Well I think I figured out my black out issue. I don’t think it was the video card after all. Forcing Windows 7 to see all of my cores and hyperthreads seemed to stop it. I’ve gone 3 days without a single black screen (fingers crossed). I’ve also set the voltages back to stock for the time being. If all goes well I’ll start venturing into overclock territory for both the CPU and GPU.
Computing
I know what my weekend project is going to be.
Updated to the latest kernal under Fedora 20 this morning only to have more grief happen. I lost communication in mumble (everything turned horribly autotuned) and even before the kernal update mumble was giving me slight problems. Each time I started mumble it kept doing a sigterm on an audio process. Since my video drivers haven’t been working properly under Fedora 20 anyway, I’ll just go say fuck it and go back to 19. The few bugs I had in 19 were in 20 anyway with extras thrown in.
Oh well, I was bored and had my little adventure. 😛 I think tomorrow I’ll start copying off my files again. Luckily Linux doesn’t take forever to reinstall like any version of Windows. I can be up and running at full throttle in half a day without having to take freaking forever to install updates and restart over and over again.
If it isn’t one thing it’s another…
So I decided to upgrade from Fedora 19 to Fedora 20, so far the only problem seems to be related to my video drivers (everything else works exactly as before), I had to uninstall my beta drivers under windows to make the random black screening go away (fun!) and for the icing on the cake I had to ram my head against the MvM server because now it doesn’t seem to startup in quickplay mode anymore despite having all of the convars correctly placed.
I was all for the new update in the beginning, but this is turning into a royal pain in the ass. I wish Valve could put some straight forward guidelines on how to get setup, and what you can and can’t use in quickplay. The current list they provide leaves too many questions unanswered.
Open Thread
Not much to report. Been working, experimenting with streaming/linux/hardware/etc. I’m planning to also upgrade to Fedora 20 for the hell of it since reinstalling Linux is a breeze compared to reinstalling and reconfiguring Windows. Oh, and the updates are better. I don’t have to restart Linux a bajillion times to get all the updates to install.
On the bright side of hardware, the R9 290 works perfectly under Linux. I can max out all of my 3D Linux games and still have frames to spare. 😀
What I did during my days off + thoughts on the new realMyst
My projects during my weekend included finishing Bioshock Infinite and srcds server attention. Basically that consisted of checking in on the servers I haven’t been on in awhile. I also changed the spawn rate on the special infected in L4D2 to match L4D1’s since it always annoyed me how they sped up the specials in the later game while grouping them all so close together, instead of spreading them out a bit like in the original.
Then of course I saw that realMyst Masterpiece Edition released on Steam today. I decided to purchase it to see what it would look like and well, I have mixed emotions.
First, the game crashed 3 times before finally loading it in 1920 x 1080, anti aliasing doesn’t seem to be working right, and the game isn’t properly optimized. I was getting a framerate of 30 to 45, which doesn’t make any sense on something like the unity engine. I hate to be brutally honest but games like Shadow Warrior and Tomb Raider have a better framerate with more objects being thrown around PLUS better graphic detail (I laughed at those who said this version of realMyst has the best graphics compared to any game out on the market… HA!) Then of course there was that confounded random hangup that took place about every 3 to 5 steps. At first I thought it was due to the autosave feature but sadly that wasn’t the case. Oh, and there was some sort of strange glitch when walking towards the book room where Sirus and Achenar’s books were kept. The room went from being dim, to moving over slightly and brightening up. YOU ARE RUINING MY IMMERSION!!!!!!111111111
But it wasn’t all terrible. I did like the flashlight feature, that was pretty cool. The return of the day/night cycle was excellent, I laughed at the night time butterflies, the water looked nice, although these days it’s pretty easy to make nice looking water as well as adding bloom and shine. But then it is a rerererere?make of a classic game on a newer engine with newer textures so…
Hopefully they fix the optimization soon. It’s really annoying to play it with that constant pausing.
I always hate this time of the year
Normally January is a terrible month for work since most of the spending was done between Black Friday and Christmas Eve. Ever since the start of the new year though it’s been absolutely terrible. Next week I only get 13.5 hours of work. I’ve never had my hours cut that low before. 19 or 18 at the lowest… but 13? Why even have me on the schedule at all?
Of course this isn’t much of a surprise. On Sundays we’re pretty busy due to the after church crowd but they didn’t stick around nearly as long. Hopefully they’ll try to call me in (and not at the last minute), but if not at least I’ll have plenty to keep me busy.
I ordered a couple 2 TB Hard Drives (two brand new ones for $89 each which is pretty cheap) to replace a couple of 1 TB’s that are starting to show their age. One of them is a video scratch drive that I use and the other is my Steam drive. Seeing as I only have 98 GB left on it I guess it’s time to move Steam to a 2 TB for more real estate. 😛 I’m thinking I’ll turn the old Steam drive into another drive for storing FRAPS footage along side my other scratch drives. That will put me at 4 TB that I can hotswap, and one scratch drive that I already have inside the the system… so 5 TB for FRAPS footage? That is a lot of pr0nz. 8) Speaking of pr0nz I got bored and made this in SFM.
The results are in. The R9 290 is awesomesauce
Of course that’s pretty much why I upgraded. 😛 Handles Tomb Raider and Shadow Warrior like a champ. Even improved my frame rate in Serious Sam 3. Before I was getting 60 frames or lower, now it stays between 160 to 250. I look forward to newer generation games just to see how they perform. 🙂
Plans for my weekend.
My R9 290 should be arriving tomorrow afternoon/early evening. So I’ll probably be occupied playing with it in benchmarks and graphically intense games that were semi crippling my Radeon 6950 (Tomb Raider and Shadow Warrior for starters).
Finally! After all the damn delays I’ll have my hands on it (knock on wood).
I’ve made contact.
Well I received a message (FINALLY) regarding why my payment for my R9 290 hasn’t cleared. Turns out they ran out and I’ve been put on back order status… lovely. They did say though that they would ship it out later this week. Hopefully. It would be my luck to make my purchase RIGHT when they ran out. At least they messaged me back about it… even though it took 3 tries. I was getting a bit rough around the edges since I’m trying to sell my parts off to someone who could put them to great use… ugh.
When they get that to me I’ll put my new CPU and GPU in, then I can rock and roll. I’ll have to see how much it’ll improve under Linux, and under windows I’ll have to see how much I can crank Tomb Raider up, and finally run Shadow Warrior at a framerate above 30. Wouldn’t that be nice!
Microsoft admits to neglecting the PC gaming platform
It’s been far beyond obvious for a quite some time that Microsoft hasn’t exactly had much interest in the PC Gaming market. Not when they have been trying to sell a console, and the failure of GFWL not only proves this but also this article where Microsoft basically wishes they could have done what Steam has accomplished to keep PC Gaming alive and well.
“Valve is right down the street from us,” Spencer noted. “They’ve done a great job of keeping the PC ecosystem strong at a time where I don’t mind saying that we could have been more focused on what was going on in PC gaming.”
He also goes on to say:
“We were probably too focused purely on console,” Spencer admitted. “With Steam, [Valve has] done an amazing job of building this thing that, in a lot of ways, we should have been building as well at Microsoft.”
It’s amazing to think of in retrospect. Considering that back in the 90’s Microsoft wanted Windows to be the future platform of gaming.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gun4erVV8CM
My how times change.