Tuesday, May 03, 2005
Video Card Woes
My wife's video card was failing - causing lots of shadowing and 'noise' on her new flat-screen monitor. She had a fairly old GForce MX card which she had been perfectly happy with (the only 3D game she plays now that we've kicked the EverQuest habit is Neverwinter Nights). So I did the hand-me-down thing: I gave her my machine's video card, and I did an upgrade on my own.
I went with the fairly budget-conscious choice of the PNY Verto 6200 card with 128 megs of VRAM. Unfortunately, the card was defective. 2D mode ran fine, but 3D causes lock-ups. Sometimes they were nearly instantaneous, sometimes they took a few minutes. The card tended to perform better when it was "cold" than after the machine had been on a few minutes, but I didn't think the card was overheating. I even tried to "under-clock" the card, but to no avail. It was in pretty sad shape.
I took it back to CompUSA today and traded it for a new card of the exact same model. I had some weird DirectX woes at first, until I "un-fixed" some of the fixes I'd made the previous night (OpenGL ran just fine). I was able to spend much of tonight "testing" the card to run it through it's paces. So far so good. Game development can now resume. But Neverwinter Nights, Battlefield: Vietnam, Unreal Tournament: 2004, Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines, Orbz, and City of Heroes are all running just fine, thank you very much.
Another interesting thing that happened was that I booted up the first early-adopter demo for the Torque Shader Engine. It worked on my GForce 4, but some of the effects just didn't seem that interesting. For example, I couldn't tell the difference between the per-pixel and per-vertex refraction. Ah-hah! Turns out there wasn't a difference on those earler shader-capable cards. The demo is quite different on the new card.
- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 11:34 PM (Permalink)
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On my Pentium 3 933MHz desktop, which I've used as my main gaming machine since 2001, I eventually upgraded from a Geforce2 MX card to a Geforce 4 TI 4200 with 128Mbytes RAM. It was a pretty substantial upgrade, and I was pretty impressed at the performance difference. But I, too, didn't notice any difference in quality adjusting certaing settings with newer games.
Then I got my new laptop: a Dell Inspiron 9300, with an Nvidia Geforce Go 6800 card. The resolution is really nice -- 1920x1200 on a very responsive LCD -- but the thing that really blew me away was the ability of the card to easily handle bump mapping EVERYWHERE.
Textures on trees and rocks and shadows came alive, where on my Geforce 4 TI 4200, nice as it was, they were considerably more flat and dull.
I tried picking up the Everquest habit again by playing some Everquest 2, and that was the first game which was new enough to really show an enormous difference between the two cards. And I have to admit: with the settings cranked up, EQ2 is a beautiful game. Too bad the gameplay is like chewing aluminum foil. Interesting for a while, but ultimately unsatisfying, bland, and, if you have fillings, rather painful.
We also run the gamut in our house from the kid's computer having my old MX to my newest card, but we're "all nVidia". Mainly due to the solid Linux drivers for the card. Kind of funny, that. ATI used to be the king of cards on Linux when they were open-source-friendly on their driver policy, but then a few years ago, they stopped releasing quality specs for their cards. Shortly before that, nVidia had begun releasing a proprietary binary kernel module with an open-source wrapper that would work with just about any kernel revision.
There are still some annoying quirks here and there (such as inconsistent power management handling), but overall it's stable, fast, and easy to install. Much as I dislike proprietary-ness on Linux, their installer is text-based but slick, and a great example for more vendors to follow if they want to release drivers for Linux, but not release their source code.
Then I got my new laptop: a Dell Inspiron 9300, with an Nvidia Geforce Go 6800 card. The resolution is really nice -- 1920x1200 on a very responsive LCD -- but the thing that really blew me away was the ability of the card to easily handle bump mapping EVERYWHERE.
Textures on trees and rocks and shadows came alive, where on my Geforce 4 TI 4200, nice as it was, they were considerably more flat and dull.
I tried picking up the Everquest habit again by playing some Everquest 2, and that was the first game which was new enough to really show an enormous difference between the two cards. And I have to admit: with the settings cranked up, EQ2 is a beautiful game. Too bad the gameplay is like chewing aluminum foil. Interesting for a while, but ultimately unsatisfying, bland, and, if you have fillings, rather painful.
We also run the gamut in our house from the kid's computer having my old MX to my newest card, but we're "all nVidia". Mainly due to the solid Linux drivers for the card. Kind of funny, that. ATI used to be the king of cards on Linux when they were open-source-friendly on their driver policy, but then a few years ago, they stopped releasing quality specs for their cards. Shortly before that, nVidia had begun releasing a proprietary binary kernel module with an open-source wrapper that would work with just about any kernel revision.
There are still some annoying quirks here and there (such as inconsistent power management handling), but overall it's stable, fast, and easy to install. Much as I dislike proprietary-ness on Linux, their installer is text-based but slick, and a great example for more vendors to follow if they want to release drivers for Linux, but not release their source code.
I also upgraded my video card relatively recently, and I bought an Nvidia (nVidia? NVidia?) card instead of ATI for the solid Linux drivers as well.
That's mainly why I went with NVidia - for the compatability. I really SHOULD get an ATI card as well - for testing purposes - instead of forcing all my friends at gunpoint with ATI cards to run my games every time I change the graphics engine.
At least that's the excuse I can tell my wife when I buy one... :)
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At least that's the excuse I can tell my wife when I buy one... :)
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