Blogged in FPS, Games by Matt on Sunday June 12, 2005
So I decided to mess around with Battlefield 2 some more, to make it run worth a crap on my system. First of all, if you have a Nvidia graphics card, make sure you use the drivers on the CD! Before I got done downloading the Battlefield 2 demo, I took the liberty to make sure my Video Card drivers were the most recent. I took a stroll over to Nvidia to download my drivers, according to them, their latest official driver is 71.89 so I got and installed them. Anyways it turns out the Battlefield 2 demo has 77.?? Nvidia Drivers. Anyways, make sure you use the drivers on the CD if you do not already have the 77.?? Nvidia Drivers.
Once you fire up the game, you’ll now want to navigate to the Options -> Video section. Once there you’ll be able to tweak your game for performance. If you’re running a low-end machine, (1.8GHZ or less, 64mb Card, 512mb Ram or less) I would recommend setting your settings all to low, and make sure shadows are turned off, Draw Distance to 50%, and you’re video resolution is at 800×600.
If you’re running a mid-range machine (1.8GHZ to 2.4GHZ , 128mb Card, Gig of Ram) I’d recommend leaving everything on Medium, however turn your geometry and texture settings to high. Once again, make sure shadows are turned off, the shadows really seem to kill machines with 128MB cards. The good thing about turning every thing to medium, except Texture and Geometry, and Shadows off is you can have the game with MOST of the Eye Candy and still get decent performance, make sure you’re resolution is at 1024×768 and 50-60% Draw Distance.
High-end machines (2.4GHZ and UP, 256MB Latest Generation Video Card, Gig or More of Ram) get to take advantage of all the eyecandy Battlefield 2 has to offer. Turn everything to high, crank your AA up a bit, and set your resolution to 1280×960 and frag away. You’ll get to see Battlefield 2 the way it’s suppose to be played, HOWEVER, all computers will differ on performance so mess around and give it a try.
I tried all the above settings out on two different boxes I have and these are what seemed to work the best. I didn’t do any Scientific Benchmarking or anything, however these settings gave me the best performance based on hardware. If you have any recommendations feel free to leave a comment for everyone to see.
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Blogged in FPS, Reviews, Games by Matt on Friday June 10, 2005
Well well well, where to start with this one. As many of you probably know, the demo for Battlefield 2 was released today. Battlefield 2 is the (over)hyped sequel to Battlefield 1942 and Battlefield Vietnam. This time around Battlefield 2 was worked on by the team of Trauma Studios the same group who released Desert Combat for Battlefield 1942.
By just reading this opening remark, you can probably already tell my opinions on Battlefield 2, however keep in mind this is my critique from my first impressions, which in this case happen to be from playing the demo.
The Battlefield 2 demo weighs in at a hefty 546MB, if you’re lucky enough to get connected to a download, you will recieve a single map which can be played in single player for ten minutes or played in multiplayer. Once installed and loaded you’ll be presented with a rather sleek user interface, where you can go ahead and select your play mode. Once you’re ready to dive in to the action, you may as well go grab some food or smoke a cigarette, because you’re going to be waiting for your “shaders to optimize” on the first load up. Keep in mind I am on a AMD 64 3500+, Gig of DDR in Dual Channel, Two 120GB Seagate SATA drives in Raid 0, and a pair of eVGA 6800GT’s in SLI, and this first load took well over three minutes. I thought this load would be acceptable, since it was claiming it was optimizing shaders for my graphics selection. However after loading another game without the shader optimization it still took well over two minutes, BAD!
Finally the load finishes, and I’m presented with a menu where I have to enter the game, then select my class kit and spawn point. I spawn in the game, and the first thing I’m presented with are HUGE FUCKING BLACK BLOCKS COMING FROM SHADOWS OF PLAYER AND VEHICLE MODELS. Now I could have sworn the game was optimizing shaders for my selection, but apparently it didn’t. I throw my anger aside with the shadow ordeal, and decide to give the game a spin. I start running to my objective, and I’m tapping my F8 key looking for my good old familiar radio menu only to find out it has CHANGED! You hit Q to bring up a HORRIDLY designed radio menu system. You navigate it with your mouse, wtf? I’d rather beck at my keys, then have to move my mouse to an exact spot for a selection. Horrid move EA, than again it is EA, so what should we expect?
I get up to where the action is happening, and start fighting and think to myself, wow this feels just like Desert Combat. That isn’t inheritly a bad thing, seeing how Desert Combat is a great mod for Battlefield 1942, but in this case it is bad. The fighting is like Desert Combat, however when you do start fighting you will notice the same bugs that regular old Battlefield 1942 was plagued with for oh so long. You can hit people with grenades, and they’re just magically lifted off the ground, or tank cannons just launch people. You’d figure after five years, EA would have figured out how to fix this, than again they don’t care, they have a cash cow, why invest more to fix when they can invest none and profit.
The weapon and vehicle sounds in Battlefield 2 are great, however the radio messages are just downright annoying. The graphics are also nice, even if they are laggy as shit. With some work, Battlefield 2 could be MUCH better, however deadlines and pre-determined release dates mess all of that up. Before I make a more formal review, I will wait untill the full game is released, until then I will not touch this demo again.
Get the demo here and judge for yourself!
UPDATE
Take a gander at this article I wrote after I messed around with the game tweaking my Graphics Options for best Gameplay.
http://www.ruinedmylife.com/2005/06/12/tweaking-battlefield-2-graphics-options/
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Blogged in Internet by Matt on Friday June 3, 2005
The good old browser war argument, and this one I can sum up with only one choice, Firefox. I know there are loads of people, who will call us strictly Firefox users, “elitists”, “web nazis”, “open source junkies”, among others. The fact of the matter is, Firefox is a completely free web brower that uterly desimates the others. Firefox is superior to IE in countless ways, safer, faster, less resource intensive, better page rendering and much more.
Being a web designer I’m always checking pages for constant consitency over various browsers and OS’s, and Firefox renders webpages to the strict rules of the W3. To keep the list of features coming in, Firefox is 99% safer then Internet Explorer. Firefox does not use ActiveX and any plugins that are needed for Firefox must be enabled by the end user, meaning users should not get spyware/adware unless they allow it to come through by enabling or disabling options.
The choice is clear, Get Firefox and take back the web!
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