EA suggested I downgrade my PC to fix GFX issues

[Sheza]

I play one or two games that use the Unreal 3 engine and they look stunning on the highest GFX setting. I have a £1200 gaming rig (It was that much a year ago, hehe) Intel Core i7 920, 6GB RAM, ATI Radeon HD 5770 and expected to be able to play Bulletstorm on Medium specs at the very least.

Turns out anything higher than "Low" on 0x AA and VSync off causes choppy gameplay. What's up with that? It wasn't any of the issues posted here so I went and contacted EA support and their support rep told me that my PC didn't meet the "best configuration" which was essentially the specs on the back of the box. Specs that were LOWER than mine. he said the game runs best on a Windows experience rating of 4.2 and as I am a 5.9, he told me I needed to match the recommended specs.

I told him that couldn't possibly be right and quoted the back of the box that says better performance may occur on better PC's and he said he needed to escalate the issue (totally bottled it!).

I know this isn't Epic Game's support I'm talking about here but as they are listed as the official Bulletstorm support I guess I'd want to hear your reaction or any tips YOU guys might have)

EDIT: Oh and I may as well add that ever since EA have suggested a few fixes to me, I can't Alt-tab from the game because it just crashes.

[Nawrot]

Very skilled customer support. Soon they blame it on that you did not followed Feng Shui rules when you placed PC in your room. And all is simple: GFWL and BS are developed by 2 separate tems. GWFL is quite invasive messes/changes too many things in game (eg. encrypted inis, something must decrypt it for game, etc). There simple must be bugs, nobody at MS side tests if new version of GFWL works with games tested on older, they assume game devs will test, but they do not. Result is that customer are doing what QA should.

What I am not getting is that GOW1 on PC suffered exactly same problems (UT3 also but not as much, and it was gamespy). And yet they repeat and choose GFWL again, and support is about same as GOW had.

And after 3 months they cry again and blame pirates for low sales of game on PC.

[Sheza]

They obviously have some sort of contract with Microsoft.

Funny though, I sat through the credits like some kind of tribute offering or something, and the number of times I saw "Test Team" and "QA" were unbelievable.

[Nawrot]

Yes they have, but there are 2 QA teams and where game meets GFWL each team assumes bugs are fault or to be solved by other team. Some bugs cannot be solved by just one side, need changes in both products. That results in such crap like now, also tendency of MS to over complicate all code and invasive nature of GFWL makes it only worse.

[ARustyFirePlace]

You paid abouit 600£ too much for that pc mate, next time build it yourself.

[Sheza]

You paid abouit 600£ too much for that pc mate, next time build it yourself.

Lol, you say you can get an Intel i7 rig for ~£500? At last year's prices? Perhaps I forgot to mention the gaming sound card, the Coolermaster Scout case, the two extra case fans, the water cooling and the 3 year warranty? That's not the input I was looking for anyway.

[RyviusRan]

Lol, you say you can get an Intel i7 rig for ~£500? At last year's prices? Perhaps I forgot to mention the gaming sound card, the Coolermaster Scout case, the two extra case fans, the water cooling and the 3 year warranty? That's not the input I was looking for anyway.

Still a rip off.

Building a PC will always be much much cheaper.

Even though you don't live in the US or Canada you can still get better deals than that when building a PC.

I put together a build list for a friend in Netherlands for around £1070 and it had an i5 2500k, 6 gigs of DDR3 1600 RAM and two GTX 560 Ti twin frozer GPUs.
It also had the Xpredator evil black edition full tower case with 6 fans.

And all for only around £1070.
Yes that build was in January but the prices don't change too much even for one year.

Your PC probably could have been built for around £650 at last year prices.

[Sheza]

Yeah well I didn't. What are you gonna do? Call me a dicktit? I decided to get a lovely small business to build it for me. Oh and I fail to see how that £1070 beats my PC aside from the twin graphics cards.

Build price was actually around £900.

[phreeflo]

EA tech support:

[RyviusRan]

Yeah well I didn't. What are you gonna do? Call me a dicktit? I decided to get a lovely small business to build it for me. Oh and I fail to see how that £1070 beats my PC aside from the twin graphics cards.

Build price was actually around £900.

The i5 2500k performs just as good if not better in some cases.
It can also OC to 4.9ghz.

But CPUs are overpowered for most games today.

The GPU is the most important part after you have a CPU that will not bottleneck it which even cheap AMD Phenom II CPUs don't do.

A single GTX 560 Ti is already much more powerful than a 5770 and the PC I listed has two of them and they scale very well in SLI.

So that PC is way way more powerful than yours.

It's not like it's against the law to buy a prebuilt PC but we are just letting you know you got ripped off so maybe next time you might try building one.

Putting together a PC is not that hard it's kind of like playing with legos as a kid.

[RyviusRan]

EA tech support:

I think having a monkey would be better.

[kman420]

You paid abouit 600£ too much for that pc mate, next time build it yourself.

Wow your just a douchbag lol, stupid troll go away :P you think you could build an i7 920 rig for under $600 at time or release, stfu idiot. I co-own a pc repair shop and a year ago the 920 was over $300 (store cost) + $200 or more mobo, then add case, HDD, PSU, DVD rom, RAM, GPU (oh and most pc purchases have screens), then take into account not everyone can get any parts they want at cost, then fix it yourself when it breaks lol... Also you obviously dont know what your talking about if you told your friend he needed 6 gigs or ram for anything but HD video editing and Server applications, and SLI, omfg have you ever run sli, or read the issues with it, or do you not know MS has ended support for sli in win7, because and i quote them " its too unstable and buggy". SLI is dead, it is a gimmick that works sometimes, if you have the patience time and knowledge to get it right for each game. Not to mention the greatly higher chance one of your cards will fail earlier due to heat issues... so infact you made your friend overspend on his pc for **** that wont be fully utilized before his next pc purchase... Stupid troll