Wednesday, January 2, 2008

Guitar Hero 3 for PC

I have lots to say about Guitar Hero 3, for the PC.
1. I hate ports. Ported games with no work put into improving performance is just a money grab. I hate you all for doing this. Too many companies get away with this bullshit.
Put some effort into it! Earn the money!!
2. Also to do with ported games.. but more to with just the performance. Here are the specs of the box I play on right now (it cost me $40 because I got it for free as it needed a motherboard).
Intel Celeron 2.5Ghz
1GM of DDR 333Mhz RAM
ATI Radion 9600 Pro (128MB)
40GB 7200RPM IDE HDD
And the game runs like Half-Life 2 on a PII 700Mhz P.O.S. WTH?

You can make the game run better! This box played COD4 at 1024x768, but GH3 is not even smooth at 800x600 with the 3 graphics options turned off!
I even removed the 3D animated backgrounds using this hack:
This 'hack' made things playable... but it still lags up a lot.
Fraps (without recording) usually shows a frame rate of 35-40. At times it gets a low as 28 FPS
3. The PC version comes with an Xbox GH2 guitar. This is both good and bad.
The bad is, why not give us something better?
The good is that it should work with an Xbox (I have not tried yet,but I hear it does) It even has the Xbox button on the controller, used on an xbox to bring up the Dashboard menu thing.

I am also told that if you get the wireless game receiver for the Xbox 360 controllers, you can use the wireless Xbox 360 guitar on the PC version of the game. Though it is not 'supported' by the makes of the game on the PC.

Here are a few screen shots of the GH2 wired guitar/controller in Windows, showing that it works like normal Joystick or gamepad.



This image shows the buttons and the axises available:

I have made this image to show how everything maps to buttons and axises in Windows:

For an Open Source and free alternative to Guitar Hero for the PC, check out Frets on Fire:
You can use the Xbox 360 wired controller for this game as well. However, I have not tried the wireless one with it. It will also let you use a computer keyboard to play (as does GH3 for PC).

5 comments:

Andy Locoweed said...

Ok... I lvoe a good rant, but really: do you think that system is really good enough?

A CELERON? Good lord!
An ATI 9600??? Good lord! Even World of I-have-no-life-craft lags with that ATI P.O.S.
1GM of 333Mhz RAM -what the fuck is a GM of RAM? And 333Mhz? My pee is faster than that (and half the cost!!)
40GB HD? ...Ok that really doesn't matter, bu have you considered what sort of swapping is going on? Try throwing in another cheap-o HD and dedicating it to swap in a second IDE channel. Even better- throw in a few and raid them all together for the C: and swap drives!
A 40GB 7200 RPM IDE drive probably can't even do 100 IOPS and when you pair that with a crappy ATI video card that you've likely loaded even crappier ATI drivers and memory-hogging POS apps it's pretty safe to assume you're doing some decent swapping.
The non-existant cache in the Celeron doesn't help that either.

Disable all un-needed services, get process explorer from sysinternals & kill everything else you don't need, optimize your swap file, defrag, and then try again.

I bet it'll be better.

...then buy a better computer :P

Andy Locoweed said...

Good lord!
I really need to proof-read these damn comments before I click publish!

...I'm ashamed of my spelling and typos :(

Derek said...

Drew!!!
Yes, proof read. I need to too... "1GM of RAM'...

Anyway. Done the defrag. Done the services shit, i've done it all. Who do you think you are talknig to here?

Either way, the game should be programmed better. Read my post on games that force hardware upgrades. If you want to debate it, let me know :P

I have got a new system and it runs way better. But the pint is that I should NOT have to. They loose sales cause of shit like that.
Still need a new video card and hard drive. But it's all planned out.

KingCharming said...

Try using 3dANALYZER, check out this page.
It worked for me! FLAWLESSLY
http://blog.dstmichel.ca/index.php/2007/12/27/15-how-to-play-guitar-hero-iii-on-pc-without-the-specified-video-card-restriction-bypass-the-video-card?cos=1

and if the link doesnt show, search for "How to play Guitar Hero III on pc without the specified video card" on google

Adam M said...

The scorehero thing worked absolutely perfectly for me, removed everything though I can still see the Star Power special FX, my framerate has increased tenfold and this game is completely playable on my Gateway Laptop.

AMD 2.2GHZ dual core
4GB DDR3 RAM
ATI 4200 mobile