Shades Of Twilight

Yes, we got Assassin’s Creed 2 before North America. Singapore had it since Thursday, 4 March 2010. I received an SMS (that’s “text message to you Westerners) from my regular game shop at 1pm saying that it was in Singapore. By 6pm I had a copy in my hands, and by 6.30 I was already home and installing it.

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The copy-protection on this however, is a little too extreme. It says it “requires” a constant Internet Connection for it to work. That’s lame, because what happens if you’re not on Broadband, but on dialup, and each minute you’re on dialup costs you money?! That is irrelevant in Singapore since everyone is already on Broadband, but it affects people in other locales.

Secondly, what happens if Ubisosft servers are experiencing heavy loads? We can’t connect to “authenticate” and thus we can’t play it? The North America launch is coming on 9th March, that is tomorrow. You can expect a sudden spike in users trying to authenticate to your servers, Ubisoft.

That’s exactly what happened to me the other day – Ubisoft Servers actually went down (see “Related Articles” below). The game just quit suddenly to desktop, and when I tried to relaunch, it was stuck at he Login screen of the launcher for about 5 mins. Then when the game started and I chose “Story Mode”, the game went to a screen saying “please wait, contacting server” and the only option available at that screen was “Exit To Windows”.

At least Bioware doesn’t force the requirement on the user. Dragon Age, for example, just says the achievements and scores won’t be updated on your web profile. Mass Effect 2 just tells you that you won’t get Cerberus goodies if you don’t have an internet connection. They do NOT stop you from playing their game!

And game companies wonder why people continue to get pirated copies.

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Yup I have been spending the past week just playing with my older games with my new toy – the ATI Radeon HD 4650 card.

I’m just constantly amazed by how much I can push the graphic details up to, and still maintain great framerates. One game in particular, Assassin’s Creed, never cease to amaze me in this part. In my previous entry, I put everything to max except the resolution. Now, I pushed the resolution up to the max my monitor could handle – 1280×1024.

As you can see in the video below, there is virtually no impact on the framerates to the naked eye. However, FRAPS did measure an average of 3 frames less than at 1024×768.

As you can see from the video clip, it’s still smooth on the whole. During recording of this video, there is naturally a drop of framerates. Without recording on, it’s smoother. Compare this clip to my previous ones:

1. Old PC – P4 3.0Ghz Hyperthreading
2. Old PC – same rig as above, with some tweaking

For an investment of just about S$100, I think my current rig can last me a couple of years more!

Since the IT Show 2009 is on right now (for people in Singapore), you might want to run out and grab an even better card than what I have – the ATI Radeon 4870. I hope they are selling it at a great discount over there. In any case, I won’t be going to the IT Show. I have nothing to buy, and I don’t want to tempt myself on non-essential stuff I might see there, and buy them on impulse

Image via Wikipedia

About 6 months or so, circumstances forced me to upgrade my PC. Budegtary constraints meant I had to get a “value” or “budget” system. I got one with an integrated graphics chip, the ATI HD3200, which is probably one of the better boards at the time.

6 months later, ie now, I have saved up enough to finally upgrade the graphics card. I still had budgetary constraints, and I looked around for the best I could buy for about S$100 (US$66). After poring through pricelists online via The Hardwarezone, I finally narrowed my choice down to the ATI Radeon 3850 and the ATI Radeon 4650 line. I wanted to consider a nvidia 9600GT, being a nvidia user for a long time. However, prices for a nvidia 9600 was not within my budget.

After a little more deliberation, and of course looking at reviews, I finally decided on the ATI Radeon 4650, being the best card I could afford at this time. Reviews looked good on this card – supposedly able to do 30FPS or more on games I play, even at 1280×1024.

Once I got home with the card, and a quick installation later, I ran up various games to give it a test. I ran Armed Assault, and increased resolution to 1280×1024, pumping graphic details up to “high” settings. While I didn’t run FRAPS to measure the framerates, I could “feel” that it’s a whole lot smoother. Even the character animations of the soldiers felt smoother.

Next I ran Assassin’s Creed, the Framerate Killer on my previous PC. On average I could only do about 7 to 12 FPS on my previous PC, and slightly better about 10 to 15 on my current one with the embedded ATI HD3200. I’ll let the video clip below speak for itself.

Framerates now average about 30 FPS, spiking to 42 and bottoming out around 19 or so. Pretty dang good for a card that costs S$109 eh? This time around, I put Assassin’s Creed into max graphic settings, keeping only the resolution at 1024×768. Everything else was maxed out.

Yes I am pretty pleased, and amazed, at how a cheap card can change the gaming experience. Yes I would like the highest end card if I can afford it of course. However, since I couldn’t, the ATI Radeon 4650 is the next best thing I can get.