SymphonyX

What?!?!?! Only 7 votes for the dream car?! Pfft... We've got a global economic crisis, people! You'd be wishing you voted for your dream car instead when your chick takes you hostage if you don't buy that Prada bag for her up ahead. It's a friggin' highway robbery!

@ zawshu Thanks! I'll be visiting those places later when I get to play. Unfortunately, I still have a lot of work to do. Bah...

Does anyone know of any other wheel that's around half or less than half the cost of the G25 but has a 900 degree steering wheel? I can do away with the clutch and H-shifter. I just want the 900 degree steering wheel. Sigh. I wish I had money to burn. The G25 and the new but equally good (and more expensive) Porsche Driving Wheel can get you a new console.

@ RB26DETT James Blake downed Federer at the Olympics. Well, no offense though but it's probably a fluke. Federer's never been this 'bad' before. But still, if it were anyone else but him in Nadal, reaching a Grand Slam semi (Aussie Open), two finals (French Open and Wimbledon) and winning one (US Open) would be like a dream season for anyone else on the tour. It's just that his standards are insane. Federer's getting old. Losing to younger players like Nadal, Murray and Simon. Kinda sad. Bur I hope he gets to at least tie Pete Sampras' record of 14 Grand Slams before retiring. BTW, isn't that the engine of the Skyline? RB26DETT?

Car companies offer great insurance on cars these days. Hell, Hyundai offers up to 5 years on the standard warranty (not confident about their product quality?). Girls these days, well, all I know for sure is that they don't come with any insurance. At least you've got an option for a prenuptial agreement when 'it's on'.

@ Ferrari7000 Can you tell me where that Oahu Raceway and Ford Island is? Even just a hint where it's near? I've been to the secret island (the one where you enter through the Eden logo) before and it's actually faster there, probably because there are hardly any trees there. I get around 30-35 FPS in the secret island. The places with the worst FPS for me are the places with lot of foliage/trees/grass. It actually drops to 20-25 FPS when a lot of cars are in those places. Elsewhere it's just fast and smooth. And it's odd considering my GPU is slower than yours. BTW, I run the game at 1024x640, 2x AA, no HDR, low details. EDIT: Hmm... I just noticed your CPU. Quite old. It's below the minimum requirements of TDU. AMD Athlon XP 2000+ Barton core? It's probably what's causing the bad FPS despite a faster video card than mine. It was great though back then. Bang for the buck. I had an Athlon XP 1700+. My desktop is still an AMD though. =P Athlon 64 X2 3800+ Windsor core.

@ Iced_Bullet Not exactly. To be more precise, you consider a point being a rally if they've been playing the point for a considerable amount of time, especially if they're slugging it out on the baseline. They call it a rally because players are basically running while attempting to outhit another guy. And so much for an example... that final was crap. Not just because it was short. It was just crap. The Wimbledon final between Nadal and Federer this year was epic. They played the best rallies and shots I've ever seen in men's tennis. And God knows how the hell they lasted nearly 5 hours on court... The last year's final at the WTA Tour Championships between Maria Sharapova and Justine Henin is also another classic. Two former world #1s in a 3 1/2 hours display of nothing but the best in women's tennis. Usually it's the long matches are the good ones because getting steamrolled or choking is pretty common in tennis. It is, after all, an individual sport. Anyway, if you were looking for a really short but great Grand Slam final, Steffi Graf destroyed Natasha Zvereva, 6-0, 6-0 in a mere 40 minutes at the 1988 French Open. BTW, I read the same article you read. Kinda sad. I feel sorry for that guy who wrote it. Biased criticisms from a pro squash player who whines about not even making a fraction of what a pro tennis player does is pathetic. If anything, he should have been writing about how great his sport his, etc. etc. without having to bash a similar sport under the premise that 'fitter athletes display better play and should be paid more'. If he's really bent on the cash and thinks he's better than tennis players he should try it himself. Besides, in tennis we've got a wider array of shot types and styles of play which makes for a more entertaining match. Why is he complaining about the cash when his sport is less appealing to a wider audience? Length of ball being played doesn't exactly equate to a good match. This is why I dislike the typical baseliners even in tennis, moreso women's tennis. Only the veterans or the more talented players actually do something else such as drop shotting, volleying, slicing, lobbing or other shots which makes the play interesting.

Native resolution = maximum resolution of your monitor. For LCD monitors, it's best playing at your monitor's native resolution as playing anything lower than that will merit a considerable reduction in sharpness. This is especially important when the pixel density of the monitor isn't so high. My laptop's pixel density is high because its resolution is 1680x1050 but the panel size is only 15". My desktop's 19" LCD monitor has a lower pixel density since its native resolution is only 1440x900. Hence, 1280x800 on my laptop actually looks better (in terms of sharpness) than my monitor, which it does. I forgot to tell you. You should download NvTray. Look it up in Google. It's an awesome GPU control application. You can enable supersampling from there.

@ SLRRR What's your monitor's native resolution? Just curious. I'm guessing 1280x1024 from the size and since most 17" screens aren't widescreen. Then again, I could be wrong. Anyway, you should try 2x AA with supersampling enabled. You'll only lose, at most, around 5 FPS. It looks just as nice as plain 4x AA which can take away more than 10 FPS.

Squash is definitely faster because of that wall thing, but how long are matches played professionally? I mean, seriously, with that speed, I don't think those guys will be playing for more than an hour and a half on court. I've tried plenty of sports before and tennis definitely gave me the most work out. Baseball -- too much waiting. Soccer -- mostly standing and running for 90 minutes. Basketball -- like soccer, but smaller playing area and with hands. Ping-pong -- crazy fast... too fast that points end too quickly and it becomes boring. No thrill. Badminton -- court size too small for my taste. You need to be fast though like in ping-pong and it can be tiring, but not strenuous. It's just that no other sport gave me as much adrenaline rush like tennis, without hurting myself of course unlike those 'extreme sports'. I did have a few injuries though, most were sprained ankles which God forbid, were already enough. I heard ACM/dislocated knee cap hurts even more. Thankfull I don't have that problem of a loose knee cap.

Isn't that the old racquet sport in England where you try to outhit someone after ricocheting it off a wall? The court for squash kinda looks like the one used in Jai Alai. Then again, each one to his own. But you can't take away the fact that tennis is a much more popular racquet sport.

@ SLRRR 4x AA is a killer and so is AF (anisotropic filtering). Drop it down to 2x AA and make sure you set it to 'supersampling' in the Nvidia Control Panel. It looks just like 4x AA that doesn't use transparency AA, which I assume you're using right now and it's not as taxing on your card. Just wondering, is your screen's native resolution 1280x1024? That's actually higher than 1440x900, even though 1440x900 kinda looks better IMO. 1440x900 = 1,296,000 pixels. 1280x1024 = 1,310,720 pixels. Small difference though. @ RX_37 Apparently, in this game, you can't. But why would you want to force it to do that? The point of dual core is so that you can perform multitasking. Try playing TDU on two rigs, one that's single core and one that's dual core with similar performance, say an Athlon X2 3600+ and an Athlon FX-57. If the virus scanner automatically does the scanning at a preset schedule and you happen to be playing at that time, you'll most likely experience stuttering on the Athlon FX-57 computer when the scanning starts in the background, even if the FX-57 is the faster processor (in given circumstances where an application is not optimized for multi-threading).

Seems like you're also looking forward to playing the newer games. The minimum requirements of GTA IV is a Geforce 7900 GS and a dual-core processor (Athlon X2 or Core 2 Duo) which is honestly, ridiculously high like Crysis, but expected. I suggest you hold on to your cash and perform a complete overhaul. You can actually get a decent gaming rig for $500 with the right parts and if your target resolution isn't over 1680x1050.

I don't have a car yet. Hell, I don't even have a driver's license! Then again, it's just another 3 or 4 years. I'll probably get a small car like a Toyota Vios or Honda Jazz/Fit at that time, which ever my parents will buy or I'll just get my mom's Corolla Altis and she'll get a new car for herself. The Lambos, Porsches and Ferarris will have to wait till I'm 50+ year old DOM picking hookers left and right with meh hawt ride.

Wow. That was kinda hurtful. Please, if you don't like tennis don't post here at all. I'd rather have no one post rather than people posting here saying 'I hate tennis'.

Did you actually *BUY* the game? If you bought it through digital download, you should contact Atari immediately and settle it. If you just downloaded it off a torrent site, don't even bother playing online. If you really want to play online, buy the game. It's cheap now and you can get it in bargain bins.

@ RX_37 and Danger Mouse Wow. That's a lot of ATI hating there. Unfortunately, ATI's got Nvidia on their heels right now. Just when Nvidia released their 'fastest GPU ever', the GTX 280, at $650, ATI just came knocking right up with their HD 4870 and 4870 x2 which drove the GTX 280's price down to $400. Even their mid-range line up, the HD 4650 and 4670 are good. The HD 4670 is faster than the 9600 GSO and just as fast at the 9600 GT and it costs less and consumes less power than both these cards. Even now, ATI's got them in a deadlock. The HD 4870 x2 takes care of the GTX 280 and 260 Core 216 -- the HD 4870 x2 outright, leaves them in the dust in some games like Race Drive GRID where a single HD 4870 x2 manages at 84 FPS while the GTX 280 SLI manages a paltry 68 FPS, both at WQXGA (2560x1600), 4x AA, maxed out. The single GTX 280 manages at 40 FPS. The HD 4870 consistently peforms better than the GTX 260 and the 9800 GTX+. The HD 4850 handles both the 8800 GTS and 9800 GTX while the newer HD 4830 takes care of the 8800 GT and the 9800 GT. The HD 4670 has a tight rein on the lower end of the spectrum beating both the 9600 GSO and GT in price to performance ratio and is very HTPC friendly with a low consumption and heat output which leads to lower noise rating. It also has built-in digital audio decoding and can output signal through HDMI. No more need for DVI-to-HDMI adapter. Yes, most of the HD 4670s have an HDMI port. It's a bang for the buck. I'd have to admit though that ATI's drivers aren't as good as Nvidia, and I am an Nvidia owner myself. I currently have a Geforce 8800 GT on my desktop and a Geforce Go 6600 on my laptop. My older GPUs were the Geforce 7600 GT, Geforce 4 MX440 and a Riva TNT2. The old Riva TNT2 on our old Pentium II PC still works. LOL. @ tool831 Do they still make AGP 9600 GTs? Sad to say but Razzman's only looking for an AGP card.

I was just wondering if anyone here enjoys tennis. Whether playing it or just following the pro scene, or both! Post your opinions and thoughts about playing styles, training, techniques, the pro scene and the professional players and tennis babes like Maria Sharapova and Ana Ivanovic. Anyway, let me start with myself. I play tennis leisurely. I wish I could compete though even just in the local clubs, but I'm afraid I'm not up to it and I'm still in school anyway. I play one-handed backhand and forehand. I used to play two-handed backhand when I was younger though. For professional tennis, I'm a big fan of Roger Federer, Maria Sharapova and Venus Williams. It's kinda sad Federer's having a so-so season, but still, it should have been considered a great season if it were any other player save Federer and Nadal, who are clearly apart from the rest. Sharapova annihilated the competition at the start of the year but she's just fragile. She gets injured too easily and she's been playing with a shoulder injury since April and only became worse before the Olympics, bah, of all the times. Just another 4 years of wait. Venus is doing fine even though she doesn't play a lot of matches since she's kinda like Sharapova -- fragile. Anyway, she's in the final of the WTA Tour Championships right now and she'll be facing Zvonareva for the title. She'll most likely win if she played like she did against Jankovic. Low error rate, more defense but outright, raw firepower at the right times. Another sad thing is that Nadal won't be playing in the final ATP Masters tournament in Shanghai. Bahhh... He sucks on hard courts anyway. Federer and the other guys would have hammered him. *I did search the boards and didn't find any threads relating to tennis in general, except for games like Virtua Tennis 3. I prefer the Top Spin series though*

@ Sunny I suggest you get one of the laptops with a Geforce 9 series GPU. Some, I repeat, *SOME* of the models with a 9500/9600M GPU have an alternative 9100M to save on power and it does switch automatically without the need for a reboot. Just look for the badge that says 'Hybrid SLI'. That's just the problem with lappies with dedicated GPUs -- battery life. My laptop can actually switch to an Intel GMA 900 but requires a reboot and I only use it when I intend to run it on batteries, which I hardly do since I'm never far away from a power outlet. BTW, my friend has an ASUS M50 with a Geforce 9500M and he runs CoD4, DMC4 and a slew of relatively new games at native resolution (1440x900) smoothly. I'm not sure of the settings, but I'm assuming most of the settings were on high or medium-high since they looked really good. He also told me the battery life was around 2 hours without playing, just basic stuff like word processing and web surfing. Anyway, I also checked out NotebookCheck and the 9500M is just as fast as the older 8600M GT. The 8600M GT should be around equal to the Mobility Radeon HD 3650 in performance, at least that's what the NotebookCheck and most of the reviews say. So I think it should be more than fast enough to run TDU maxed out (probably no AF and just 2x AA, but maxed out in-game settings), considering that TDU is a relatively old game (2006). Anyway, I'm actually surprised people here still value CPU performance a lot, even if the gap between two choices is small. 2.4 Ghz, 3 MB cache C2D and a 2.5 Ghz, 6 MB cache Ghz C2D. Heck, they're both the same to me. The 3-5 FPS difference would be negligible when it's running at nearly or over 60 FPS. If there's a purpose at all when it comes to gaming, if any, it should be bragging rights.

The Radeon 9800 XT is actually kinda old due to its shader model capacity being only 2.0. Another thing is that the 9800 XT consumes more power relatively since it is, after all, a former high-end card. The Radeon X1650 Pro should run this game fine at 1024x768, 2x AA, high, no HDR. But IMO, if you can find a Geforce 7600 GT or 7300 GT, get that instead. Just make sure the 7300 GT has GDDR3 memory. If it says DDR2, don't bother. The 7300 GT GDDR3 version should be just as fast but cheaper than the X1650 Pro and the 7600 GT is definitely much faster than the X1650 Pro but for a slightly higher price. Dang, if you only had PCI-E 16x, you could have gotten a Radeon HD 4670 for that price. It even makes short work of older high-end cards like the Geforce 7800/7900 and the Radeon X1800/X1900/X1950 series.

Argghhh... I can place the thumbnails of the images instead, but nothing happens if you click them. They don't enlarge. Can anyone help? EDIT: Hmm... it looks ok now. They're displayed at 800x500 pixels now and only display at their full resolution when clicked. I probably had an error in perception. No need to display them in awfully small thumbnails that don't enlarge when clicked.

Nice post. But do you mind posting some pictures of this enabled? I'm worried it will kill the visuals a lot. I'm actually quite satisfied running the game at 1024x640, 2x AA, low settings, no HDR and I still get over 30 FPS consistently, except when crashing or bumping into another vehicle. My lappy's specs are actually similar to your rig's. But if it does increase FPS by over 15 without killing the visuals much (ie. lower resolution shadow maps, less denser foliage), I'm up for it. @ Ministry That's the first tweak I ever saw and currently the only one I use right now. Increases FPS by 5-10 and I barely even notice the birds and flying paper being gone! *Sigh* I wish I had a faster lappy, you know, the ones with the Geforce 9500/9600M graphic processors. I can't complain though since I don't have a job yet. Heck, most of my friends don't even have laptops that can actually play some games (integrated graphics...) and some don't even have a laptop. So yeah, I'm quite satisfied with right now.

Sorry about that. But how do I make the preview resize to 800x600? I saw some pictures in other threads that enlarge to their original size when they click on the screenshot, but the resolution that's displayed on their post, the preview, is 800x600.

You guys are probably sick of seeing the same cars and sceneries. But I just can't help but post pictures of this fabulous game! These are just my current cars right now and I'm working towards getting a Ferrari Enzo, which may take a while. If you're wondering why I got these, they're the 'bang for the buck' cars since they've got the best price for their specs. I even beat some Class B vehicles in events with my TVR Sagaris which is just Class C. Settings: 1024x640, 2x AA, Low, No HDR (I dislike the effect and the framerate's going to drop below 30 FPS if I enable this anyway) For me, it still looks really good even with these settings. Even some of my friends were 'wowed' when they saw it in action. It's hard to believe this is an old game, just like Oblivion which looks better than Fallout 3, IMO. Anyway, here are the screenshots. The 'Photo mode' in this game is just pure genius! Just make sure to enlarge when viewing them. Audi TT Quattro Crossing a Mercedez Benz -- OLD IMAGE REMOVED (imageshack) -- Strolling around the city -- OLD IMAGE REMOVED (imageshack) -- At the airport (just ignore the hitchhiker sign on the background) -- OLD IMAGE REMOVED (imageshack) -- Gotta love that grill! -- OLD IMAGE REMOVED (imageshack) -- Caterham CSR 260 Leaving my place -- OLD IMAGE REMOVED (imageshack) -- A very sharp turn -- OLD IMAGE REMOVED (imageshack) -- Under a tree canopy -- OLD IMAGE REMOVED (imageshack) -- Crossing paths with a Lotus Esprit (kinda looks like an Esprit, just correct me if it isn't) -- OLD IMAGE REMOVED (imageshack) -- Drift! -- OLD IMAGE REMOVED (imageshack) -- TVR Sagaris Overtaking -- OLD IMAGE REMOVED (imageshack) -- In the tunnel -- OLD IMAGE REMOVED (imageshack) -- On the highway -- OLD IMAGE REMOVED (imageshack) -- The long road -- OLD IMAGE REMOVED (imageshack) --

Hello to everyone here! My name's Alphonse. But you can call my Phonse or Fonz for short. I'm quite new to the TDU scene since I just got it 2 weeks ago and I'm loving it! It's like the Oblivion of car games! Big world, lots to places to explore, gorgeous sceneries and a hell lot of stuff to do! Anyway, as much as I like to play this all day, I can't. But I'm working on it. I only have 1 house though, it's the flat in the middle of the city. My current cars in-game are the Audi TT, the TVR Sagaris and the Caterham CSR 260. They may not be the best looking (well... all of them look good, some just better and cooler) but they're the cheapest and fastest available. I especially love the Caterham! Lovely handling and insane acceleration but marred by the limited top speed. Anyway, before I bought the game I looked up some screenshots and the system requirements. It looked really nice though my laptop barely met the minimum and I took a gamble which didn't mean much since my desktop, I believe is fast enough to run it maxed out (Athlon X2 + Geforce 8800 GT), but I move around a lot and prefer playing on my lappy. To my surprise, the game ran fine at 1024x640 with 2x AA, no HDR, low settings. What's odd is that low, medium and high had very subtle differences in image quality. HDR makes it look a bit more 'photorealistic' (and kills performance too!) but thankfully HDR isn't suited to my taste. Ever played Race Driver GRID? The HDR in that game is overkill. It runs at over 30-40 FPS in most areas but dips to 15-20 when I crash. And the game still looks fantastic! I wish we had more options though like going for simpler shadows since I really do appreciate racing games at 60 FPS even with some visual compromises, just like the case of Gran Turismo 4 on the PS2 (the cars in GT4 still look good by today's standards though). BTW, I did rename one of those folders so that the 'flying paper and birds' would be removed and it did increase performance by 5-10 FPS even if it only removed a very negligible part of the visuals, which aren't even there all the time. God... You won't believe how hooked I am on this game, just like Oblivion when I first got it! I try to play it every time I got free time and I pack my controller with me now all the time since it's hard to play it with the keyboard. I can blab even more about the game but this post is ridiculously long enough already. Anyway, thanks for having me guys! I'll post some screenshots soon! As for me? Off to play TDU this whole weekend!