There is no way in hell they are announcing Half Life 3. If they did they'd make a huge lead up to it, like an ARG or something, and continuously hint at it to keep the hype train going. I could see Left 4 Dead 3 having special features on Steam OS or something though. Unless the "input announcement" they are talking about is really goddamn special I hope they announce some sort of game, or source 2. I'm betting the next announcement may include something about Oculus though.
Huh, I've had a dreadful time with AMD (ATI) hardware over the years - driver support was and still is I'm told HORRIBLE. I switched to nVidia in pretty much all my rigs and it's been smooth sailing ever since. I'm hoping there will be an Occulus announcement myself as well and like I said before I also HIGHLY doubt there will be an announcement to do with HL3, the HL3 fan base are starting to turn into obsessives much like the RE 1.5 fan base is/was. Don't think there;s a day gone by recently where I don't read a post or see an image with some convoluted theory accompanied by 'HL3 CONFIRMED!'. If they had it in the works they'd officially announce it I reckon instead of sitting on it, seems counter intuitive to do so.
Drivers have improved since AMD took over personally i've had no issues with ATI or AMD drivers or cards. i have recently seen some bitching regarding nvidia drivers on linux but not read into it. occulus rift looks awesome and i cant wait to get my hands on one n rock some awesome FPS games, Quake 5 and Doom 4 will do nicely
Combine that with the Omnipad, and 5.1 surround sound headphones and you have the next best thing for VR on a budget.
Ah, ok - I've not had any Radeon cards from the AMD era, but I do hear bitching about the drivers still and forums seem to be packed with people having issues with a lot of games which just run like silk on my nVidia card. The only issue I've had so far in Linux with the official nVidia drivers is it breaks flash support somewhat with firefox whereby any web page that has a youtube video on there for instance, if you scroll down the page - while you're scrolling past the video firefox slows right down and clumsily jerks and judders until the video has passed off screen again then goes back to being smooth. I can't seem to find a fix for it at the moment. I'm currently re-enabling Nouveau drivers since I don't use Linux to play games (I have Win 7 on ssd for that), that should fix the firefox issue I've been having since this doesn't happen on my laptop with intel/nvidia optimus drivers (bumblebee). On a side note I finally got adobe CS6 to work in Linux under wine which now means I can ditch Windows completely for work purposes and use Linux as my main OS which is what I've wanted to do for years, so much nicer! EDIT: Scratch that, just installed the very latest nVidia package from their website and it's now fixed all graphical issues I was having with firefox. :-D EDIT2: They've also fixed full screen flash videos exiting when clicking into another screen on a multi monitor setup, it's just getting better by the minute...lol
Ugh, I was hoping it wouldn't be a touchscreen/trackpad. It still could be cool, but I was expecting something a little less conventional from Valve.
The AMD beta driver did have that same issue also but it seems to be fine now with the latest version, on the "EDIT2:" that's a great improvement and actually something i was thinking about last night. anyway depending on what happens my next rig could go either way AMD or NV. similarly I've normally used AMD CPU's in all my builds(Athlon XP 2000+,2500+,3000+,Athlong 64 3500+, Phenom II X6 1090T) but may try out Intel's offerings for the next rig, just for a change up.
nVidia most definitely are working on improving the drivers, I can tell. I've not seen this much movement/improvement for a year and a half from them Linux wise and they seem to be fixing little 'nags' all over the place. I'm really impressed. You can also achieve the fullscreen flash fix by hex editing (ghex) the libflashplayer.so file, however it's good they've fixed it since nobody should have to do that in the first place. I'd say give nVidia a try, I've never looked back. Though not to say I wouldn't be open to switching back to AMD since all consoles will b using AMD GPUs meaning that may be the way to go on PC in future, I'm by no means an nVidia fan boy.
Talking about drivers, what is the best way to update them? Believe me, i haven't done that for a while. My previous computer had a GeForce FX something and never bothered upgrading. My current PC has a MSI GTX560 TwinFrozr II with 295.73. That's the driver i installed when i build the rig. I've just got back to PC gaming recently and was wondering the right process to upgrade. Some people say install over, uninstall the older one first, other say use driversweeper... Everybody says 314.22 is the way to go. Anyway i'm asking because i'm curious about FXAA performance on the GTX560. Since it's generation behing GPU, would upgrading really have any improvements?
I presume you're referring to the windows drivers? If so just google nvidia driver, and when on their website select your OS, card series (500 series) and hit download. Just install them over the old drivers as it has a built in cleaning routine so you don't have to uninstall the old ones. It should also initialize the driver for you during installation so there's no need to reboot Windows ether. Easy You could try Nvidia experience but I tend to aviod it, it's basically a crap load of profiles stored in the cloud which have settings tailored to as many different card and rig combinations as possible submitted by users and nvidia themselves. This is mainly for people who can't be arsed fiddling with settings and would rather just game. Though I like to customise all my settings myself as to get best possible picture quality & frame rate. As far as improvements, they may not have improved FXAA a whole lot but they do improve and optimise games on the regular so it's always worth keeping up to date I'd say, nvidia are great at releasing useful updates quite often as well. I do sound like a fan boy - lol - but I'd switch back to AMD (Radeon) in a heart beat if their support was anywhere near as good.
That is exactly what i'm talking about. I've read the nvidia drivers has that cleaning routine, still some people say i should uninstall. The only reason i'm asking this is because my PC is working perfectly and i really want to avoid driver issues like BSOD's and registry errors As for FXAA, 295.73 doesn't have it. I'm curious to see any performance improvement, on a GTX560.
Oh, ok fair enough. Not 100% sure what you mean then really. Go ahead and install them mate, you can roll them back just as easily as you install them. I've done this several times as at one point the latest drivers corrupted the shadows in Quake (Dark Places) and I had to revert them back a couple of releases to get the shadows back. Then they released newer ones that had no issues at all. And I must also say I've never had a graphics related BSOD, I often get them because of core windows components dieing inexplicably and had issues with the Intellimouse drivers at one point which I couldn't and still haven't resolved but never anything GPU or graphics driver related causing BSOD.
I gotta be honest: the only chance this has of getting any momentum is if microsoft keeps fucking up and finally abandons DX like it did XNA, because getting the whole industry to switch to OpenGL is next to impossible Drivers are still shit, and if you have any linux distro then its complete shit, I switched to nvidia too and dont regret it one bit
i've had no issues with the past few drivers (other than support being dropped for HD3200s which affects my laptop) can play all the games without issue and they have improved the installer also. still not perfect though. regardless I'm gonna format and reinstall the OS im on now (Xubuntu 13.10 with KDE) soon we'll see how the latest drivers fair on a fresh install. i've got a partition waiting for SteamOS too
