THE THIEF CALLED GARRETT

Well I did not expect to be ever writing this post, not any time soon at any rate.

But I did see the chance to build a much needed PC rig and will be followed in the winter, hopefully, by another one too. I had completely forgotten until a couple of days ago that due to my purchase choices I got the new version of my old favourite, game, Thief for free. Yes that Thief of Thief 3 Deadly Shadows infamy.

After it stated there as a problem with my coupon and a couple emails back and forth with AMD I finally got around to downloading the game via Steam.

Upon the first running of the game I was surprised to see the graphics automatically set way down low on resolution at something like 1024 or 1280 across?! So I turned this up to the 1920x1080 native resolution and whacked everything up to max, thinking that even if it is a little too much I can just alter it later?

To my surprise the coders did a silly thing in that the first few minutes of the game you could not save it and get out to change the graphics setting, or at least I thought you had to exit the game to change the important ones. This was not the brightest idea in all honesty and I was surprised someone actually coded a game like that these days! Because i can make the first few moments a living hell instead of vastly enjoyable and exciting. Well it did!

Thief reduced my new PC to its knees!

This was a bit of a shock especially as the game appeared to be coded more for AMD's graphics cards over nVidia, judging from the logos presented? After the lengthy intro was over and I had managed to do the things I was forced to do during its run I saved the game and got out of it. After an initial loo around I discovered a few things. Thief runs OK now!

It seems the Super Sampling Anti Aliasing I think it is called or SSAA does not do much in the game and yet even on low uses a great deal of power. This is also true of the Contact Hardening Shadows and Screen Space Reflections.

I turned off all of these and viola! The game now runs amazingly better than it did before! In fact I think that with a slight overclock or the addition of the Radeon R7 250OC at a later date will have this running like silky smooth!

I also heard that Thief was bug ridden and crashed a great deal and yet this did not happen in the first couple hours of running it. There does seem to be a great deal of issues with the game and if you are one having issues the website I discovered that contained the solutions I mentioned to the performance issues is here ...

http://forums.eidosgames.com/showthread.php?t=141887

The page explains page file issues, crashes and black screening on start up. It mentions editing a file which may seem like a strange and daunting task, it is not. That is provided you follow one simple rule and that is make a copy of the original file. Easy way I do this myself when I have had to is make two copies and rename one with an additional character so the application wont use it. Mane alterations to the correctly named file and save. If the game fails to load, is worse than before or the same then you simply delete the file altered and rename the other file back to what it was, or taking out the letter or number I added to the file. These are normally files called '.ini' that are altered and it can be things like VRAM allocation or limiting the number of CPU threads. I had a game that refused to run without crashing on my laptop which was a Phenom X3 (three CPUs). Limiting the threads to 2 mysteriously solved the issue. Now as much as I love games and always have it does surprise me that you can buy a game in this day and age of multi CPUs and GPUs and yet this error occurred.

In the meantime I will be either on a bus or on my bike in 24 hours time attempting to find and buy a Corsair Vengeance K70 Keyboard?! Plus I have to order a cooling fan splitter cable to get my other front mounted fan working. Not that I need to mind you as it as silent as a mouse with just the two fans and I have yet to hear any of the three fans operating to speed up.

So just to recap, my new rig is A10-7850K on a MSI A88XM Motherboard with 16GB of Kingston Hyper Beast 2400Mhz RAM (not 2133MHz OC'd but 2400MHz RAM) running off a Crucial MX100 SSD. No overclocking or dual graphics just yet. A months time yes but not right now.