Witness me revel in my geek joy !
I love PC fairs. I'm like a kid in a candy store when at one, what with it's bewildering array of goodies for my PC and promises of hard-to-resist bargains.
I bought a new graphics card on Friday. After many years of using nVidia products, this time around I decided to switch. I got me an ATI 9600 Pro with 128Mb RAM by Gecube. It was a real bargain too, as I discovered later when I plugged it into my PC at home.
The card cost me RM390 (approximate USD102). Considering how powerful the card is turning out to be, that's dirt cheap. My Need For Speed Underground 2 is a totally different game now that I get fog, lights, motion blur, reflection (both on the road and on the apparently very shiny cars) and rain. It actually feels cold when it rains in that game. Unfortunately, the improved detail levels made driving in bad weather kinda dangerous.....
And Rome Total War ? Also totally different now that I can run it in high-res and good detail levels. Now I can see things like grass and my army's metal weapons and armour will glint in the sunlight. The battles themselves are faster now too, since I don't lag quite as much.
Also, in both games I've been trying out a feature that I've never used before, primarily because it's a real perfomance killer - FSAA (Full Screen Antialiasing). It's supposed to reduce jaggedness and make round things appear round. And boy does it make a difference. Finally I have a VGA card with enough horses to power this feature without much loss of performance. I'm pleased.
Another feature that I've read about is ATI's hardware based video processing. ATI claims that this onboard video playback processing cleans up your AVI & MPG video and improves quality. I can vouch that this claim is true. BIG difference. I ran one of my Buffy AVIs and the improvement was immediately apparent. The colors are "warmer" and more solid while the contrast between light and dark areas more distinct. I tried streaming videos and playing low quality mpegs and the playback quality is less muddy and has less "noise".
The next thing I want to try is to hook up another monitor to the card. It comes with a DVI connector (as with most ATI cards) and happily enough, Gecube bundled a DVI-to-VGA adapter in the box. Coincidentally, at work one of my bosses is asking for suggestions on how to connect two displays to one PC so I've been reading up on this. One PC, two monitors - sounds intriguing. Now where's a spare monitor when you need one....
They say money can't buy happiness. I agree, it can't. But it sure does help. And being able to occasionally buy stuff beats being broke anytime.
Excuse me while I go and contemplate about which games to install on my PC. Oh damn, I'm running low on hard disk space !!
I'll post again when I get back home later.
Currently listening too "That Kind of Love" Allison Krauss
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