Any PC Gamers Around?

[weederr33]

[weederr33]

Got my Corsair Xeneon OLED monitor. The quality of picture is insane! It's quite a bit of an upgrade from my previous MSI monitor as the Corsair is OLED and has a 240hz refresh vs the 165hz as before. However, the MSI was curved and the Corsair is flat which initially threw me off. I do like that I feel I can actually take advantage of HDR now as before it just made the contrast too white. The dark colors seem more rich and it overall looks much nicer. My only complaint is the one reviewers mentioned which is brightness. On standard it is surprisingly dim. And I usually keep my screens dim. However, you can get around that by adjusting the display settings or downloading a firmware patch.



Overall, it's an awesome monitor. I'm not worried about burn in as the monitor has a 3 year warranty.

[Captain Snooze]

Originally Posted by weederr33

Got my Corsair Xeneon OLED monitor. The quality of picture is insane!

What do you think of text rendering?

[weederr33]

Originally Posted by Captain Snooze

What do you think of text rendering?

Everything seems super clear to me. Granted I don't have 20/20 vision like I used to, but to me, it's all very crisp and clear. No jaggedness or odd pixelation.

[Dadhawk]

Originally Posted by Captain Snooze

...Witcher 4 Trailer...

I hate when they show prerendered video in a trailer rather than in-game footage. This looks great, but very likely has no bearing on how the real game will look.

It's also done on an "unannounced" video card, which means something stupid expensive.

[Dadhawk]

Originally Posted by weederr33

Borderlands 4 trailer

Very much looking forward to this!

Jury is still out on the change away from cell-shading graphics though. I personally like that style for the game. Helped set it apart.

[weederr33]

Originally Posted by Dadhawk

Very much looking forward to this!

Jury is still out on the change away from cell-shading graphics though. I personally like that style for the game. Helped set it apart.

I didn't even notice the lack of cell shading! As for the game itself, I'm very apprehensive since BL3 was utter dogshit IMO. So unless they make characters likeable or ditched the edgy/cringe humor I may consider it.

[weederr33]

Stalker 2 already has a 10% discount on steam lol

[weederr33]

Well, I decided to play Dirt Rally, Dirt Rally 2.0, EA WRC (), WRC Generations, and WRC10 all within roughly a month long period. I can definitively say, only Dirt Rally 2.0 truly scratches the itch. Namely because it seems to balance the selection of cars, locations, and types of racing (aka Rally Cross and Rally). The sound and details are also very nice. EA WRC probably would have been top if it wasn't for the shitty use of the Unreal Engine and atrocious career mode.



WRC10 comes in second for me. While it doesn't have the insanely awesome graphics of Generations, it does not suffer from the poor car audio sounds. Well, except a couple cars. The career mode is nearly identical and is absolutely amazing. I love the RPG aspect of it, it's very easy to navigate the career calendar and you get various options for events. I think Generations is slightly more fleshed out. The physics are pretty good IMO and you're not snap oversteering constantly like in EA WRC (something something it's more realistic! as many supporters try to claim). My only real gripe is, the game really would benefit from anti-aliasing from all the jagged lines.



Dirt Rally 1 is just as fun as DR2.0, but you literally get 6 locations and nothing more. You also get some cars in DR you don't get in DR2.0 such as the Mini Cooper Clubman WRC and the Hyundai i20 WRC2.



WRC Generations would probably take the crown if it weren't for the atrocious audio. You get more gusto and burble from your mom's Rainbow vacuum cleaner than you do from Rally1 cars! There is also a very noticeable and very annoying throttle lag issue. Both of those issues aren't present in the previous WRC10, so I'm not sure what happened with the developers. Both of those issues really can suck the fun out of an otherwise amazing game. The graphics outdo EA WRC by a long shot minus the rain effects.



EA WRC in theory should be the best. It has long races, great location selection only rivaled by WRC Generations, and amazing car selection (again only rivaled by Generations). The audio is absolutely incredible, especially with the WRC24 cars! You can even tell Codemasters are getting better with the Unreal Engine with how Estonia and Poland look. But That's where it ends. The UE4 just looks well, generic. And there's a reason people claim UE4 UE5 games all have a similar look. But the career mode is the worst as it's discombobulated and boring. The final killer for me is, once again, the anti-cheat EA use.



Anyway, that's my thoughts on those. I think I'll probably take a break from rally racing for a bit once Assetto Corsa Evo comes out.

[weederr33]

Ordered a few components recently. Decided I want to shrink the keyboard I have and heard good reviews about the Corsair K65 Plus Wireless. The current mechanical keyboard I have from MSI is way too loud and clicky. So I figured i'd try a more linear mechanical board.



I plan to move my NZXT H1v2 over to AM5 come summer and want to maximize what I can out of the 140mm AIO. I had switched the stock fan to the BeQuiet Lightwings due to it having decent static pressure and still looking good. Well, I was looking at the Silent Wings Pro 4 as they are dummy good, but really want some RGB to match my GPU. After searching around, I found a happy medium. Corsair came out with their RS140 ARGB that actually has decent static pressure at 3.46mm H2O vs the BeQuiet at 2.3mm H2O. The RS140 is also not plagued with the iCue Link BS. This was something that had deterred me from Corsair fans in the past.



Small upgrades, but I'm still quite happy with my AM4 set up. The Ryzen 7 5700X3D is more than enough and my 7800XT can handle just about anything. In hindsight I should have gone with the 7900XT when I downgraded from the 7900XTX, but oh well.



I forgot if I had posted my current set up so wanted to also include a general breakdown:


Monitor: Corsair Xeneon 27QHD240
Keyboard: Corsair K65 Plus Wireless
Mouse: Corsair Harpoon RGB


Case: NZXT H1v2 (the upgraded one with a 750w PSU, Gen4 Riser, and 140mm AIO)
CPU: Ryzen 7 5700X3D
MOBO: Asus ROG Strix B550i Gaming
RAM: Kingston Fury Renegade 32GB DDR4 3600Mhz

SSD: Samsung 980 Pro 1GB & 980Pro 500 GB (for games)
GPU: Sapphire Pure AMD 7800XT

[weederr33]

Ok, so quick review of the Corsair K65 Plus. Simply: it's awesome. Maybe because I was so used to the shitty MSI mouse with the very clacky keys, but this one is so much nicer to type with. It's quieter, has a more pleasant sound when typing, and feels really nice. I'm still getting used to not having a numeric pad on the side, but otherwise it's a very nice switch. It's substantially smaller and the RGB effects are cool if that's your thing. I'd highly recommend this board.



The fan I ended up getting sucked lol. It was loud, the cooling abilities were not much better than the Bequiet Lightwings I had on before. Also because it didn't have any rubber buffers, the vibrations were annoying. So I went back to the Lightwings fan.

[Stephen W.]

I want to edit some game video I have saved from my super-duper, fancy Win11 gaming system I bought a year ago. I can watch the videos no problem on this new system. I hadn’t tried doing any video editing because I couldn’t figure out where the video clips where being stored. I finally found them in a folder called Desktop. No, not on my desktop it’s folder buried down a rabbit hole. Have I mentioned how much I HATE WINDOW$11?
So, I wanted to edit one video I found. I have something called Microsoft Clipchamp on this system. I figured out how to load and edit a video but, it’s washed out. The colour is all wrong. I tried loading the video on my old Win7 gaming system and using an old program called Movie Maker. But it doesn’t show any images at all, just audio. How can that be as these are all mp4 files?
Searching the web-o-sphere I see lots of people have this same issue. Many of the sites I visited had links to fixes that were dead, “File Not Found” or sent me in a loop back to where I started. After hours of this it looks like I need to BUY some sort of converter to get it to look right. Why? Why can’t Window$ fix this? It’s their product!
So I go looking for a free video editor that can do this. Several articles and on-line reports showed DaVinci Resolve 19 as the very best free product. I started the download and for whatever reason it was dog slow. I mean 200 to 400Kbps slow. It took hours to download and then more time to unzip and install.
I get that all done and it’s way more than I need to edit some game video. Anyway I get it set up and drag in the first video I want to edit. Yep, the colour is washed out just like before. All that time and data and for what?
I’ve was at this most of the day. The wife was wondering if I’d ever emerge from my computer room so I gave up. That was Sunday.
Yesterday I read that it’s a codec problem. It took me another couple of hours of surfing and reading posts to find download and install the latest HEVC codec for Window$11 for free. All the videos I have on my Win11 gaming system I thought were all visible in both Clipchamp and DaVinci. So happy me… But I was wrong. Today I fired up my system and tried to edit videos again and again the video, which when played back looks great, is all washed out in both Clipchamp and DaVinci Resolve.
If I turn off HDR anything I record works fine in the editors. Anything I’ve already recorded is still washed out. However, with HDR off the onscreen video looks like crap. Oh it’s got colour but, it’s not the reach High Definition I’m used to on my fancy BIG $ monitor. WTF? What's a guy to do?????

[Dadhawk]

Originally Posted by Stephen W.

I want to edit some game video I have saved from my super-duper, fancy Win11 gaming system I bought a year ago. ...

Well, couple of things.

I doubt WIN11 is at fault for where your video ended up. Likely a setting in the capture software somewhere. I have that problem with the scan software for my Dell MFP. It just seems to randomly pick a directory to store scans in.

On the video editing, not really surprised HDR causes different results with the recording. HDR is known to cause recordings to appear overexposed or washed out. This has to do with the way it over saturates things, which are compensated for by the monitor. It can also mess up colors.

Also, not all recording software supports HDR, so make sure the capture software does. I know, for example, AMD ReLive doesn't support it, but GeForce Experience does.

As far as editing, I haven't done any in quite a while but I did a good bit back in the day, (primarily Church and School functions plus home videos). I tried a lot of tools but ended up using Pinnacle Studio the most. It's not free, but sometimes you get what you pay for. It's also not overly expensive. I think the top level version is around $100 US.

[Stephen W.]

I'm using Nvidia Shadowplay which claims to support HDR.