So yeah, the RX 570 that I talked about in the previous blog post has arrived, well in fact it has arrived quite a while ago but I've just had things to do.
Well, it went pretty much perfectly yet again. The card seems to be in good condition, I installed it, tested it and it... just works. Nice!
That's pretty much the end of that! There's really not much to say.
I tested a few games and yes, I can put the settings on higher now but I'm heavily CPU bottlenecked in almost every single scenario. I don't mind that, it is what it is.
I tested Assassin's Creed Odyssey and Far Cry 5. Odyssey runs at solid 40-50 FPS depending on the area. In barren areas it can go as high as 70. More than acceptable with a gamepad. Far Cry 5 also works at around the same fps range. Oh well, it's certainly playable. Good enough for me.
With that in mind, I've mostly just been playing the PS2 WWE wrestling games. Shut Your Mouth, Here Comes The Pain and the first SmackDown! vs RAW. They recently released a version 2.0 of the PCSX2 emulator, and the CPU in System #6 is finally good enough to run these games at mostly full speed, with just occasional tolerable hiccups. Yay!
It's all good arcadey fun. We played the everloving shit out of these games with my friends in my childhood and teenage years, so it's nice to play them again. I plan to go through the entire SmackDown! vs RAW line of games on the PS2 eventually, to find out which ones I prefer the most. Should be a good time.
On another note, it seems I severely underestimated the sheer amount of disk space that modern games take. To me, a 50 GB game is already gigantic, but it seems that most modern games, even some that are from the late 2010's, seem to drift more towards 100 gigs and some even towards 150 gigs. That's insane to me.
Needless to say, I filled up that 500 GB HDD pretty damn fast. I like to shift around a lot in what games I play, I play them in stints, then play something else for a while and return to them at another time. It'd be annoying to have to uninstall and re-install a bunch of games constantly - I mean it's doable but it's certainly suboptimal.
*sigh* I'm really thinking of getting an SSD for that PC. As I've mentioned in my previous blog posts, the case for the machine is super weird in that it has these proprietary HDD slots that need specific drive caddies, that just don't seem to be any kind of standardized ones, at least I couldn't find anything for sale. I have no idea what they were thinking with that kind of an implementation, or if the case just originally came with them and they've been thrown away... But all of that essentially means, that I can't easily install another internal HDD in this machine.
Now with SATA SSDs, you can basically just throw them wherever. I mean it would be nice to have them mounted and all, but that's not a requirement by any means. Heck, I know a PC that just has the SSD hanging around in the bottom of the case, loosely. Never been an issue with it. There's no moving parts, so it doesn't matter as long as it doesn't overheat.
I'm thinking about it... On the other hand, I don't like spending money unnecessarily. On the other hand, it just might be worth it. We'll see.
Another thing is that now I have that GTX 660 free and without purpose. Other than storing it as a backup card, the only thing that comes to mind is sticking it into System #3 and installing games on it that make use of hardware accelerated PhysX (Alice: Madness Returns comes to mind. A good game that one!), since it's my most powerful Nvidia GPU at the moment. Well, System #3 is in a bit of a limbo anyway right now, as I really have no specific use case for it. Other things that I could do with that PC is messing around with different operating systems. I've been wanting to try out different Linux distros, Free-/Open-/NetBSD and Haiku for a while, but I wanna do it on real hardware. I don't know, virtual machines are super boring to me for some reason.
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