of time and money now, especially with nvidia).

Gaming industry stopped innovating around 2007-2008 when console shooters flooded payed reviewers and there was absolutely nothing new and exciting to play as it was way back when, in the golden era of shooters.

You should try the Crysis series or Wolfenstein : The New Order. I just finished them and I enjoyed them even though they aren't as sandboxy as you would like. I'm a die hard id software fan, my first ever game was Quake 2, I still appreciate the work of Zenimax/Bethesda, whatever it's called now.

You can run new games easily on a second hand Core 2 duo (or quad rather, pretty soon 2 cores will be obsolete) overclocked and a decent video card. I had a HD 4870 1gb and could run most everything on medium-high @ 720p or more.

33

Motherboard 'stability' isn't an issue anymore. It used to be with stuff like SD-RAM but you don't get random crashes from mediocre or sub par hardware. That stability you bought into was meant for power delivery > overclocking.

I also enjoy fixing things, I am a masochist like you but I do love the feeling of achievement afterwards.

34

I've been playing games since I was only 2 years old, started with platformers and shooters like Captain Claw, Hercules and Quake 2. Before that I've played Star wars Dark Forces and Duke Nukem 3d, my dad had a decent pentium 1 in his first PC, while my uncle influenced me with his 586 AMD clone. until I was 7 I mostly played stuff like that, sometimes when I was bored windows plus games, sometimes masterpieces like unreal tournament. I got my first PC, shared with my sister, when I was 7.back in 2003. It was a 933Mhz Pentium 3 with a geforce 2 mx440 64mb and 512mb 133mhz sdram, not bad for a start but not nearly good enough for recent games.

And what did I learn? I learned that there are boatloads of great older games that can be played on my humble machine and that you can tweak and optimize it to run heavier stuff like HL2. You can even run Crysis 1 almost playable on dual pentium3 for crying out loud.

Since then I've upgraded every 4-5 generations, from that to a core2duo wolfdale and a hd 3850 five years later, and now I'm using last year's i7 4770 and upgraded my baked hd 4870 to a gtx 770 now, and my guess is it will last longer because current consoles suck mad ballz).

35

If you want to PC game play games made for PCI and never buy day one. Read user reviews to make sure that games run correctly.

But the PC gaming is great for all the stuff you can't  play on consoles.

Stuff made by Edios, Valve, 2k, Epic, and sometimes ID Will run great.

Dont forget there entire genres thatdon't exists   on consoles like strategy, MMO, Twitch shooters, Strategic shooters, Rouge Likes, Point and Click, and true Western RPGs. And sims how could I forget sims.

And then there is the Indy and crowd funded scene that Consoles wish they had.

Consoles are good for pickup and play PC is different beast.

Edit: PCs have MOBAs which people seem to like

36

You are wrong on CS:GO it is still in beta that is why it isn't full featured yet not Valve gimping Linux

37

Google the error message. This has never failed me.

 

38

A big factor here is the environment these games are being played in ie your OS and hardware. Consoles are easy and convenient but also have their cons. Consoles have a high rate of hardware failure I do not have one friend who has not death ringed their console and had to return it. I  also have had a couple friends return multiple units. I have a ps3 simply because my friend was going to throw it out and I knew I could repair the damaged solder joints with my oven :) Consoles also have the most annoying update procedures forcing you to wait to even use the unit until the installation is completed. This took 3 hours for GT6. Computer maintenance/troubleshooting is not for everyone and most PC gamers actually enjoy that aspect of using PC. If you are looking for put a disc in and play a game at low/mid specs go console. If your looking for high/ultra specs and computer maintenance go PC. It's that simple do what you like. Pc gaming is not like playing the game on xbox360 its like playing a game on 1000 different consoles with different hardware and specs. The fact that it is as reliable as it is is a miracle. I am happy to see that PC gaming Revenues have finally succeeded consoles so eventually they will get the shitty ports and not us :)

39

It all depends on what applications you're running.

Some applications in W8.1 have freezes, they're not really crashing, but freeze from time to time for up to a few seconds even. Some applications just outright crash, and Windows restarts them. It's just not working like it should, however you look at it.

It's not because I use linux, that I don't also run Windows and OSX. I get the whole software console comfort thing. Linux and Windows are not competing, they are something completely different, even though some linux based products are made to compete with closed source software consoles, like SteamOS, or Android, or CrOS, etc...

The way I see it, PC gaming is not going to be solved until it moves completely over to linux, and the stupid DRM and software console limitations are dropped. I'm quite pissed at Valve for not providing an honest port of CS:GO for linux, because it's clear that they don't care about PC Gaming at all, preferring their stupid Music Pack in CS:GO and their skin trade over providing a better tool for competitive e-sports. Think about how crazy good CS:GO could be if it were an honest native linux game: lower latencies, less system overhead, higher availability, more reliable networking, less prone to attacks, etc...

The gaming user base on Android is already way larger than the gaming user base on PC, so is the hardware console user base. And still... none of the "players" in the PC gaming market, seem even remotely interested in the platform, and that includes Valve. The whole PC gaming scene has become a bourgeois scene, where the hardware and the price thereof is more important than the actual gaming. There are very few PC gamers than wouldn't switch to console in a heartbeat because game X or Y is released for consoles only. Nobody really cares any more, it's just become a show-off scene, a hollowed out pretentious construct. If PC gamers would really be passionate about high end gaming, they would have pushed towards a more open source approach a long time ago, and they wouldn't accept to be treated like they are now by the big gaming studios and the publishers. The way I see it, if you're adamant on being a PC gamer, you should also be passionate about getting all of the performance and features modern hardware can provide, and that's not the case at all, because right now, there's only a bunch of bourgeois kids fighting on the interwebz about when the next expensive AAA title is going to come out, and that a fucking Windows-only 32-bit application that's not even worth the storage space it occupies. Oh but I'm an indie game fan... yeah right... how many people actually play a lot of indie games? Isn't an Indie game only an Indie game until Microsoft buys it like Minecraft? What's left of PC gaming is just a bad joke for the moment. It's definitely time for a complete gaming industry overhaul in my opinion, because the only thing PC gaming is accomplishing right now, is that a lot of people degrade perfectly good computer hardware to console level, and that has consequences on many things, in the first place the concept of what computers can do for individuals, and the chances in the future of those individuals.

 

40

Oh come on, CS:GO was ported to linux along with other source games two years ago, when Johnson was still at Valve. He did most of the work. Valve just didn't release it, not in beta, not in alpha, they redid the whole thing as a wrapper to "preserve feature parity" with Windows. Yeah right, that's why the framerate of the linux port is 40 % lower on most systems than the windows version... even running the windows version in straight forward wine provides a higher framerate. They just nuked the linux version, it's a plain nerf, that's all there is to it. It's not honest, because especially in games like CS:GO, an honest linux version would benefit e-sports immensely, because of the lower latencies and the better multi-threading, the performance would go through the roof. It's not like CS:GO requires demanding graphics hardware that depends on proprietary graphics drivers features, and it's not like the source engine was ported yesterday... I don't buy the beta thing at all.