Raven Shield (the prequel to Random Stuff) is sort of a hybrid of Rainbow Six with a little bit of the newer things that Ghost Recon brought to the mix. It's still R6, but they included a bunch of guns and features that kept showing up in peoples' mods, more accessories (almost every weapon will accept a silencer, scope, or high-capacity clip, though these affect performance and are sometimes a bad idea), the ability to lean around corners and gradually open doors (for just a peek, if you need that) and issue a few more commands on the fly to your teammates.

If you hadn't guessed, this means I successfully installed a new video card. :) Not the Radeon though -- plugging its power cable into my power supply made my computer so unhappy it wouldn't boot. Even with all the drives unplugged, so you'd think it should be fine on whatever power supply I have in there. I wonder if the card's bad, and how to go about getting a replacement if it is.

(BTW, it's the All-In-Wonder Radeon 9800 Pro. The non-All-In-Wonder version I saw at Best Buy today sells for $400. The extra stuff includes a remote, TV in/out, TiVo-like TV recording, and some other stuff involving a lot of cables and whatnot.)

But the geForce FX worked fine on the first try, no problems whatsoever. Just doing this stuff it's running at a nice 41 degrees Celsius; it got up to the low 50's after a bunch of Raven Shield, but considering that its slowdown threshhold is 140 degrees C I'd say it's pretty safe. ;)

I can run Ghost Recon with everything turned up all the way and have a higher frame rate than I did with everything turned down all the way on my old card. Ditto for Crimsonland, which looks really sweet now -- perfectly smooth frame rate with everything cranked up. Nice.

The downside to this is that the geForce is the one with fancy debugging drivers with helpful performance tools that we could have used at work. I may wind up with the Radeon (either with its replacement, or a hefty new power supply) anyway.

So, new video card, game I've wanted to play for a long time, two other games I was pretty much into, D&D 3.5 books arrived, lots of ideas I want to work on at work, Retreat in two weeks, moving in 2 months (preferably less). I should never be bored :)

Posted 01:55 AM CST [Link] [Archives] [Index]

The Radeon worked fine at the office. Running a 1.4 GHz machine side by side with a 3 GHz hyperthreaded machine, both with Radeon 9800's, let us know beyond any doubt that the Hero's Journey client is CPU-bound right now. Even without my particle system turned on :)