I'm not sure how the rest of the game is going to turn out, but the opening couple of hours has been pretty awesome. The artistry is fantastic. They did not hesitate to use plenty of bright, vivid colors. It looks gorgeous. I can't imagine the console versions faring well in comparisons. It seemed like it was using maybe 50% per card, so one GTX 670 probably can run it at max at 1080p. This game gobbles up VRAM. It exceeded 2 GB VRAM at 1080p at max. Fortunately, I have plenty to spare. I'm really impressed with this game so far. I'm intrigued by the story as well. Racism appears to be a key theme early on. As in Deep South from back in the day type of racism. The racist group portrayed black people as cartoon monkeys. I love that they tackling these types of things and not censoring how revolting things were. I'll make a video or two and post some pics when I have some more time.
Against my better judgement, I bought one of the Bioshock Infinite bundles on greenmangaming. I threw the $15 credit at Dishonored and got that for $17.99. I liked what I played of my pirated copy, so I figure I might as well go legit on Dishonored. I already own Civ V and XCOM, so those will probably become gifts. Everyone seems to have such good things to say about Infinite. It's getting like Half-Life 2 or Ocarina of Time caliber reviews. 9.5s and 10s across the board, with a 95.8% average on gamerankings, which is actually higher than Half-Life 2. That's just too high for me to ignore. I seriously might have to go on a killing spree if it ends up being bad. Or maybe I'll just give up on gaming entirely and start a new hobby gardening or something. I was already about ready to do that after playing the soul crushingly disappointing Mass Effect 3.
I really want this, but damn, I'm saving to go to China in a month. I'm also one of those who thought Bioshock was overrated, but it was a must buy just for the art in my mind. This looks the same, and hopefully better. Yes, it does look like a bunch of endless scripted epic scenes, which I usually tire of quickly, but I still think I'd come away from it liking the game just due to the setting and art alone. Sorry to nit pick and go off topic somewhat, but that's not how SLI handles memory. Everything stored in VRAM is the same on both cards. There used to be older render methods which would split up frames load wise and have one GPU render each, but that only effected frame buffer size anyhow and all multi GPU configs use Alternative Frame Rendering now. Whatever is in memory on one of your cards is also in the other, it's redundant. So you have an effective total of 4GB VRAM, not 8GB. All but the worst ports scale pretty well this late into the generation. More and more console platform focused games actually have higher quality textures and more effects on PC these days. 512MB will be limiting, but the game would have certainly been designed around it with scalable effects and assets. I'm also assuming that modern games properly ported to PC actually purposefully make better use of VRAM and aim to try and fill more of it up to reduce the reliance on streaming assets, which is definitely one of the major limitations with PC's vs. Consoles.
I enjoyed Bioshock for a few hours but way too much backtracking and not really knowing where to go wore me down. The game crashed on me and I lost 2 hours of work. I haven't had the urge to pick it up since then. Biohock 2 has sat in my collection for months now, I doubt I'll ever play it. As a result I'm already bored of all the attention Infinite has been getting on twitter and YouTube.
The main developer, Irrational Games, had nothing to do with Bioshock 2. It was just a quick cash grab trying to tag along on the success of the first in my mind. I wouldn't judge Infinite on Bioshock 2 in any way.
You are mistaken. Afterburner is showing 2.1 GB or above at peak in VRAM usage per card, not summed together. When I disable SLI, I still get over 2 GB VRAM usage at 1080p on a single card. Also, if memory serves, the guy who was responsible for developing Fort Frolic (the best part of Bioshock) was in charge of development of Bioshock 2. I didn't see this huge disparity between the two games. Bioshock 1 was pretty awesome through Ft. Frolic and a bit after, but the rest of the game wasn't that special. Bioshock 2 didn't have any segments as good as Ft. Frolic, but it was more consistent. I thought the first was massively overrated and the second was slightly underrated. Irrational and 2K Marin worked together on Infinite.
Isn't that what I said? The unique memory usage is the same whether you're using SLI or not. SLI has to have the same exact data in both memory pools, thus half the memory available is redundant. It's always been this way aside from the small exception I mentioned (which doesn't apply anymore) and it's the same with crossfire too of course. So the total is hovering around 2GB for your settings. It's not 4GB of unique memory use when you enable SLI and only 2GB with a single card.
The problem (for your position, at least) is that I didn't say that they were summed together in the first place. I listed the VRAM figure per GPU, which was accurate and the same number one would get with SLI disabled. You're attempting to correct me when the info I listed in the first place was already correct. I'm assuming that you misinterpreted what I said the card usage was at 50%. I was referring to GPU usage, not available VRAM. The game was using about half the available GPU power per card and used over 2 GB VRAM.
I'll give credit where credit is due. The original had amazing artwork and a really cool underwater dystopia setting. It was just really lacking as a game. It had poor shooting mechanics, gimmicky powers, a lot of backtracking, and an anticlimactic final boss fight. Good as a $10 Steam sale purchase to enjoy the artwork? Absolutely. Something that people should have bought at launch for full price? Absolutely not. The reviewers misled us. It was overrated. People are saying the gameplay is a lot better in this one. Haven't tried it yet, but hopefully that's true. The original Bioshock could have been epic if the gameplay had lived up to the setting they created.
I don't know if you'll like the game, but you will be impressed with the sky city of Columbia and the atmosphere.
Bioshock 2 was really disappointing so this wasn't on my radar at all. I keep hearing really good things though - think I'll hold back and wait for a sale just in case.
I bought this yesterday on launch day, and after playing 4-5 hours of it I can recommend it. Whereas Bioshock 1 and 2 were largely corridor shooters, Infinite has you battle foes in large, open areas with platforms connected to a sky rail system. Navigating this system with the sky hook and attacking the enemies from above or below with plasmids (they’re now “Vigors” in this game) and machineguns/carbines is awesome. The sky hook can also be used as a weapon, which offers some especially gruesome death scenes. It’s in these outdoor areas where you’ve got multiple ways to approach combat. In the previous games, there wasn’t anywhere near as much variety. Early in the game you meet an important character who offers the ability to open up “tears” in the environment. Through these tears, comes the option of teleporting in mounting turrets and RPGs etc, which can help through some of the tougher scenes. The artwork in my opinion is probably some of the best in a videogame. There really is just a lot of effort that’s been put into this game. Columbia really does feel like a jingoistic America. The bad: There’s some pretty crazy performance stutter when the game engine seems to be loading a new area. Not sure if this can be corrected with a patch but it’s pretty annoying. Also, the game is a VRAM hog. I’m using a mix of Ultra and High settings. So far it’s better than I remember Bioshock 1 and 2 being. And I thought those games were good but not great.
Yep, that was it. Sorry for that, I guess I must've been tired. You're original point is right, using 2GB or slightly over is a lot for a current game. Crysis 3 doesn't even use quite this much. It's hard to believe this can run well on consoles and scale up to well onto high end PC's. Just goes to show that 2GB really isn't going to be enough VRAM in the very near future.
Thanks for the feedback Perky. I hope I can get this cheap soon enough, but will probably just wait 6 weeks until I can spend money again It sounds really good, just like the videos have looked. The way many of those videos were done made it look like everything was scripted, or almost like a bunch of QTE's like Uncharted or something. I don't think that's the case though, it sounds like you have a lot of actual options for combat. The loading issues sound like a typical Unreal engine 3 streaming issue. Most games load the scene with low quality assets which quickly (or slowly on lower end machines or consoles) turn into higher quality. Maybe they've been more agressive with making this less noticable but it has impacted performance instead. Bioshock 1 and 2 were actually on Unreal engine 2, believe it or not.
So basically what you guys are saying is that this game is going to bend over and anally rape my 1GB/256-bit GTX 460?
Actually, it might not. I found this vid of a guy using a GTX 460 with rather high settings. The game comes with a benchmark tool built in that you can launch from the desktop, so you should be able to find lots of GTX 460 benchmarks very soon.
Looks good. His PC isn't much better than mine. Just a marginally better CPU (Phenom II instead of a Core 2 Quad). So I would expect it to run pretty well in that case.
Yeah, I’ve heard it’s typical of the Unreal engine 3 too. Although admittedly at first, I did think it was a VRAM issue causing the stuttering, but it only seems to happen in the choke spots just before you walk into a new area. Other than those areas, the game runs smoothly. I dialled down all the graphics settings and it didn’t make a difference so I guess that rules VRAM out. Who knows, maybe a patch will come along and fix this soon. Seems like a lot of others have been reporting the same issue all over the interwebz. As for QTEs, they’re practically non-existent so far (about 5 hours in). There’s cutscenes that develop the story, but they’re never overly long or frequent enough to break the immersion. Probably the worst example of that is Assassin’s Creed 3 that I’ve played recently.
I have 6GB of VRAM in my x-fire set up, hopefully it won't pose any issues. I can't play it till Saturday at the earliest. I so want to play this game on 1440p I wish those monitors were slightly more affordable than they are now.