Os Eye Candy

[Big_al]

Do you like OS eye candy?

[Mystic]

Nope, its a waste of space

[g6672D]

Death to eye candy wasting my precious CPU and graphics power!

[CrazedImp]

Quite honestly, in today's day and age things like CPU and RAM being used by the OS is a negligible factor. The only reason your system runs slow with it on is because your system can't handle it, not because its pointless or whatever else. If you can't run what the OS was supposed to do then you should have done a bit more research prior. I'm tired of all this bullshit "OH NO ITS EATING MY RAM AND CPU", computer hardware now is well beyond that stage. I especially get annoyed with people running somewhat dated PC's who complain something runs slow. Well fucking duh. If something runs slow, upgrade. Simple. If you can't afford to do it, then you'd be a massive hypocrite complaining. People don't need to hold technology back.

I don't really care if an OS has extra eye candy or not. But it does need to be upgraded enough to keep standard with ever increasing hardware power. I think its pointless if you have a high powered PC, then you decide to run an interface that looks pre-Windows98. Its like buying an ultra high-end gaming PC, then running games on low because "running games on max eats my FPS".

[FATAL]

^^^^^^^ wrong

[Aliotroph?]

How exactly does one not care about eye candy and then turn around and say it needs to be upgraded to use a computer's power?

I'm more than happy to have eye candy where it doesn't impede or even helps usability. For most people it will put them more at ease with their computers and their day-to-day tasks don't use a lot of power anyway. That said, Windows has always been so low on eye candy it's never been a limiting factor except on computers that are underpowered anyway.

If your computer gets slower because of the fades in XP it must hurt trying to run new applications on it. Running old applications is fine as long as the formats work and the features you want are there. Yes, new ones are often bloated but occasionally they end up with some killer functionality that just makes them better to use. The exception here is if the fade effects and such are slowing down tasks intentionally to give time for the effect, they need to go. The classic example of this is games that use Flash-based installers. Installing some EA games takes twice as long because I get to sit through the menus animating before I can click anything.

Ack, tangent. Back to usability. On Vista I had most of the eye candy turned off. Because of speed? Hell no! Vista was smart enough to keep my games running well even with the eye candy. I turned it off because Micro$loth decided making it easy for them to have their GUI look nice was more important than making it easy for me to customize it for my eyes. Seriously! There was no way to change the fonts in explorer windows! WTF??? Some of us NEED bigger letters. Can't change the colours either. WTF is wrong with these people? So yeah, eye candy went. Vista works ok if you drag its themes back to the Windows 98 days in terms of look. Why they took out the profiles for colours and fonts starting with XP is beyond me though. Oh yeah, the old version of explorer has ugly bugs and they're somehow more apparent in Vista. Time to see if Windows 7 helps this. :/

I do find things like the animations, colourful fades, transparent bit, etc, seem to make life more comfortable for computer newbies. Simple things like having a flicker-free GUI, properly indicating a window that's busy (Vista makes those look ghostly), using animations to show "where my program went," etc. go a long way to making computers less painful for some. Apple was the best at this stuff for a long time. Windows got a lot further with Vista (it's a separate issue that everybody was selling computers that couldn't properly run it). Not sure what this is like on Linux now. Last distro I used for any real work was Fedora Core 3. Sort of olde now.

So yeah, I'll keep my eye candy, but if it gets in my way I'll turn it off.

[CrazedImp]

How exactly does one not care about eye candy and then turn around and say it needs to be upgraded to use a computer's power?
I don't recall saying I didn't care about eye candy, I just take what I'm given and use it if I'm able to.

^^^^^^^ wrong
Well that means I'm right.

I should add though, back to the whole wasting of CPU and RAM thing. If you have a computer able to actually run a new OS with all the bell's and whistles on, then thats a good thing. Whats the point of having hardware in your machine that doesn't even get used? Using less resources is not always a good thing. Say if you buy a PC with 4GB+ RAM, then you take every effort possible to minimise RAM usage. A little pointless.

[Aliotroph?]

Well, aside from the fact that lower CPU usage would mean less power usage... :D

Eye candy should never take too much RAM. Most of what I can see in eye candy for newer GUIs is using the GPU. That's fine because not much else is willing to use it. There are better uses for RAM though. One of the controversial ones is caching frequently-used programs so they load faster.

It would be interesting to see an OS where you could set profiles depending on how the computer is frequently used, or even tie that to user profiles. Some people really do use the raw number-crunching power of their computers to encode things all day, some wants things to load quickly from the desktop, and some just play games. Actually, it would be even more interesting if the OS could be set to be intelligent and learn the habits of its users.

[CrazedImp]

I'm sure the whole scientific computers will be intelligent stuff will come. And less power usage? Really, if you want one thing to be concerned about in your PC that sucks up power turn off Aero if you have Vista and a high end GPU. :p

[Raptor Jesus]

I like it :). As long as it doesn't slow now my PC, BRING IT ON! :D I love my gooey windows in Ubuntu :)

http://i51.photobucket.com/albums/f356/rapt10439/Screenshot.png

[Mystic]

Im sick of people telling me I should upgrade to use the newer 'faster' systems, if it was faster it wouldnt need an upgrade, fact is each new windows is slower and more bloated than the previous ones and only runs faster if its on a faster PC. DUH, so does everything else.
My system is fast enough to run Vista with all the crap (aero etc) loaded but I really dont care for superficial stuff like that and prefer a simpler more functional desktop so aero and that annoyingly space wasting widgets thingy are both out.

[sLydE]

I like shiny things, and not really loving the whole reading this thread thing right now...OMG I'm a regular computer user!

/me runs away

[rustyslacker]

I like it . As long as it doesn't slow now my PC, BRING IT ON! I love my gooey windows in Ubuntu
Ugh, that plugin is so fucking buggy. D:|

Most of the eye candy features I've enabled in Compiz actually help usability. I've grown used to having a desktop cube, for example, and having my windows darken and fade when they're not in use.
Say if you buy a PC with 4GB+ RAM, then you take every effort possible to minimise RAM usage. A little pointless.
True enough. To use a Total Annihilation analogy for Fatal to understand, it's like what happens when you have some +200 metal income, and your metal storage is maxed out. It's useless and doing nothing for you until you spend the resources.
Im sick of people telling me I should upgrade to use the newer 'faster' systems, if it was faster it wouldnt need an upgrade, fact is each new windows is slower and more bloated than the previous ones and only runs faster if its on a faster PC. DUH, so does everything else.
wat

As computers become both faster and less expensive, it's a natural progression that new software and operating systems progress to take advantage of that. So, trying to run newer software on older hardware is obviously going to lead to a slightly handicapped experience. Are you being stubborn, cheap, stupid or some combination of the above? Since you say you have a Vista+Aero capable computer, it seems the first or third.

[Potnop]

I like it :). As long as it doesn't slow now my PC, BRING IT ON! :D I love my gooey windows in Ubuntu :)

http://i51.photobucket.com/albums/f356/rapt10439/Screenshot.png

Oh yeah... We use linux in the computer labs for programming class and I spend a good quarter of the hour I need to be doing the lab playing with the windows...

[REoL]

I never bothered turning off the eye candy on Vista. It doesn't really do anything in the performance department. Maybe Windows 7, if I upgraded to that, might bog down a little, being an older machine.

My Boss's CPU was built for WINDOWS 98, and upgraded to xp. The system handles things fine, but the graphics are a bit slow, noticible, but nothing horrible. (1GB RAM, and about 1.6GHz P2, I think.)

[Raptor Jesus]

1.6ghz p2? My desktop had a 1.6ghz p4.

[FATAL]

True enough. To use a Total Annihilation analogy for Fatal to understand, it's like what happens when you have some +200 metal income, and your metal storage is maxed out. It's useless and doing nothing for you until you spend the resources.
Moar gaters?

[Aliotroph?]

REoL's boss needs a (slightly) newer video card. I hate XP with laggy graphics. Yucko. Win2K for the win on those boxes.

There was a load of kicking and screaming before Mystic would leave Win98 behind. Don't think I could ever go back to using that on a day-to-day basis. Stuff just works better on newer machines. Well, my olde Star Trek game doesn't; it's a nightmare making it work right in DOSbox, but I don't play that much.

[g6672D]

Performance is not the only important factor. Simplicity often results in less bugs and/or security holes. Right now, I'll horrify you, because I have 4GB worth of RAM, and it's only using 306MB. It was at 700MB after the 98 hours or whatever of downloading Windows 7, because of caching and other reasons like that.

To use a different TA analogy, mine's not usually being used on Berthas or powerful aircraft swarms, but it isn't being wasted on multiple targetting facilities or A.K/Weasel/Jeffy/Peewee/Flea spam, which creates negative effects on unit intelligence, number and so on.

And every now and again, I do run something demanding, like PSX/PS2 emulation, VMs, Wine and other such things. In those cases, the UI prettied up is a useless distraction to what's going on inside the window. Namely, pure awesomeness. ;)

[Aliotroph?]

It's interesting how some things I used to think were processor speed issues turned out to be I/O and memory issues instead. I was listening to an XG MIDI file earlier and it occurred to me I'd never seen that softsynth lag on this computer except when it tries to run on two cores and gets confused about caching samples. So I dug out the file that used to drag my olde PII to a halt and tried that. At best I could get the CPU usage up to 20% (this is with a pile of other apps running, including Shareaza). It would stay there for a few seconds and go back to hovering between 3% and 7%. Turns out even that silly thing just wanted to do some I/O (saw a big spike on both cores for a second despite the driver only running on one).

[ghost]

Computer parts are not meant to be conservative, with the exception of power consumption, that is.

For me, it wouldn't be completely eye-candy, most of the colours are black so my eye's don't strain as much. The only eye candy being the wallpaper, I usually get them from Digital Blasphemy. So that's a yes from me.

[Big_al]

Ever since it has been an option in windows I have the "Adjust for best performance" checked.

[REoL]

1.6ghz p2? My desktop had a 1.6ghz p4.

Uhh........you might be right. I just remember Windows 98 stopping around the P2/P3 era.

[Raptor Jesus]

http://img254.imageshack.us/img254/8661/ohisu9.png

My desktop. I don't notice any performance lost. Thread won.

[Mystic]

all that crap uses system resources, you may not notice slowdown right away but it all adds up when other stuff gets loaded and windows refuses to keep its memory tidy even after all these years and all those crashes. Try making a DVD from home movies with all that shite loaded.

But of course the new windows wont crash, just as they claimed for all the previous versions.

[CrazedImp]

I use Vista, and only have 2GB RAM, and the only time I notice slowdown is after I exit from a memory intensive game. Having many windows open with normal desktop use barely affects performance. Modern OS's have smarter memory management, and give the extra resources to programs as needed, and when that memory isn't needed the OS will use it so it doesn't just sit there. Its like I said before, if you have a high amount of memory and don't use it, its going to waste.

[Aliotroph?]

XP crashes far, far less than 98. I did find a reliable way to make it crash on my machine. Certain DOS programs reset it instantly. Dunno why because it didn't do that before. I suspect SP3 has something to do with it. Vista on its own crashes less too. Sadly, they dropped the ball with driver support initially and that caused all manner of problems.

You ever tried directly comparing resource usage with the eye candy vs. having it off? I bet it's pretty small. The big thing Vista does is use your graphics card. If that thing sucks the eye candy will slow down stuff, but otherwise the difference isn't noticable at all. DVD encoding doesn't use the GPU. It would probably go faster if it did though.

[Raptor Jesus]

I have a GeForce 8600M 256 mb Vidja card. Runs all that pretty just fine. I've run Counter Strike: Source in Wine and got just about the same FPS I get in Vista.

[BC_Programming]

Who was saying they took out the ability to customize colours from XP/Vista? Warranted you would need to be running the classic theme for the colours to take effect... but you can change the size of elements for Luna (not sure about aero). The "Advanced" button on the Appearance Tab under Display properties still works as it always has.


And Microsoft refuses to change some things... Visual Basic's menu editor, for example. it stayed the same from 1983 to version 6 in 1998. And it SUCKED. But that's completely off-topic...

[Aliotroph?]

Oh, they left the colours in. They just crippled them. They took out the ability to save schemes of colours like profiles. It was useful because on Win2K I had a standard dark colour scheme I made and one that worked with those retarded programs that don't work with dark schemes (I'm looking at you, Creative Labs assholes).

So first they take out the profiles, meaning if I want to change my colours I get to do them all manually every time. Then they go and build Aero so I can't change most of the colours! GAH! If I want to use Aero I'm not forced to stare into the white glare of all the stupid windows! The price was too much to pay and that kept me from using Aero most of the time.

Half the font sizes cannot be changed in Aero either. The one for the icons in Explorer windows seems to be immutable. Thanks guys. I never played enough with the Windows 7 beta to see if they bothered about any of that kind of thing. They did make the taskbar and Start menu prettier and managed to disallow you from changing the icon size and layout in the control panel.

I blame Apple users for acting like an intentionally crippled GUI is a good thing. *bug* Time for me to go see if LightStep got more usable, perhaps.

[Raptor Jesus]

Alio, you need Ubuntu :P

[KuriKai]

Yeah, I'm using ubuntu and using a customised darkroom theme. so basically everything is dark^^ Easier on the eyes

[BC_Programming]

So... the themes tab doesn't save any changes made to the "Advanced" elements? I know it saves Caption button sizes- the only one I've changed; Don't know about colours, though.

It would have been better if they made it more customizable. I mean- you can choose Silver, Olive, or Blue. Wow. what variety.

[Mystic]

My 2 gigs of ram is for applications like PSP or various DVD authoring packages to use, not for some frilly lace curtains on windows.

[Aliotroph?]

DVD authoring is silly. Why would I want my movies on discs when I can have computers connected to all my display devices and networked???

The colours in XP are only changeable if you use the "classic" theme. Even then they took out the profiles you could make in there. The profiles were useful. It looks like they took it out when they realized it would get broken by the ugly Luna thing. With Aero they weren't even trying. They apparently forgot some people don't like white windows.

What makes me laugh are those people who have really crazy colours. I remote connected to a lady's computer once and was amazed by the colours. Lots of pink, blue and yellow everywhere. No grey, no white, no black. It was just painful.

[Mystic]

DVD authoring isnt silly if I have in-laws living in a far away country and have hundreds of AVI movies and thousands of pictures of my adventures with their daughter. There is also a large collection of movies and pics taken when on holiday with the in-laws. They love the DVD's I make for them, her dad cries through them. They dont have a PC.

[Aliotroph?]

Ahh, the olde in-law thing. He cries through them?

[Doom_Dude]

Yeah, that's what he said, he cries through them. You know, when that wet stuff gets in ur eyes. :p ;)

As for OS eye candy. I dunno... I never thought of it that way. Guess I don't care as long as it looks decent and works well. But at what point is it eye candy anyhow? I mean if you like your fancy wallpapers is that eye candy? As for a game rig, all I want on there is for my games to run, have loads of room and be able to organize my patches, skins, maps and other game related content. Having flashy looking shiny parts and junk matters little.

[Mystic]

Yeah, that's what he said, he cries through them. You know, when that wet stuff gets in ur eyes. :p ;)

As for OS eye candy. I dunno... blah blah blah.

exactly, thats how I see it.

He cries because he misses Unda terribly, she and her sister Inga both live here in Scotland, the parents live on a farm in Latvia. Until recently the parents were always pressuring Inga and Unda to come back to Latvia but now that the full extent of the corruption in the government there is becoming apparent they are glad their daughters escaped to the UK.

[Sigma]

True enough. To use a Total Annihilation analogy for Fatal to understand, it's like what happens when you have some +200 metal income, and your metal storage is maxed out. It's useless and doing nothing for you until you spend the resources.

No. I'd rather have my RAM as unused and unburdened by the OS as possible, so when I want to do something (such as run an application) it's available for me and I don't have to mess with all of my settings to make it run smoothly. It's more efficient in every single way possible (especially in terms of time and money). Fatal is absolutely right.

[CrazedImp]

So then tell me, whats the point of having excessive RAM if most of its only ever going to sit there some 90% of the time? People need to realise that computers are not as affected by these physical memory limitations anymore. If you have a larger amount of RAM it needs to be used.

[rustyslacker]

No. I'd rather have my RAM as unused and unburdened by the OS as possible, so when I want to do something (such as run an application) it's available for me and I don't have to mess with all of my settings to make it run smoothly. It's more efficient in every single way possible (especially in terms of time and money). Fatal is absolutely right.
Jeeze, show up once every six months and post three sentences? We miss you!

While your argument has merit, I also spent a good chunk of money on this computer and I want to make the most of it. I think the metal analogy holds true as long as the operating system is capable of scaling and reallocating on the fly so that performance inhibition is imperceptible.

Shrug. If you like having your memory usage at 6% or we, that's great too, and often I can't really decide if I agree with this viewpoint or not. For now, I'm siding with Crazedimp.

[Aliotroph?]

Most of the extra RAM usage in Windows (well, in Vista anyway) goes to precaching apps you use a lot so they do load faster consistently. Definitely better to maybe wait two extra seconds for the rarely-used giant app and have everything else, giant apps included, going as fast as possible. No settings changes required to make anything run smooth (at least on systems with 2+ gigs.

Now it's a totally different story on somebody's crappy little $400 PC from Dell. They bought it with 256 MB, which is enough to run XP in itself. Then they added Norton, some Adobe stuff, fancy AIO printer software, and whatever else Dell likes to throw on. Their computer is always slow, even with some tweaking and if they get some malware they're screwed. Hehe, Dell even sold some Vista machines with 512 MB and GMA 915 GPUs. Those things can take an hour to install that stupid AIO printer software.

On my own machine right now I have a bunch of apps running. Shareaza (hehe, open-source P2P thing) is using 405 MB, Firefox 3 is using 223 MB, the kernel is using about 57 MB (non-paged), and I somehow still have 2 GB free. I wouldn't mind if Windows took a bunch of that and dropped Fallout 3 there so it didn't take three bloody minutes to load it when it started! It could even do it while I do other stuff here, because with those apps, Pidgin, and Winamp going my CPU usage is only around 3% and this isn't even a new computer.

Yeah, I'm with Rusty and CrazedImp.

[Mystic]

what I want to know is why it makes you lot so angry that some of us dont give a shit about the eye candy??? seems a very strange thing to get all argumentative about, someone asks us if we use it or not so we gave honest answers, we just dont like it or see the point of it, its superficial crap like 'go faster' stripes on a car and regardless of what anyone says having more stuff running is going to affect the system somewhere along the road..

[CrazedImp]

I'm not annoyed at the fact if people like eye candy or not, I couldn't give two shits if people want it or include it with something or not. What does annoy me is this age old mentality people have that they need to use the least amount of resources possible, when computers have come along a fair bit since people would normally have to worry about such things.

Putting into a different perspective, you could say its like buying a high end gaming GPU, then running the latest games at low settings and low resolutions to get better performance. You pay like $400+ for a card that performs well, but don't use its full potential. The same thing if you have a lot of RAM and decide to let most of it sit there a lot of the time.

[Mystic]

I see that point, I actually try to run my games as high res as possible. But honestly, I really dont care about the fancy window dressings, I keep my desktop simple, classic windows style if you like, I rarely if ever use a background picture even.(usually just for those desktop picture threads)

My Vista PC will reset itself now and again, usually after a few hours mixed usage, surfing the net, running PSP, watching movies, it just resets the pc, no explanations. I reckon its just because microsoft still dont know how to unclutter memory after applications close so everything eventually fills up.
Thats with all the superficial visuals turned off, when the pc was new (about 2 years ago)I had all the aero etc switched on, it would reset a lot more often and would sometimes just sit there thrashing away at the hard disk and freeze for 30 seconds or so in the middle of doing something

I also run XP on the same machine (separate hard disk) and dont have any complaints, with 2 Gigs I guess XP thinks its christmas and is too busy partying to crash.

[Aliotroph?]

Because anger goes better with hot wings? ;)

[g6672D]

My Vista PC will reset itself now and again, usually after a few hours mixed usage...

Your problem sounds more like a hardware issue, probably related to the power supply or overheating. It could be a driver issue too, though those usually show up as BSoDs.

In my computer's current state, it's vastly underused. 310MB RAM used, consistent 10-20% CPU load while at 800MHz and so on. That's while it's doing stuff like IM, browsing Internet and short uptime. Generally, after long uptime, say 30 hours, the RAM use can get as high as 700MB due to stuff being cached for faster access. Running Azureus adds about 200MB. VirtualBox takes about 375MB. Doom 3 forces it to 2401MHz in complex areas though it sits at 1200MHz in the simple regions. Uses about 300-400MB RAM. This is on High settings, though windowed 800*600 so I can view the system state.

The high specs do help in the cases where I'm building source code or other CPU-intensive tasks. But that's not common, nor does it use a great deal of RAM. At the same time, swap use is 0MB, so it helps there. Anyway, what else could the resources be used on?

[Aliotroph?]

Yeah, if it's resetting like that it's just broken. It shouldn't do that. I have my computer running for weeks on end sometimes, and I did on Vista too -- well, at least until the hardware problem I do have kicks in. Might wanna have a look in the "Reliability and Performance Monitor" (you can type that in the Start menu box) and see if it says why it's resetting. If it's logging the crashes it'll even give you a pretty graph of when they happen and a fake "reliability index" that means very little.

[Mystic]

Nah, at the time I looked at all the messageboards to do with Vista problems and everyone else (on the boards) seems to have had the same problems. SP1 fixed a lot of it but its a operating system I still dont trust and wouldnt tell anyone to buy it. Another strange thing, since SP1 I cant see my internet settings, its as if I connect to the net by magic, I wanted to transfer the settings to my XP but there dont seem to be any settings to transfer, its a mystery.

I had to 'fix' my legally bought XP so it doesnt do that online verification thingy because I cant find my original setup stuff for my ISP

reliability thingy says all the crashes are due to IE not responding or system shutdowns (when the system freezes I just switch it off at the socket). Actually there isnt as many as I thought but it seems like a lot when they happen. As far as I can remember the freezes usually happen when watching some movies.

About the random resetting under Vista, it seems to be an XviD issue, it happens in XP too so forget all that stuff about resetting.

[Sigma]

I'm not annoyed at the fact if people like eye candy or not, I couldn't give two shits if people want it or include it with something or not. What does annoy me is this age old mentality people have that they need to use the least amount of resources possible, when computers have come along a fair bit since people would normally have to worry about such things.

Putting into a different perspective, you could say its like buying a high end gaming GPU, then running the latest games at low settings and low resolutions to get better performance. You pay like $400+ for a card that performs well, but don't use its full potential. The same thing if you have a lot of RAM and decide to let most of it sit there a lot of the time.

In the circumstance you have enough resources to run your applications well with the eye-candy cranked up, fine. However, if you can run your applications just as well on a system with far fewer available resources because you don't have said eye-candy features turned on (or have them at all), I really wonder what the point is.

No matter what, like I said, it's an efficiency issue. No one purchases a high-end video card, turns around and cranks all of the settings down so the game runs at a super high frame-rate-- your example is ridiculous.

This isn't a debate of XP versus Vista (security, stability, etc.) or whatever, it's an issue of pointless eye-candy that you're dedicating resources to for no one reason than you can. It's your money, I suppose-- or, as I suspect with a lot of people, your parents'.

[Mystic]

I couldnt say it better myself

[sourceror]

"If you can't do the job in 4kb, the job isn't worth doing. If it's good enough for the space shuttle it's good enough for me."
"People who waste nanoseconds should be drug out into the street and shot."
--Poor paraphrases that you'll understand if you're cool
I never buy high end shit 'cause I'm too damn poor and all the "real" computing pastimes (programming and science, etc) don't need overblown specs. I also run Slackware 9.0, so I couldn't have eye candy if I wanted it. ;-)

[CrazedImp]

No matter what, like I said, it's an efficiency issue. No one purchases a high-end video card, turns around and cranks all of the settings down so the game runs at a super high frame-rate-- your example is ridiculous.

I assure you that you get people like that. You get people that think getting high end hardware, turning down the settings, getting a super high FPS and running at lower resolutions helps you to aim better in FPS games. Ridiculous I know, but they think it works. Personally I think running your games at optimum settings and actually enjoying the game is better than going to every length possible to get an edge.

Needless to say, no matter how ridiculous something sounds I can assure you there will always be one person in the world that does it.

[Jimi]

The only eyecandy I have is an image for the desktop... Other eyecandy is just waste for me.

[Raptor Jesus]

Having super high FPS is stupid. Unless you have the display for it, everything will just get torn to shit and looks terrible. My laptop, without vsync, can run CS:S at 140 FPS but it's hard as shit to play as the screen tears alot when turning. Why would anyone want FPS over what their display can do?

[FATAL]

There will always be tearing no matter what unless the refresh rate syncs exactly with the FPS output of the video card. V-sync is a must.

[Raptor Jesus]

I actually got into a discussion about high FPS with a CS:S buddy of mine at school yesterday. He was saying that the high FPS allowed him more precision. I mentioned the tearing and he said it was a small price to pay. I don't get it. If you want more precision, get a better mouse. I have a Logitech G9 and I get pixel perfect aiming on CS:S while running at 60 FPS. Why would you need to aim between pixels??????

[REoL]

[FONT="Arial"]{SNIP} No one purchases a high-end video card, turns around and cranks all of the settings down so the game runs at a super high frame-rate-- your example is ridiculous.{SNIP}[FONT]

Quake ran fine at 320x200 on my Pentium back in the day. For the hell of it, I did adjust all the video settings as low as possible, including eliminating textures. I cranked the rez up to 1280x1024, and I topped out at 6FPS. keep in mind the refresh rate was slow enough you could see the frames being drawn top to bottom. :)

Yeah, people do it, sometimes just to see what can happen.

[Sigma]

I did not mean to sound argumentative, so if I did, I apologize.

Regardless, if someone really wants to pay a couple hundred dollars for higher-end hardware so he can pull off an extra headshot or two once in awhile, that's his prerogative. I, on the other hand, think such things are ostentatious, so we can agree there. I'd think latency would be a bigger issue than overly inflated framerates in online shooters, but there could be a lot going on there. Even so, I suspect a person such as the one you described would also (probably) want their higher-end system as fast as possible, so they probably won't be sporting a bunch of OS eye-candy on their PC.

I believe a good player would adjust (ever so slightly) to his system, rather than exploiting it for a slight advantage, but some people can't do that / aren't as skilled, so it's understandable I suppose.

@ REoL

Your experiment was the opposite of that example. We're talking about taking a high-end video card / system and cranking everything down to the bare-minimum-- not taking a low-end system (by today's standards) and cranking everything way up to see what happens. :)

[Aliotroph?]

With games I like them as pretty as possible? Why is this? Because most games I play seem to exist to be pretty. That said, Fallout 3 is no fun when it lags so badly VATS takes a whole minute to let you do anything. There is a balance and I seem to have pretty much found it on this system (I want a new video card).

My bro used to do that trick where you turn down everything so you can run CS at 200 fps. I noticed he doesn't do that with newer games. He just got a ridiculously precise mouse and tweaks the game so he gets at least 60 fps. Now he plays so well he gets banned from everybody's servers and eventually switches games. He scares me.

[REoL]

Actually, it was both. The P60 I had was an average machine for Quake, and mine got P90 performance. I cranked the rez just to see how fast it ran on the highest resoultion. Most of the drawing time was simply plopping it onto the screen, as I watched the refresh go from top to bottom, a new refresh instantly happened as soon as the previous one ended.
In a nutshell, I did both. Quake hauled at 320x200 with all the stuff turned off.

[Big_al]

I used to run Screamer (driving game) in the low-res mode since it was silky smooth.
I've run Doom in a lower screen size while playing over the modem to get the same effect.

[REoL]

I don't run DooM any higher than 640x480, as it appears too flat going much higher.

[Mystic]

Screamer would crash the system in high res mode, it was something to do with
dos4gw.exe, it usually happened after about 3 races.

[Aliotroph?]

That game was pretty for its day. I remember wondering (since I was a kid) why racing games always had nicer graphics than FPS games, which I thought were more fun. There was some other racing game we had (shareware) that had this track in the mountains of Tibet. I dunno what it was, but it looked cool.

[Mystic]

you sure that wasnt the demo for Megarace2?? I think the demo level was Tibet.

[Aliotroph?]

Could have been. I don't remember at all.

[Big_al]

Can the man in the street tell the difference between Windows 7 and KDE4?
http://tinyurl.com/czjp73

Nope

[Raptor Jesus]

Haha. Easy to use my arse! :P

[Mystic]

I have no idea what kde4 is but Im pretty sure thats ok.

[Big_al]

I have no idea what kde4 is but Im pretty sure thats ok.Its a Linux thing, you wouldn't like it.

[Mystic]

I might if its easy to install/use and doesnt overwrite my mbr. All my graphics cards are nvidia (apart from your old voodoo3, in my win98 pc) so I shouldnt have a problem with the graphics drivers.

[Raptor Jesus]

Definately anything but easy. I hate KDE4 anyway. GNOME is much better :)