@OZSeaford: Don't upgrade your drivers. Save the smurfs!
From the comment thread of another article here:

Quoting: edddeduckferal

Quoting: silverphilIs it mandatory to install nvidia-352 or can i get away with nvidia-331 (preferably) or nvidia-346 without issues or performance problems?
I have a GT 650M.

If you don't run at least those drivers everyone will look like smurfs (all blue), stability should be ok but those drivers are pretty old so your performance stability will vary.

I'd highly recommend using the supported drivers or newer.

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Fan culture is weird. This is just like dissing a movie because it's not a literal and complete adaptation of whatever book it's based on. So what? Why treat entertainment like holy scripture? It's not heresy, it's just a different story.

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Quoting: metro2033fanboyNext Gen game boy! next gen!!

Funny being called a "boy" by someone with fanboy in his nick. ;) On the other hand it's refreshing to see you post something that doesn't end with "FTW" for a change.

Anyway, the term "next gen" obviously has very little meaning in PC gaming. There are plenty of mid- to high end video cards on the market with much less than 6GiB of memory. And I bet there will be for quite a while.

Quoting: eikeThe game states these itself when changing texture quality (box on right side).
AFAIR it doesn't state a resolution, but I guess that only could be 1080p.

Thanks. Nice of the developers to have it visible in the UI. I had no idea as I don't own the game yet.

EDIT: answered eike as well

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Quoting: ColoneilYep, seems random to me too. Maybe texture loading in the graphic card ram? I only have a 2Gb card and 4Gb is recommended, what about you? Any comment on this from the (still awesome) feral guys appreciated ;-)

According to a random website, the official vmem requirement for the game at 1080p is 2 gigs for the Medium texture quality setting and 4 GiB for High. 6 GiB for Ultra when the hd texture pack is installed. No mention of the effect of other settings, but I got the impression that this is with at least reasonable AA.

Seems a bit memory hungry to me.

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Quoting: Mountain Man

Quoting: MagbedHopefully Vulkan will change everything and we will finally forget about wrappers.

I doubt Vulkan will change anything because Microsoft has a lot of money behind DirectX to keep it front and center with game developers.

Also there's little chance older games and engines will suddenly sprout new Vulkan backends. The coding effort required isn't exactly trivial, nor cheap. Then there's the fact that the graphics api isn't the only thing that EOn/Wine actually wrap.

Quoting: Mountain ManUnless the Vulkan group has an enormous pile of cash for promotion and training, they're going to find it as hard as ever to compete with DirectX.

Availability and quality of tools and documentation is also a factor. This is where d3d seems to shine when compared to ogl. It seems more difficult to create and debug quality OpenGL code.

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It's an older game so a wrapper is better than nothing. If only this was Dirt 3 I might actually buy it, but Showdown... probably not. I don't mind a fun arcade racer in the vein of Flatout or even good old Destruction Derby, but somehow I'm not hyped for this one. Might be because I really preferred the straight out racing and rally-type events in D3 when I played it on a friend's PS3.

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@Oldrocker99: Oh, I think I finally got what you meant by having to start at the beginning. :whistle: Monsters and stuff get reset when you quit the game or leave an area/level, but you keep the loot and experience you've collected. The levels aren't that long and this way you can return as many times as you want for the challenges, extra loot or whatever. You can access all the locations you've found from the castle map, so pretty much the only downside is that you have to play through the levels in one sitting. Anyway, this is clearly by design.

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Quoting: oldrocker99My only problem (still only 15-20 minutes into gameplay) is that I have ti start at the beginning, even after passing two checkpoints :><: .

Oh, didn't see that. Perhaps because I didn't actually manage to die once in the couple of hours I've played. :P

Quoting: oldrocker99It is still one awesome game :woot: :wub: .

It sure is a blast. I know I've only scratched the surface but thus far I find it much more enjoyable than Torchlight. A big plus for good gamepad support.

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Quoting: subImho, this would be really interesting to get a good idea of issues with the porting process and what's actually going wrong with Catalyst. But from my experience companies do not want to share this kind of information. :(

More likely it's AMD that does not want these details public. Software developers generally do not want to piss off HW manufacturers, at least if they need their support or driver bugs fixed.

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Quoting: coesetaMetascore or steam score is useless. The only sane thing to do is watch some lets plays and decide for yourself if the game is to your liking or not.

I for one prefer reviews to gameplay videos. Written reviews often tell you why people like or dislike the game instead of just what gameplay looks like. After all, I'm trying to find out if I'd enjoy playing them, not if someone looking over my shoulder would be suitably entertained.

Maybe I'm not sane (to use your words), but I also find watching others play fairly boring (sorry Samsai :P). I don't think I've ever watched a let's play for more than a couple of minutes. Also, these videos spoil a lot of stuff for any game where that matters. Like most of the games I'm interested in.

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