Pistonhead wrote:
Okay let's put it this way, my grandpa play solitaire on his work computer and my grandma plays bejeweled and spider solitaire on hers. Would you really call my grandparents PC gamers? Casual gamers maybe, but it's not the same as someone who plays Half Life 2.
Right, but... I do play Half-Life 2 - just on the best video card that's available. I am still waiting for episode 3. I almost certainly have more video card than your grandparents.
My parents spend a lot of spare time playing Frontierville. Watching them grind, I am willing to grant they're gamers. I don't think playing the top of the line high end games with the most powerful video card is necessary, and there can be more than one category of gamer.
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The price point is going down....or maybe I just am getting behind on things cause admittedly, I hate motion gaming, this primative "3D gaming" BS that nvidia is pushing, the 3+ monitor crap ATI is pushing and honestly I'm starting to lose interest in physics because it's so poorly implemented it seems like a gag (have you ever bumped into a table in oblivion and seen a cup fly across a room at ridiculous speed?)
Oh I agree with this paragraph a lot. The physics get on my nerves in some games - like you said with Oblivion, why does everything need to scatter when you look at it? It was clever to implement but needed way more fine-tuning.
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FYI best of the best sh** costs $500+ per card and 2-4 cards, as an unemployed guy who has other expensive priorities (cars) I still manage to put down some good money on computer sh**. Also, keep in mind what you get for the money. If you buy a $50 video card it's not even 1/100th the performance of a current $200 card. You get more for your money if you pay for more than just the materials and processes to make the card.
I have never paid less than $120-150 for a video card, I just don't tend to pay more.
My previous computer, oh my god. I was trying to get a video card that'd run the games I wanted to play along with a new computer at Fry's, and the salesman is aggressively trying to convince me that the integrated video chip on the motherboard will be sufficient for all my needs. Seven years later, I still want to travel back in time and verbally slap him.
I have put a lot of money into my computer - it just so happens that this meant I couldn't spend all that much money on a card at the same time. I picked one that had decent bench marks.
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I'm not saying you can't take interest in plants versus zombies but if that's YOUR GENRE OF CHOICE you don't need a good video card and you probably shouldn't start being interested in Oblivion since it's NOT an easy game to pick up for a non-gamer anyways.
I only recently started to get into the indie games - they're really clever and a lot of fun, and take risks you just don't see in the top titles, and play around with some cool ideas. I mean I'm thinking of World of Goo and Braid as two examples here. The Path is another good one, but I have yet to finish playing that.