I really don't want to keep being 'that guy', but that's not the case, you effectively have 3GB. The 3GB on the other card has to store a duplicate of all the same data, so it is rendered redundant. 3GB is plenty for this game regardless.
I only got to play maybe the first 20-30 minutes, but man is this game a spectacle to behold. The graphics, art direction, and design of the floating steampunk city all combine to create a visual feast that's unlike anything I've ever seen. The visuals in this game are mesmerizing. I don't think screenshots or videos really do them justice. It's a very bright and colorful game too, kind of like Mirror's Edge. It stands in stark contrast to the drab, brownish military shooters that seem to be all the rage right now. It runs fine on high at 1080p on my GTX 460. Very high and ultra were choppy. High still looks amazing. I'll comment on the gameplay as I continue playing. I haven't seen enough of it to form an impression.
I managed to hit 2.68 GB VRAM this time at 1080p. That's a new record for games I own. Despite that, of the games with high end visuals, Bioshock Infinite appears to be the best optimized right now. I've seen people posting playable benchmarks for rather old cards. Yet it still looks quite nice on the higher end cards. Even better, the visuals should age quite well given that it owes much of it's beauty to superb artistic direction rather than solely on the most advanced technology. Here's a decent pic at max settings: Right click and use View Image for a better look.
[SIZE=small]I'm not sure if that's completely accurate. Adding memory does not always equal a performance increase. Less memory with a wider memory bus can often win out over more memory. I expect the trend of faster memory with more bandwidth to continue. [/SIZE]
That's normally true, but it won't be when console games are designed around 6GB+. Just like 256MB quickly became not enough at the start of this generation - even though many of those 256MB cards had twice the bandwidth (or more) of the consoles.
This is easily the best shooter I've played since Half-Life 2. It's so good that I stayed up all night last night playing it. The high praise this game has received is well deserved. I'd rather not say too much about the game, as I don't want to spoil it for those who haven't played it yet. It's not only a beautiful game, but the gameplay itself is excellent. I love the skyhook, and Elizabeth is by far the best companion ever featured in a game. She's not only likable, but really helpful in combat. I'm about 7 hours in, and unless something changes, this game is a 10/10 for me. Even if you didn't like the original Bioshock, I'd say you owe it to yourself to play this game. I don't know if console gamers will want to bother with this or not. I've heard the console versions don't hold a candle to the PC version. Consoles just don't have the power to run a game this awesome.
Just bought this from greenman for $50 (that's a decent deal here...) even though I really should be paying off my credit card not putting more on it. Downloading now, I can't wait... well, I guess I'll have to wait a little bit, the download is varying between 13MB/s and around 100KB/s. Yay.
The main difference between the consoles seems to be in gamma. The 360 is notorious for this issue. The PS3 has a more vibrant pallet for this reason, but honestly I see appeal in both the over saturated colours of PC and the more washed out realism that the consoles display. The lower general quality also helps hide the often poor quality assets which do not scale up quite as well on PC. PC is clearly better, but on the flip side, the graphically weak aspects of the world (many of which are just as bad as the worst visual offenders in the original Bioshock - except in an easier to see well lit environment) stand out a lot more. For this reason the consoles represent an overall more consistent experience graphically, even if the PC is clearly superior. Where they fall down is in missing details and certain assets all together, this is where I couldn't play the game on anything other than PC myself.
Opinions so far... The art in this game is great, just like expected. The graphics.... well, they're good. Some textures are quite high quality, others just aren't. Most models are quite low in poly count for 2013, but for me this adds to the charm of the art so I don't mind. When it comes to animation and facial animation in particular, it falls flat however. There just isn't enough detail to work with. I'm loving the game so far, the art has exceeded my expectations. Everything else is pretty much what I expected. Graphically it will date very quickly, as it is hardly ahead of it's predecessor in far too many aspects. On the plus side, the environments are far more vast, open, alive and varied. This excuses the lack of overall detail quite a lot. The same deal with the effects - they are a lot better, with the smoke/fog looking particularly good and helping out the atmosphere quite well, but it's the not so good examples that really contrast just too sharply. I don't find myself minding at all though. The games atmosphere stems from the art, and much of the things which would otherwise subtract from the realism simply add to the surrealism, which engulfs you in the world of Columbia even further. Combat is refreshingly old school for the most part - with some nice new twists that the sky hook brings to the table. This really does play like what I would now consider an old school shooter, but for me, that's a good thing. In a few years I can see it will look particularly dated due to the classic animation and overall general interaction (or lack-there-of) with the environment and npc's. I love a good story though, and this is delivering. The atmosphere, art and story are top notch. The slow introduction is reminiscent of Half-Life/2 and something I am a big fan of, not just, "here's a fantasy world and all that shit you guys asked for, now shoot some stuff". The game is a classic in scope, and for fans of such games, we need to speak out in support of such games. With Free2Play and always online being the obvious direction the gaming world is going, it's a good thing when someone delivers a classic single player epic of A-grade quality. Some of us don't always want to play against immature teenagers online in every game, some just want to visit another world and experience an interactive story. Bioshock Infinite is definitely delivering on that so far!
I think this game is going to age quite well. Just as Mirror's Edge still looks beautiful years later, this game will still look quite good over time given the artistry is so exceptional. And as you said, given most shooters are so geared towards mindless multiplayer with constant action, the more oldschool single player the style, the better.
I guess linear, story-driven single player shooters are considered "old school" these days. Frankly, I prefer them to the multiplayer focused military shooters that seem to be all the rage right now. Open world shooters like Far Cry 3 are also popular, but I don't think every game needs to be open world. Sometimes I prefer a shorter, more controlled, more polished experience. I have to agree on the art assets in this game. So many scenes in this are just breathtakingly beautiful that I find myself stopping to take it all in. I also really like the bright color palette they used. It's reminiscent of Mirror's Edge. I'm so tired of brown military shooters where I can't even tell what I'm shooting at half the time because everything just looks brown or grey. The world in this game will suck you in and not let go. The last time I felt like this about a shooter was Half-Life 2. In fact, the parallels to Half-Life 2 are uncanny: beautiful but dystopian setting, shooting that has an old school feel but has some unconventional stuff mixed in (gravity gun, skyhook), a female companion who's actually helpful in combat. I can't imagine anyone who liked Half-Life 2 not liking this game.
Yes, the overall feeling is just like Mirrors Edge, which I loved also, both for the art direction and refreshing gameplay. The gameplay in this is more classic, but with enough to keep it new thrown in. Graphically though, it has a much more detailed world than Mirrors edge due to the setting, but the assets range from being slightly better quality to some being worse. So it's a more varied experience. I guess this should be expected when you are tied to the same engine and the same consoles but go for a much more varied, grand and daring setting. That's my overall feeling; the highlights are amazing, but the lows are just as bad as ever, to me, often standing out more because of said highlights. Overall I don't mind because it usually adds to the artistry and surrealism of the setting. It will remain a classic because of the art, gameplay and story. In this way it will date rather well, just like Bioshock. However, overall interaction with the environment and npc's is something I expect to change a lot with the next generation. In many games this generation, it is already half way there. Bioshock Infinite is purely classic in this instance, effectively being no better than Half-Life 2.
Playing a little more I'm really impressed by the graphics. The lighting/ambient occlusion and post process effects are top notch. Despite some of the assets letting things down, the game has amazing graphics, and the assets that are poor don't really get in the way making the game look beautiful and quite simply delivering some of the most artistic scenes in the history of gaming. Some technical tweaks I've done. 1. Increased the fov in the ini file. I have it now so the max setting in the in game slider is around somewhere between 85-90 FOV. This is my preference on a 16:10 monitor for single player games. 16:9 you would probably want 90-100ish depending on preference. Overall this has made the game feel less claustrophobic. I got a little bit of motion sickness playing for a few hours yesterday. 2. Turn off the frame limiter in game, it's just V-sync. Running the benchmark revealed my min fps was 22fps with an average of 52fps on ultra settings with alternate post process. With the frame limiter on (v-sync) this meant I'd be seeing 15fps in many battles or even just in certain demanding scenes. The lag was pretty noticeable and the experience choppy. I know from history that not limiting the frame rate in most games will bring about extreme tearing (I hate tearing), and my max FPS in the benchmark was 115. So fps is fluctuating over a huge range. In stead of using v-sync, I have limited the frame rate with Radeonpro (you could use Rivatuners D3Doverrider too). I first tried limiting it to 60fps, but there was too much tearing for my liking. Setting it to 45fps for me was perfect as this is not far from my average frame rate, so most of the time it has no trouble maintaining 45fps. I did notice the drop from 60 at first, but the experience is much more consistent now with very little tearing. The game runs beautifully all settings maxed even with the increased FOV. 3. I turned off the games AA, which is FXAA, and instead enabled SMAA in RadeonPro. SMAA looks a little better to me. Performance seems exactly the same as far as I can tell. 4. Slightly tweaked the mouse sensitivity down in the ini (from 5.xxx to 4.xxx). I had it on the second lowest setting and it was slightly too fast, however the lowest setting is too slow. For single player games like this I hate fast twitch type mouse movement. I'm not very good with it for multiplayer either but make do with a moderate setting as it's required to be competitive. I turned off mouse acceleration just after starting the game which made it good, but I still wanted it a little slower. The default adjustments just aren't fine enough. I'm very happy with both how the game looks and runs on my system now. For the record I have a Q9550 at stock 2.83GHz since my motherboard no longer likes to allow for any half decent stable overclocks. I have 4GB DDR2 800 and a Radeon 7950 at 1GHz/5.8GHz. Very GPU limited system, so I'm very happy with how smoothly this game is performing for after a few minor tweaks
If anyone was getting certain textures that had shaders applied looking horrible at any distance beyond 5-10m like this, I have found the fix. Also, my VRAM usage at ultra with alt post process was only 1200MB, now with these tweaks it's up to 2GB in the area I'm in and level/area texture streaming load is instant, not 2-5 seconds as seen in Borderlands or other U3 engine games. Everything looks sharp at any distance now! I'm thinking of restarting the game on hard. There were a few moments where this texture/detail problem really screwed up the visuals for me. [minor early spoilers] when commstock is talking to you on that projector screen with the fancy mirror styled edges around it... the edges kept switching between ultra low detail and high. Also, when Elizabeth opened the tear to 1980's Paris when you first watch her, the Eiffel tower was just a blurry mess. I couldn't even tell what it was until just before she closed the tear as it started to load in.[/minor spoilers] I have no idea why my system is doing this... hopefully it's not an AMD driver "optimisation".... I doubt it considering these ini settings fixed it. But AKS was reporting over 2GB VRAM usage? Maybe a game update broke it... if there have been any yet. But yes, if anyone else has the same issue I can post the fix here.
I finished this a couple of days ago, and without spoiling anything, it’s probably one of the best I’ve played in a long time. I thought the plot was clever, and I loved the dynamic between Booker and Elizabeth. I also tried many different tweaks to the ini files, most of which did not help with the stuttering I had. I tried increasing the memory pool size, and the min and max smoothed frame rate numbers but it didn’t seem to improve anything. Using D3Doverider seemed to work a lot better than the in-game and nvidia control panel vsync options. Definitely want to replay this, preferably on Hard, as Normal I felt was way too easy. In fact, I don’t think I died once. 1999 mode sounds interesting too and worth trying out. But I think I’ll wait until they patch the game first, assuming they do.