I’m really happy at the moment! On Monday, Dad went and picked up a GeForce 6200 for my computer.
First of all, it runs Quake 4 extremely smoothly. For “professional” gamers, it might not be their opinion of smoothness, but for me, it’s smooth. I did a quick multiplayer game on an internet server and this time I could actually aim at my opponents, as opposed to trying it on my GeForce 4, where you had to be aiming at a wall at point blank range to get any decent framerate for mouse movement.
Next comes Aero Glass. I tried installing the nVidia Vista drivers on the Vista build 5231 installation I got from Dad’s TechNet discs. I had trouble at first because the drivers from nVidia’s website didn’t actually support my card. However, I noticed that the website said that nVidia’s drivers were unsupported on build 5270 — instead, you should use the drivers that are shipped with the OS. Well, I’ve been playing with it for the last few days — it’s actually very fun, especially when I put in the AnimationsShiftKey registry value and hold shift while watching the animations. I could play with just the new eye candy in Vista for hours. (Which is what I have been doing actually, but anyway…)
There’s not that much improvement in Freelancer, but I now run the game at 1280×960 and get a decent framerate. With the GeForce 4, I was running it at 800×600 and as a lot of people could guess: it doesn’t look all that great on a 1280×1024 LCD monitor.
The card is a huge improvement on my present position against gamers around the world and I am sure it will last quite nicely for the next few years.
Oh yeah, one more thing. I’ve been able to upgrade all our computers by getting this card as the old one from my computer has now gone to the next PC, which had a GeForce 2 and is getting a GeForce 4. The next PC in line is Miraz, which has a 4x AGP slot in the motherboard and had an ATi Rage Pro 128. I wanted to put the GeForce 2 in it, but it was an 8x AGP card. Well a few weeks ago Dad found out on the internet that an 8x card shouldn’t work in a 4x slot but I thought I’d try it anyway. It worked and is stable so far, so that’s good I guess.
Update: Getting the new card didn’t fix my Linux instability problems, so I guess the problem lies elsewhere. However, getting the very latest drivers from nVidia (as opposed to the Ubuntu supplied ones) and compiling my own kernel interface has helped with the stability a bit.
