[Gameplay] Titanfall Beta gameplay videos

With the chores related to the baby, I didn’t have much opportunity to play Titanfall beta but I managed to record 3 gameplay videos. And even then, I could only check out Attrition game mode. Check them out and subscribe to my channel while you are at it.

The beta was live only for a few days. It only became open beta on 17th. By the time I write this post, it is already expired. So I will have to buy the game to on 11th of March when it comes out, to check out the game in full glory.

I’m not sure if I would buy it at launch though, because I have a lot of games in Steam and Origin libraries that I haven’t played and they require less of a GPU to play with all the eye-candy turned on. So I won’t miss not having a powerful GPU. Will see how it goes.

[Rant] Live streaming to Twitch

Now that NVidia has released a version of GeForce Experience that allows us to stream gameplay videos straight to Twitch, I had been playing around with it.

Click here to visit my Twitch channel. I hope you'd subscribe. ^^

 

The day before yesterday I live streamed NFS Rivals, which I deleted because it was a crappy gameplay videos. Last night I recorded Crysis 3 which turned out to be quite nice. I still don't record the audio from the mic.

 

I am still experimenting because this is completely a new thing to me. It seems that you can upload the gameplay videos to YouTube fraught from Twitch but I still don't know how to. I have connected with YouTube from Twitch settings but I think I need to explicitly tell it to upload the videos to YouTube.

 

One more thing. GeForce Experience doesn't seem to save the Twitch account credentials. I have to enter them every time I reboot. Every time I try to do a live stream, I get a crossed indicator that shows as if it is not working. When I checked the ShadowPlay settings, it was not logged into my Twitch account.

 

# Fount it. You will receive an email when you can save the Twitch broadcasts.  From there, you have to first save the video in Twitch and then explicitly ask it to upload to YouTube.

 

Here’s one of the videos that I uploaded through Twitch to YouTube. (Hey, while at it, why don’t you subscribe to my YouTube channel as well?)

Crysis 3 MP TDM on Williamsburg

 

What about the performance? There is definitely a lag between the upstream and the downstream. If you checked out the archived videos you’ll see me turning to the left of me. That is to check if the stream is working on my laptop. It was a bit laggy on the MacBook Air, so I lowered the quality to “low” setting in GeForce Experience. Hey, a lot of Sri Lankans cannot watch the videos because of the darn caps imposed by SLT. What a retarded ISP!!!

 

Anyways, I will continue to live stream videos to Twitch, and later archive them to YouTube. It seems easier than saving, editing and manually uploading to YouTube.

[Rant] NVidia Shadow Play, here I come!

Finally NVidia is releasing ShadowPlay to the public. If you don’t know, ShadowPlay is the technology where you can record your gameplay videos using the hardware encoder inside the GeForce 600/700 graphics cards. What’s cool about that is, you will hardly see a performance penalty when you do that. I had been using MSI Afterburner for video capture and while it is better than FRAPS as if doesn’t lock the gaming FPS to 60 or 120FPS, it still comes with a 10-15% performance hit because all the processing is done in real time in the CPU.

ShadowPlay comes with the version 1.7 of GeForce Experience software. GeForce Experience was originally created to automatically suggest the optimal graphics settings for your system to play the games that are installed in your system. I usually tweak the graphics settings on my own, but if you are a causal user, you will find this software to be very helpful. Of course, if you want to get the best FPS for your multiplayer games, you will have to come up with your own settings.

ShadowPlay is still in beta. You also need to update your graphics driver to 331.65 beta driver as well. After you download and install both GeForce Experience 1.7 and graphics driver version 331.65 beta, you will have to din to the Preferences tab on GeForce Experience to enable ShadowPlay. To enable ShadowPlay, you have to click on the button called “ShadowPlay”. Then you have to turn on the switch on the left hand side. Your monitor would go black and do some weird stuff when you click on that button. Don’t worry; just give it about 10 seconds.

 

There are indeed limitations in ShadowPlay. The biggest limitation is that you can only record maximum 20 minutes at a time. Plus, you can record only at 1080p 60Hz. At best quality settings, you will end up with a 7.5GB file at those settings.

Even though NVidia said that you would be able to stream games to Twitch, there doesn’t seem to be inbuilt support in GeForce Experience at this time. But hopefully it will come in the final version. For now, you will have to be satisfied with Afterburner or FRAPS like recording and manually uploading the video files to YouTube. Of course you will have to do some preprocessing because 7.5GB sounds very big.

Ok, enough chitter chatter. I need to experience this. See ya later!

[Gaming] GTA V game play video is amazing!

Few posts back I mentioned that I'm fixed to only two game series, Crysis and Battlefield. Yesterday Shameez posted a video about upcoming Grand Theft Auto V (GTA V for short) on Facebook and that possibly changed my decision. But there is one caveat. GTA V is, at least initially, only coming to the consoles. However, after watching that video, I felt buying a console just to play this game is justifiable (well, maybe not). But I bet it will eventually come to the desktop. The video only shows it is coming for the Xbox 360 and PS3. With the next generation consoles right around the corner, there is no way that they won't support them. If thy support them, there is no reason why they cannot do it for the PC because the next generation consoles are more like PCs than previous generation consoles.

 

Without too much ado, watch the video and see for yourself. This game is like a combination of every game out there. It's got everything. Shooting, fighting, driving, flying, diving, hunting, shopping, working, eating, talking, making friends, living, loving - everything is in it. Just pure win.

 

Grand Theft Auto 5 - Official Gameplay GTA V Video

 

I will definitely buy this game. I didn't GTA IV, maybe because it is too time consuming and was buggy at launch. I played GTA3, Vice City and San Andreas though. Hoping to play GTA V when it comes out to PC.

Crysis 3 patch 1.3 released

Few days ago, Crytek released the patch version 1.3 for Crysis 3 with a lot of bug fixed in single player and multiplayer modes. While the improvements were necessary, they broke an essential part of multiplayer mode.

People were seeing a massive performance drop only in multiplayer mode. For example, I was playing with High settings because I wanted to get all the FPS I could so that it reduces input lag, and prior to this patch I was getting around 80 ~ 120FPS. But after the patch, the frame rate didn’t rise above 50FPS. Funny thing was, I was getting the same 50FPS in all Medum, High and Very High graphics settings. There were many posts on the forums and for some people the game had become completely unplayable. I can see how that would drive people insane, especially because every one who is playing the multiplayer has bought the game legitimately.

But Crytek released a small update the next day and it fixed the issue. Now I’m getting the same 80 ~ 120fps as before. Phew!

In case you are wondering what the improvements in version 1.3 are, click the following image.