Front Mission Evolved PC Performance

Front Mission Evolved is the latest part of the well known mech series. Instead of a turn based game though, this time we have an action oriented title. We won't discuss if it was a wise decision or not. We'll concentrate on how well it performs and if it is a good port!


We used a Q9650 @ 3.96Ghz with 2GB DDR2 and a GTX295. Performance was good, although we expected something more. The game doesn't take full advantage of the quadcores. As we can see below, the game engine uses mainly two cores. Also, when we lowered our CPU overclock to 3.6Ghz, there were noticeable slowdowns. The above observations mean that you'll need a high CPU frequency if you want to enjoy Front Mission Evolved without frame drops.

Going Back In Time

There are occasions when everything goes to hell. And frankly, it’s natural. We’re dealing with PC’s after all. Everything can brake down, from your PSU to your motherboard. In these weird ‘PC’ occasions, you are faced with two options. You can either forget about PC gaming and everything that has anything to do with the PC world till you sort out everything, or return to your previous PC set-up and wait patiently for a fix, a solution, a replacement or whatever.

As my motherboard broke down some days ago, I figured I could give a shot to my old PC. It is an Athlon XP @ 1.15Ghz with 512MB SDRAM and an integrated graphics card. Clearly, this PC set-up is old. In fact, it’s reaaaally old. One of the reasons I wanted to give it a shot is the whole nostalgia thing. I mean, we remember all those great days of our past and want to relieve them, but what happens when you relieve them in a modern day with the same old hardware? Were our systems powerful enough for our daily activities? How come we were able to play games with GPU’s that had 8MB RAM? How were our systems performing with only 512MB of RAM? Well, it’s time to find out.

Benchmarking and Overclocking Q9650

I'm pretty sure a lot of you are wondering if your systems are indeed CPU limited. Do you need more Ghz or is the extra cache of a new quadcore more important? So here we are with a Q9650 CPU and will overclock it to a "safe area". We will also compare it with a Q6600 (at the same speed) to see how important is the extra cache.

For starters, we used the Gigabyte EP45 UD3LR with 4GB DDR2 @1000Mhz and a GTX295. You can see our bios screens in our previous overclocking feature. The Q9650 needs lower vCore to achieve the same results we had with the Q6600. Therefore, we used 1.42V instead of 1.55V that was used for the Q6600 (and that was the limit of our Q6600). We also used 1.280V MCH Core. Everything else was at stock volts. Our system was stable 100% with these settings but you may need to tweak yours differently to achieve these speeds.

Nvidia ForceWare 260.89 Beta Released

Nvidia released today the latest beta version of ForceWare. You can download them from the links below. For testing purposes, we used the previous version of ForceWare. Our test system was a Q6600 @ 3.6Ghz with 4GB DDR2 and a GTX295. As we can see, the latest ForceWare didn't increase or decrease dramaticaly our performance, with the exception of Lost Planet 2. Nvidia seems to have tweaked the SLI profile of Lost Planet 2 and as a result of this, we got better framerates.

Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light PC Performance

The latest installment in the Tomb Raider series is quite different from every previous game. This time, instead of a classic third person game, we have an isometric 3D action/adventure/platform game that emphasizes a lot in looting and upgrading your beloved girl. It comes as a shock that this experimentation is among the best we've seen and shows the way Tomb Raider should had evolved. We all love the breasts of Mrs Croft but after a while, what matters is the game itself and not the boobies. And here we have a refined gameplay that isn't ruined by the problems of yesterday (regarding game and camera controls).

JohnDio Presents Greek-Cypriot Alliance [04-10-2010]

Here is my latest mix with tunes from Greek & Cypriot producers. Huge respect to each and every one of them. Keep rocking guys, we need you. Also, although i love Kosmas Epsilon, i kept "I Trance You" off the list as it's a really dark tune. Therefore it will be added to my Experimentation mix. Anyway, here is the tracklist and the download links. Hope you'll like it!

Genre: Prog Trance / Trance

Date: 04-10-2010
Length: 63:24
Quality: 320kbps
Size: 145MB

Tracklist

1. Perasma - Swing 2 Harmony (Original Mix)
2. Viton & Stel - Wooden Swordz (Christian Cambas Forgotten Dub)
3. John Aleph - Placebo Effect (Original Mix)
4. George Vemag - Himalaya (Original mix)
5. POL featuring Chucka - Clear Bull (Vangelis Diamantidis Remix)
6. Afternova & Andy Blueman Vs Hans Zimmer Feat. Lisa Gerrard - Now We Are Free For Serenity (DJ Osiris Mashup)
7. Bobina & Mikkas vs Robert Miles - Time & Fable (VoRo & AngelDream Presents Sanitarium Unification)
8. Lange vs Gareth Emery - Another You Another Me (Original Vs. Austin Leeds & Terranova Remix) [JohnDio MashUp]
9. Luke Terry presents Akemi - Alone Without You (Michael Angelo & Jim Remix)
10. Haris C - Room With A View (Kuffdam & Plant Remix)

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