I'm sure you're all dying to hear all about my latest and recent PC upgrade, and some point last week saw me elbow deep in circuit boards, PCI-E slots and all manner of faintly organic and intestinal-looking disk drive power-cables again.
It's a process that always makes me faintly nervous, mostly due to my vague understanding that Static Electricity is Bad for Microchips, and a taste for cheap shoes and a man-made fibres often causes me to...arc somewhat, near metal.
Opening the case of my pride and joy then, causes me to fret tremendously, and visions of my inadvertent 'Dark Sith Force Powers' leaping about and frying everything make the whole process, (which at the end of the day is basically 'Pull Out Circuit Board, Put Other Circuit Board in Now-Vacant Slot',) a lot more fraught than it needs to be.
This time it was a replacement of my previous Radeon X1300 with a new GeForce 8600. I'm generally quite ambivalent on the whole Radeon vs GeForce debate, not having experienced enough comparison to have an opinion really. Having tried both now, either seems to work well enough, and more important seems to be the hardware spec itself - VRAM, how far up either ladder the card itself is, that kind of thing.
Installing the thing was a procedure that developed complications very early on, in that it didn't actually fit. Mostly due to the monstrous fan on the side of the thing, the new card needs two of the shiny backplates, instead of one. This would be fine, apart from the fact that my lone PCI Express slot on the Dell motherboard, is at the top of the available set of backplates. Square peg, round hole, that sort of thing. I raged a bit, swore a lot and then, rather than just send it back and get a different one that did fit, decided on an audacious Plan B; start taking bits off the card until it jolly well did fit!
Not quite the terminal stupidity it first sounds, as the 8600 seems to come with a quite baffling amount of extraneous (I hope!) plastic coverings, housings, fan covers, rocket fins, curly tubes with bubbles in and other guff. Stripping all this nonsense away now leaves me with a card that has a dangerously exposed cooling fan which might cause injury to a small child, if they can somehow crawl inside my PC, that is! More importantly, it now fits, and seems to function just fine, although with no backplate securing it in place, it has a tendency to wobble a bit in high winds. Also with all the dross removed, it is now approximately 25% lighter, and so, it stands to reason, will go even faster!
(Look out for an angry post on how electrical fires suck, and a shift in focus to Collectable Card Games, Board Games and Going Outside For Fresh Air and Exercise some day soon!)
All this about the same time as NVidia start selling the 9000 series, demonstrating my uncanny ability to be consistently eight months behind the times, in all aspects of my life. Mind you, every game I own now, runs with all the graphical whistles and bells turned on, except Oblivion of course. I'll need to wait until Quantum Computing is invented before that'll run smoothly with it all going, I fear. Sins of a Solar Empire chugs a bit when you have all 2000 points of ship supply in the same gravity well on extreme close-up too! Victory may indeed be at hand for The Unity, but it'll be a very slow-motion victory if I keep zerging like that at full zoom...
On the MMO front, Guild Wars, strangely enough, improved. I already have all the settings on, and it always ran very well anyway, but on the 8600, it flows along at a new level of smoothness that I had no idea even existed, so well done there!
EVE Online didn't noticeably improve that much. Previously, I had Trinity enabled, but with the shadows and HDR off. Now they're both on 'Extreme', but while a nice touch, in themselves they don't add a whole lot to the look and feel. EVE has always done well with very little graphical resources though, so I'm not surprised, or disappointed. Saying that, I rarely roll in a blob fleet of 200+ ships, so perhaps this kind of upgrade helps a lot with those?
Second Life didn't improve much, but then that's little to do with the card. The bottleneck there is how fast LL's servers can stream everything at you, one texture at a time, and of course, how incompetent it's users are at Photoshop. Mind you, with the new card, I might stand a chance of my PC not having a massive panic attack if I try to use their new-ish Windlight lighting and environment engine, although I think that's still only available on some special 'First Look' client, (or 'Beta' as the rest of us call it), which I've yet to find and download.
The big winner in my current MMO list was Tabula Rasa, which stands to reason, it being the most recent and all. Previously it didn't look too shabby, but now does look quite spectacular, mostly in the form of now-enabled over-the-top lighting options; shines, shadows, directional lightning, anti-aliasing, 64-bit Fluxo-Mega-Specular Dynamic Whatchamacallits - all that stuff, although it does still stutter slightly in some of the more hectic CP battles with the all the detail knobs turned to 11 and, for some reason Tahendra Base, an instance that uses the 'Brann Facility Interior' tileset. Something not quite right about the lighting in those, I think, and it does rather demonstrate that the pursuit of flawless stunning graphics is a partnership; I have to do my part, by shelling out for decent PC Hardware, yes, but game developers also have to meet me half-way, by coding elegant and optimised game engines to run on it all, and use the card to its full potential.
One of the nice things about an upgrade like this, is the anticipation of going back to older games that exist in my memories as jerky slideshows that ran grudgingly, if at all, and seeing how they were meant to look, now that I have a PC that is much better than the ones the games were written and tested on, years ago. Particular old favourites I'm looking forward to seeing again, if only for the graphics, include Star Wars: Galaxies, Planetside, City of Villains and Everquest 2 - all games that I enjoyed, but perhaps less than I might have done, because of the then necessity of hobbling most of their graphics options, purely to get a playable framerate. In EQ2's particular case, it's most pimped graphics setting was intended for a graphics card with 512MB RAM, which at the time of it's release, hadn't been invented yet! I now have 1GB of video memory, so perhaps finally, over three years later, I can see what it was supposed to look like at launch. In future, when my fickle interests turn again and nostalgia hits, I'll get to see them all with new eyes - quite literally!