This weekend, I started playing Assassin’s Creed. It’s really a fantastic game and you can see all the experience from the Prince of Persia titles. For example, whilst running, you just have to control your character’s direction. He’ll intelligently navigate the environment like a free-runner, jump over obstacles, launch himself off of obstacles or jump from beam to beam.
The fighting system is also great. No as dedicated as that in Prince of Persia: Warrior Within, but you won’t get very far with button mashing. For example, you can deal light strokes and hard strokes with your blade, the hard strokes of course take longer to execute. You can break a move at any time and block, if you’re quick enough you can pull a last-second defense if your enemy tried to strike you while you tried to gain momentum.
Now once you’re used to this, you can learn new tricks. For example, when an enemy raises his sword to attack, you can press the left and right mouse buttons (in the default controls) to intercept his move and execute a counter-attack. Or when you see that the enemy is about to parry your own attack, you can left-click again to punch or kick the enemy. And if that worked, if you click again, you can deal a fatal blow.
It’s a really well done progressive system where you learn better and better tricks, one step at a time!
Frying?
Now what about the post title? Well, I’m playing this on an Asus GeForce 8800 GTS 512 TOP, a factory-overclocked card. So far, it has worked great in numerous games. Assassin’s Creed, however, manages to overheat the card rather quickly.
I had to crashes yesterday, once with strange blocky artifacts on the screen (a telltale sign that your graphics card is either overclocked too hard or overheating) and once the system just froze. Looks like the default fan control settings aren’t adequate. The card idles at 70° C (158° F) and there was only a slight increase in fan noise at the time of the crashes (I don’t know which temperature it was at since I didn’t monitor it at this time).
Using NVidia’s nTune utility, I set the fan speed to 60% (that’s about the point from where onwards the fan’s noise level starts to exponentially increase), which kept the temperature at 60° C (140° F) during the game. No crashes anymore.
Recent Comments