Tales of Extraordinary Interest

So, in building my 4x4 I didn't include a video card upgrade. I'm usually a few generations behind with video cards because I don't need them to be ultra-new or ultra-powerful. It's amazing what even older video cards can do. With todays games, however it's not so much that my video card (6800GS) isn't "good enough" anymore, it's the fact that the newer games take advantage of features that just aren't on it. To me, it's a great card. I had a Matrox G400 for 4 years. I had a Riva TNT2 before that, and when I upgraded the Matrox G400 I went with an inexpensive (at the time) Geforce4 TI4200. I loved all these cards dearly, and I did a lot of development and programming on all of them. My 6800 has never seen any code of mine because I'm just not up to speed with all the newer technologies (namely DirectX and programming pipelines, but also all of the other options and accelerators that come on video cards now!).

It sounds like a tale from an Old Hand, and maybe I am one, but I remember doing VGA hacking in the mid-90s. It was great! I wrote my own assembler functions and built them into a DOS library. The assembler functions all took care of things like putting a single pixel on the screen or copying memory to and from the video card and the system RAM with certain boundaries. I then used C for the "complex" functions to draw lines, circles, set colors, set screen resolution and bit depth, etc. That was some of the most fun I'd ever had programming. I also got into the 3D stuff back then when it was still pretty much all software-based. When I got to doing OpenGL in college, it blew my mind. "This is amazing.", I'd say to myself. OpenGL does all of the drawing for you; you basically just tell it what to do! Anyway, I'd like to get back into graphics programming, but tweaking on someone's bloated 3D engine just doesn't seem to be my cup of tea. I'd rather implement systems that take advantage of OpenGL and the powerful graphics hardware we all have in our systems. These advantages can go a lot farther than what OSX and Vista have done on the "desktop."

Anyway, after saying all of that my primary motivation for upgrading is not that my card lacks all of the features that I would need to hack on the technology, nor does the card have any problems playing some of the older games that I enjoy. The primary motivation is current gaming

Lame, I know. But I can barely see how wonderful Supreme Commander is on my current card. And, especially when coupled with my current rig (see previous blog posts), it's kind of insulting to my other hardware

So, I was going to buy a card 1-2 generations old. Something in the NVIDIA 7x line. I looked, and those cards aren't a lot less than some of the great 8800 cards. Because they're not much cheaper, and because I could afford it, I decided to plunge and get an 8800GTS. This one, actually.
It's a Foxconn FV-N88SMCD2-ONOC GeForce 8800GTS 320MB 320-bit GDDR3 PCI Express x16. People turn their nose up at Foxconn, but they're asleep. This card is a beauty, and optimal for the price/performance range. Talk about bang for your buck! It comes clocked higher than most of the 8800GTS cards (both GPU and memory), and from what I've read it can go even higher. 575Mhz Core clock, and 1800Mhz RAM! Most of the 8800s are around 500Mhz core and 1200-1500Mhz on the RAM. I'm going to try to take it to at least 600Mhz on the core. Shouldn't be a problem at all. This card supposedly runs very quiet and cool compared to other ones as well. We'll see about that.