Chewi vs The Sickness (my graphics card)

[chewi]

So I just received Deus Ex 2 - Invisible War through my letter box after having bought it on eBay for the ultra bargainous £2.50 including postage. I almost felt sorry for the seller. Unfortunately I won't be able to play it for a little while yet. It is generally known to not run on Linux but that isn't the problem. Even on Windows, it wouldn't run on this thing and all for one reason - that bloody graphics card. This certainly isn't the first time I've complained about that damn thing. Today, I gained a new perspective on just how crap it really is. On the back of the game's box, it says it supports the NVIDIA GeForce3 Ti series. I knew it required pixel shaders so that came as a surprise to me. I had always assumed that pixel shaders were a relatively new thing. Apparently not. The GeForce3 Ti200 was released in October 2001. I acquired one second hand in the summer of 2002. It wasn't the hottest thing going but it beat the crap out of my 8MB ATI 3D Rage Pro. Fast forward to summer 2004 when I ditched my ageing desktop in favour of this second hand but still only one month old laptop. Little did I know of the sickness that lurked within - the sickness known as the ATI Radeon IGP345M. Even with a whopping 128MB of system RAM allocated to it, it still runs like a lump of lard. Now armed with my new found knowledge about pixel shaders, I went to find out whether this pile of crap supported them. The Wikipedia entry on the R100 chipset informed me that the card is actually based on first generation Radeon technology. Forget pixel shaders, it's probably a miracle this thing can even do pixels. So there you have it. A card with 32MB RAM, released in 2001 that I got for free just one year later, walks all over this card with 128MB RAM, released in 2004 that I got as part of this rather expensive laptop. Amazing. If it were purely down to pixel shaders, there might be a glimmer of hope. Transgaming's Cedega, the program I use to run Windows games on Linux, can emulate pixel shaders to a certain extent. But I can guarantee the game would still run like shit. Gah.

In other news, I got paid today, hence the good mood. (-: