9 October 2007, 6:48 pm
I recently accquired the XFX 8800 GTX.The first thing you notice about the card is that it’s friggin’ huge! It’s 10.5 inches long, and takes up two slots worth of space on your motherboard. The design is very sturdy with a solid heatsync and slot fan. Most graphics cards I have seen have put very little emphasis on the stock heat sync and fan, which doesn’t make much sense when you consider how hot a kickin’ GPU can get.
What the card is capable of:
I can basically run Enemy Territory: Quake Wars on set to Maximum. All graphical settings are on their highest (high/ultra) set at 1600×1200 with Antisotropic Filtering set to 16x and Anti-Aliasing set to 8x. Even at this extremely high setting, the game can still hold a steady 60 FPS.
I have yet to try any other games, but I have a feeling that I will be able to run any prior released games at their highest setting. Quake Wars was released October 2nd so it is a very new game that uses some pretty advanced graphics, shadowing, weapons effects, and textures. It is also the only game using megatexture technology, which might actually make it run better than games that use individual textures to cover a complete map.
My experience using this card within Vista has been mediokre. I currently use XP through dualboot for gaming because Vista has a ways to come to be able to run games as fast as Windows XP. Hopefully SP1 for Vista will improve performance enough so that this isn’t an issue.
6 October 2007, 9:43 pm
This is an In-Depth on whats to come in the Windows Vista SP1 release. Anyone who has been running Vista has known that the performance is very lacking, including myself. Compared to XP, Vista is much more of a resource hog which has an adverse effect on application speed. While all Windows upgrades have always added more features and services, resulting in a toll in application performance; Vista’s release didn’t seem quite ready, as it had very high resource needs.
SP1 is supposed to increase Vista’s performance dramatically which will be quite releaving for many users, especially Gamers who have been having many issues with their gaming running slower than what they would normally get in XP. This includes myself, I tend to run games in XP via dual boot; because Vista doesn’t seem to handle games nearly as well. I’m not sure if it is a Vista related issue or an Nvidia Driver issue.
All in all, SP1 can’t be anything but an improvement on Vista’s current state.
A pre-break down on the SP1 features located here.
1 October 2007, 10:40 pm
Quake Wars is soon to be out in the United States!
The game was released on the 28th of September to Europe and Austraila and will be available in the US tommorow!
Enemy Territory: Quake Wars is ID Software & Splash Damage’s latest FPS based off of the award winning “Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory”.
More information about ET:QW can be found here.
24 September 2007, 2:31 pm
I am very pleased with the detail of these figurines. Each stands about 2 1/2 inches high, and 1/2″ – 1″ thick. Here are some detailed photographs of them proudly displayed ontop of my monitors.
