Gaming is been definitely improving in Pakistan as DSL internet became mainstream or more affordable. Today there are more Pakistani Gamers that play in international game servers as compared to the local ISP's gaming servers. In coming future we will be seeing more gamers getting online.

Gaming has been the biggest change in Pakistan since the introduction of Internet. Both have somewhat same growth rate which is highly progressive. With the evolution of internet our attitude toward games have also changed significantly, we prefer games with online options, quality of internet connection is an issue as well. We found out that the quality of service provided by PTCL was much poorer as compared to LinkDotNet. Latencies or Pings or lag was found to be much higher in PTCL. Customer support by PTCL has always been terrible, 1218 people hang your phone call by saying that we are transferring your call to our senior but they never do, they say that we will farward your complain which they always farward to their trash bins and internet connection speed has not been doubled for most of the users out there. I wish PTCL stakeholders go to internet and search about the quality of service they are providing.

Rockstar's most popular GTA series got a new addition a year back (i guess), GTA4. I finally got a chance of running GTA4 on my PC and it given pretty hard time to the PC even more than the Most popular nvidia inclined Crysis. It was quite amazing that the game graphics itself were not really that revolutionary at all as compared to other games in the market but the overall performance that it was able to squeeze of the PC was disturbing.

 Back in PS2 days, one of my favourite games were Bully again by Rockstar, it worked quite well on PS2 given the harware resources available to PS2. The very same Bully got released on PC, with little change in name Bully: Scholarship Edition, except the name, nothing was quite changed in the game. Those of you who played Bully on PC can easily smell that GTA 4 is having same problems, bad hardware resources management. Both Bully and GTA 4 and unable to utilize CPU/RAM/GPU properly. Even if you meet minimum/recommended specifications set by rockstar for either of the games, there are no guarantees on some level of performance that you will get out of your harware that you call, beefy.

So, here it is as it was expected, Nvidia GTX 295, Nvidia not only shown some of the new graphics cards, GTX 295, 285 at CES (Consumer-Electronics-Show) in Vegas but also released 3d Vision Glasses.

3D Vision Glasses are not something like a tiny 2.1"x2 LCD's put inside the Glasses but it just some material that is hooked with a control module that creates 3D effect. People who tested this product said that its good for a game like Left 4 Dead (Closed Environments)  but not really works well with games with open environments like Crysis, Fallout 3.

Back to the graphics cards that we care about most. GTX 295 (If you don't have a clue) is Dual GPU graphics card, most probably its 2 x GTX260's. Its equivalent to ATI's 4870x2 in most of the game test, however at higher resoulutions it underperforms 4870x2 due to bigger frame buffer 4870x2 (GTX295= 896x2 MB, 4870x2= 2GB). Price wise its 599$ card which ~= 48,000 Rs (Just prey that the dollar value comes down :P), nvidia may price this as well as GTX 285 (Single GPU solution, little better than GTX 280) aggressively in the comming days as the competion is still pretty tough. Nvidia even after good home work, still not able to beat 4870x2 fair and square in each and every game. Comming days are definately gonna be interesting as the prices of these card will drop down in Q1 2009.

"Throw your memory back to the year 2004 and the release of the innovative Far Cry on PC. Developer Crytek managed to fashion one of the most convincing and striking locales in all of gaming, and satisfied gamers with the freedom to pass through the landscape and tackle enemies in almost any way they saw fit. You surely remember Jack Carver and that things where about to get seriously messed up for you ? Well, tough luck. You are no longer at that deserted tropical island yet hop into a jeep and arrive at the sandy savannah surroundings of Africa. And that's a change .. as much as you'll no longer run into any mutants, aliens, or any superpowers or psychic powers. Also -- you are no longer Jack Carver, you assume the role of one of nine different mercenaries who are embedded in the midst of a brutal civil war which rages in a imaginary African nation."

Source -- Guru3d

So here we go again, Far Cry 2, its not obcessed with Island this time (Far Cry, Crysis, Crysis Warhead they get annoying because they got island all way) rather the game takes place in African Dusty Lands & you got to kill the warloards. The game also got pretty big requirements:

 Minimum Requirements: Far Cry 2

- Pentium 4 3.2 GHz, Pentium D 2.66 Ghz, AMD Athlon 64 3500+ or better
- 1 GB RAM, DDR I/DDR 2/ DDR 3 Whatever you got, it will work fine
- 6 GB of free hard drive space, but you got to need more
- NVidia 6800 or ATI X1650 or better; must support Pixel Shader 3.0

Recently Guru3d guys did good job with benchmarking plenty of graphics cards out there (most latest and greatest), so check them out here. Probably the best feature of this game is Enhanced lighting features, that completely eat up your graphics card, this is definitely gonna be the next game on which benchmarking for the upcoming graphics cards will take place for some time.Happy playing Far Cry 2!