Adventures in Video Cards (and Minecraft!)

Jan 15, 2012 00:17

Finally bought a new video card. (The old one may have been pretty decent when it was new, but now... yeah. Not so great ( Read more... )

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discopanda January 15 2012, 18:18:04 UTC
Where does it say it's a PCI-e? I see no such claim. Take a closer look. :-)

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discopanda January 16 2012, 04:02:45 UTC
Actually, I only have 2GB (2x1GB) at the moment. The board will take up to 3GB (3x1GB) though.

And yeah, eventually I plan to build a newer computer, but until then I'd like this one to not completely suck.

(Yes, I used "not completely suck" in conjunction with an Athlon XP 3200+ CPU, an Antec SL350 PSU, and 2GB of a max 3GB RAM... But the new video card really does seem to be an improvement. If nothing else, the weird glitchy colored stripes that came up sometimes ever since we upgraded to a widescreen LCD are gone now. Who'd think that going from 1024x768 to 1280x768 would do that to the old card??)

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porsupah January 16 2012, 00:20:53 UTC
Fancy a real stress test? See what it makes of Second Life. ^_^ (Which is an odd combination of resource requirements - it's not strictly CPU- or GPU-bound. Also awkward to benchmark, unfortunately, as there's no stock "perform this test" button that can run through a scripted path on a local sim)

I remember going from Hyzenthlay to Dandelion, and being just bowled over by what a huge difference the newer GPU made - where a single 720p would be pushing things, depending a lot on the encoding, then I was able to play five 1080p trailers simultaneously, with nothing skipping a beat. Crazy, when you consider the degree of computation going on, to make fluid, HD playback possible with a codec as intricate as H.264. I love the progress of technology. ^_^

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discopanda January 16 2012, 04:19:22 UTC
Hmm, interesting idea... Maybe I'll download the last pre-mesh version of Cool VL Viewer and install it. (It says the mesh versions won't work on an Athlon XP processor, something about needing SSE2? I wonder if there's any kind of SSE2 to SSE translator, like FX!32 did from x86 code to Alpha code?)

Either way, before I do anything intensive like SL or GPU mining or whatever, perhaps I should attach a fan of some sort to the videocard heatsink...?

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