Define "enthusiast"

I like computer games.

I've been hotrodding my computer for 15 years.

Yet I've only once owned an "enthusiast" graphics card.

I only now read an artice in Toms Hardware Guide about "budget" graphic cards(their budget is $100).


When half life came out I could not play it. The 200 mhz cyrix processor driving a 1mb 2d graphics card connected to a 12 mb 3d card could not keep up. Despite my whopping 64 mb of system ram.

Two years later my brand new 800mhz p3 with a 32 mb TNT2 card had no problems.

In the meantime my friend and fellow gamer had bought a 650 amd duron and paired it with a 16 mb 3d card and it too could run half life. And Unreal. And on his computer I first played these games.

The first 3d fps I played (bar wolfenstein: on a 12 mhz 286 :-)) was Jedi Knight: Dark forces, simply because it would run on my hardware(the 200mhz cyrix).



When Max Payne came out the p3 was overtaxed. Another friend of mine with a similar machine chucked out the tnt2 and installed a Kyro2. This made the game playable just barely at the lowest settings. It took another two years before I bought a geforce3, a hotrod version on sale because the geforce4 was all the rage. The geforce3 sliced and diced every game I threw at it. Only the very newest games would require me to turn resolution down to 800x600 or 640x480. By now I had also improved my cpu to an amd athlon at 1500mhz, Max Payne looked glorious.

This might surprise some, but Max Payne looked cooler in 800x600 on the 28" TV with AA than it did in higher resolutions on the pc monitor.

The quest for resolution in games has reached ridiculous proportions.
Budget graphic cards that are not even tested at 640x480 or 800x600?

Now I have an S3 graphics Deltachrome S8. It was the cheapest card available(NOK500=€60) when I bought it that had the latest pixel shaders.

I run Half Life 2 on it now. And 800x600 on the telly(32" now) seems to be my preferred resolution. I tried once in 1024x768 on the 14" monitor but that was ridiculous. And I think it's ridiculous watching people with high end cards play games at 1600x1200 on puny 19" monitors. That resolution has as many pixels on screen as Episode 2 did if you saw it in a theater with digital projection(1920x1080). Now, in the cinema they use these 2 megapixels to make a picture that is 10 meters wide or more.

My friend with the Duron now has an athlon, 2ghz, and a geforce4ti4800(bought on sale after geforce5 came out). That machine could just barely play doom3 at 640x480, so we did and fun it was.

Unless you have a huuuuuge screen(think 100" or so - basically: projector) any resolution above 1024x768 is pointless. Yet it is at this resolution that game testing begins.

This can do nothing but play into the industries hands, who's selling more higher spec. cards to people who don't really need them.

My friend with the kyro2 got bored with the annual upgrading and bought a playstation2 when the kyro would no longer play the newest games.

I don't know what resolutions the playstation has on offer but it is most definetly less than 640x480. And the framerate will never exceed 25 fps(in Europe) because that's what the TV is showing -25 whole frames per second(interlacing disregarded).
Most of the time it feels like less than that.

I wonder what need I have for a card that could play hl2 at 1000 frames in 'massive resolution'TM. I can't seem to find my cinema-quality wallscreenTM anywhere. Now where did I put that pesky...

Most people sit infront of monitors that play 60 frames per second. Some have boosted this to 100 frames. But I'd guess the majority of pc gaming is at 60hz refresh. LCD panels seem to struggle even with this.

So who needs a card capable of more than 60 fps?
Who needs that 250 fps frame rate in Unreal?
They're not seeing it because their monitors are not displaying it.

Graphic card hype annoys me. I've been squeezing more out of less for longer than any graphics card testing site has existed, I call myself an enthusiast, knowing it means I'm the kind of person that does not spend €500 on a graphic card. Or even €200(I actually just built a whole 2ghz pc with radeon 9600 for that price(for a friend, and it does play most games)). My most expensive card to date was the €80 geforce3, at the time it felt extravagant -but I rationalized it with the fact that it would greatly improve my preview in 3d animation software(which it did).
It died when its fan stopped and the chip burned -2 years later.

After that an integrated geforce2 chipset(on the motherboard) was all I had and I played alot of games on that too, worked just fine.

Now with my Deltachrome I can't wait to play some older games again just to whack up the AA and Aniso, I am however, too busy writing this blog B-).

And when geforce7 or 8 comes out, I'll pick up a geforce6800Ultra for €50 somewhere -if I can live the noise it generates(I am silent computing enthusiast also).

Or maybe I'll just buy a ps3 a few months into the launch when price-competition between it and xbox2(I ain't never paying for no Volish product) heats up.

It seems like a revolutionary product that would end alot of this nonsense going on, it appears to be so fast that games will take years of evolution before they're able to use up all the power. I do, however, hate that hand control. It is impossible to aim, so I would have to plug my fave keyboard and mouse to it for control, they better include usb.

anyway
b