Fragfests and Imbas

…and with Tribes: Vengeance to boot! This is the controversial last installment of the Tribes series, of which the first incarnation was a genre-defining game and essentially created the FPS-z style of play. Think of a much slower-paced, tactical, team-based version of Quake 3 with jetpacks!

Vengeance threw some of that out the window and opted for a gameplay that is more familiar to casual players. Hardcore fans of the series scorn it due to that sole reason. But what the heck! Lush graphics, bright environments, hectic fragging and reverberating 2.1 3d sound can really take a player in! My girlfriend, who watching a telenovela in the living room, was complaining that the TV shook with each exploding mortar round that flung me every which way. I didn’t listen; three heavies had somehow stomped their way towards the chamber where our base’s power generator was located. It was our generator! Without it, our sensor and inventory and resupply stations would not work. Girlfriends can wait.

“Flung me every which way?” you ask? Yes, the game has ragdoll physics. You should see what a godhammer round does to a recon soldier. (Evil grin)

UPDATE: RAM vs  Hard Drives (A Storage vs Memory Comparison-Tutorial ) starts here.

I’ve been doing some tweaks with the game, both in-game and in its .ini file and this reminded me about some of my friends who still have only a little inkling about how their system RAM figures into their gameplay. Oftentimes I hear the comment: “I don’t want to install anymore programs because it will eat up my memory."

Slightly true, mostly wrong.

Fact is, those programs you install are just sitting idly like sacks in your hard drive. (For the sake of simplicity, let us just assume that they don’t run in the background.) Continuing the sack analogy, your hard drive is like a warehouse; it’s just storage. The bodega is filled with laborers who can find what sack you want to use. They are slow, but they get the job done.

Your RAM on the other hand, is a conveyor belt; it’s temporary storage. It funnels data into your CPU.

It is faster than your laborers in your bodega, much, much faster. Also, the more RAM you have, the larger and longer your conveyor belt is in our analogy and the more sacks you can have in it in any given time.

The CPU only orders sacks when it needs it; the rest still sit idly in your warehouse that is your hard drive. The slow laborers only find the sacks and put it in your conveyor belt when they are needed.

So you see, you can install as many programs as you want and as long as you don’t demand for most of them at one time (unlikely), your RAM is okay.

Why won’t we just use RAM instead of using the hard drives with its slow seek time? Well, for one thing, RAM is much more expensive per megabyte than the hard drive — but this is not the primary reason. The reason is, when you deactivate your system, the conveyor belt stops, and all your sacks fall to the floor until none is left on the belt. The warehouse on the other hand retains copies of the sack in it; they are still there when you turn your PC on. RAM cannot hold data when there is no power.

Your RAM and the hard drive work hand in hand though both have nearly the same function — they hold data for immediate and/or future use of the CPU.

RAM vs  Hard Drives (A Storage vs Memory Comparison-Tutorial ) ends here. ****Also, take note that those sacks that are on the conveyor belt are just copies of the ones in your storage. When you make alterations to them (ie, your games’ save files or the Word documents you are working on, etc) your PC will overwrite the ones in your hard drive if you let it. (There are many instances where the "sacks" will get overwritten without the PC asking permission from you. One example of this is when you update your anti-virus software.) How does your PC overwrite? Well, to make things simple, we can use the sack analogy again although this is VERY much stretching it to the absurd lol! Just think of your PC as replacing the sacks in your warehouse with the EXACT images of the ones that have passed through the conveyor belt and your factory (the CPU). The old ones are forever lost and the new ones now occupy the warehouse. There! That should set things in perspective for you. HOLY GAMING GODS OF THE INTERNET THAT JUST SOUNDED LIKE A CREEPY ALIEN INVASION FILM!! ROFLMAO!!!!****

The reason for this tirade — lol! — is that, I was supposed to make an entry about why I prefer Nvidia cards over ATI ones. I was going to compare the effects of lower and higher settings like the ones shown below and what their effects are on gameplay.

(Tribes: Vengeance at Low Textures, No Anti-aliasing, High Performance settings)

(Tribes Vengeance at Low Textures, 4x Anti-aliasing, and High Quality settings)

Well, lo, behold and despair! I found out that in some combinations, my frames-per-second rates were equal for wildly deviating settings! I was expecting low frames rendered for higher settings (pretty pictures do come at a price!) and much a much higher rate for lower settings. As you can see below, the FPSs are equal for purposes of comparison.

 (Tribes: Vengeance at Low Textures, No Anti-aliasing, High Performance settings; 19 frames per second)

(Tribes Vengeance at Low Textures, 4x Anti-aliasing, and High Quality settings)

My theory? My videocard can handle the rendering of the graphics but all those sacks can’t fit into my conveyor belt. The belt has to place some of the sacks it needs in the warehouse and continually orders the laborers to load sacks into it nearly every second. This continuous huffing and puffing of the laborers as they run back and forth to feed sacks into the belt creates major delays. It makes the CPU wait as additional data is slowly fed to it in turn. This “dipping of the RAM into the hard drive” — as opposed to all the data being loaded into the RAM in one go — causes frame rates to intermittently drop considerably for small fractions of a time. This is called stuttering.

I need more RAM. Shazbot!

For a more detailed explanation, see Koroush Ghazi’s The Gamer’s Graphics & Display Settings Guide

Also, systems that have humongous specs will definitely have larger conveyor belts. Alienware PCs are well-know for their superb performance. Take a look at the Area-51 ALX.