I waited a little while before reacting and writing, but these recent last weeks we have witnessed an interesting move in the little world of graphics cards. While ATI (now AMD) has recently been relegated to the troublingly systematic position of follower or challenger in the competition for the pockets of PC graphics cards buyers, they finally reacted through two noticeable actions:
On the one hand, in the lower-end of the range, AMD/ATI launched a new nice price solution under $100: The new HD 3400 and HD 3600 are there to grab the awards for the lowest prices and simultaneous 3D graphics (DirectX 10.1, but don’t expect them to be enough for a crusher like Crysis) and HD video capacity (1920×1080p Full-HD resolution). The HD3400-based boards could even go under $65!
On the other hand, at the star-end of the range which was recently left to nVidia, here is a solution obviously attractive even if not elegant: HD 3870 x2. When you’re short on performance, you can always double it by grouping 2 GPU on 1 card and crash prices down to kick the hell out of your competitors. It’s not 100% perfect (some games will not be optimized for two graphics cores) but this is a (realtively) easy technical solution to setup. ATI did it and robbed the limie light from nVidia (at least for now).
Ok! This is not enough to forget the raw performance of the nVidia boards. But it is interesting to see how AMD/ATI fights with all available tricks to be able to come back a little later with some still-undisclosed new graphics cards.
After S.T.A.L.K.E.R. – Shadow of Chernobyl in 2007, you will see S.T.A.L.K.E.R. – Clear sky in 2008. This new opus of the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. saga will retain the advantages of the original FPS game: Great playability, exceptional environment, free wandering in acres and acres of open terrain.
There is now a gallery of screenshots for S.T.A.L.K.E.R. – Clear sky on Voodoo Extreme.
Would you know what colour cerulean is? Or peach? Or spruce? Or watermelon? Or plum? Or rust?
The HP online color thesaurus is a great way to identify these and to get the precise formal definition of such colours. You type in a name, and it will give you the color, similar ones and anonyms.
Crysis, the First Person Shooter PC game of the year is already upon us, but the marketing frenzy is not finished and news are pouring in relation with this FPS game. Let’s have a look at what ended up on this desktop and that I’d like to share.
Crysis will be part of a trilogy. After FarCry, Crytek decided to start a three-part set of games with Crysis. This is branding at its best following in the footsteps of others like Civilization, Grand Theft Auto. This explains the sharp end of the game: It’s just the beginning.
Some problems appeared in multiplayer mode. Connecting to the game servers was abnormally difficult (not only an issue of players rushing to the latest MP game). A hot patch is expected. In the mean time, kludges are available at inCrysis fan site.
The drivers for graphics cards from AMD-ATI and nVidia are regularly updated to improve performance with the hit software. Latest as of today is a fix from AMD for the Radeon HD 2000 and 3000, but nVidia is certainly trying to get another small improvement, too.
More and more companies started bundling Crysis with their best and most recent graphics cards (sometimes adding just the CD-ROM, sometimes adding a Crysis-themed sticker to the card). Let’s just list:
GeForce 8800 from eVGA
ASUS GeForce 8800GT series
Even some mobile computers will be able to run Crysis (already a famous resource hog): The nVidia GeForce 8880M GTX mobile chipset is being readied just for that purpose. A demonstrative video comparing 8600 and 8800 graphics chipsets.
After months of expectation organised by marketing and advertisment, the FPS video game most awaited of the year, Crysis, will be available tomorrow (you can already download it on Steam and the Electronic Arts online shop/store -on-line electronic payment and validation- but not use it yet).
Graphic card providers are already dreaming of the rising sales of their top products. But they also have to prepare their software programs. For example, nVidia drivers have just been upgraded again to a last minute revision (version 169.09 beta) to correct a final bug detected in the management of some water reflections of Crysis. Furthermore, beyond those last refinements from manufacturers, Crytek polished the chrome plates and it appears that the final version of the game also got a small improvement in performance and fluidity (compared to the Crysis demo available for a few days already).
Now, the amateurs only have a short time left to prep up their PC to the arrival of Crysis. Here come the nice links to two little articles you’d like:
Crysis – Very High Settings in DX9 tells us all about how to get the “high performance” settings normally accessible only to Vista-powered machines running DirectX 10, but while only using an XP PC under DirectX 9 (you may not be welcoming the idea of buying a shiny new expensive OS to improve Crysis looks). It’s only a matter of adding a system.cfg file with the right data in the game installation directory.
Tweak Guide gives all the details about Crysis optimisation, configuration and a few tweaks.
Advice to those willing to pay Crysis online, the exchange rate does not seem very favorable to Euros. If you pay 49.95 dollars, the bank should short your account with something like 35 euros. It’s up to you to see if this exchange rate compares favorably to what EA wants to charge in Euros!
Since it appears that finding this information about the Crysis video game is a bit difficult, you can follow the link to Crysis minimum requirements here.
I had previously indicated that I successfully calmibrated a Hyundai Q17 LCD display for a better color management. Today, in order to work in the best possible conditions when handling digital photos on my main PC system using a Dell 2407WFP as my primary display and still the same Hyundai Q17 as secondary display, I did again a full color calibration of the screens under Windows XP using a Spyder Pro sensor and the Optical software from Pantone.
The result is as satisfactory as always and allows to come back to a fair color balance that is more precise than before (for the Hyundai display, since the Dell screen is so near to perfection that installing the color profile just built leads to only a really minor colorimetric change).
For those interested in the technical details, here are the characteristics I used:
Gamma 2.5 for PC (it would be 1.8 for Mac)
Brightness to 0 (LCD displays are generally much to bright for normal use – this makes them nicer on store shelves)
Contrast to 50 for the Dell 2407WFP, to 100 for the old Hyundai Q17
As plenty other people you may have already downloaded the Crysis demo because you wanted to taste the PC game of the end of the year. But some Internet web site went further and stressed the demo to the point that you can get a good feeling of what this video game will be capable of. Here is an interesting list:
What you will notice is that plenty of these web sites consider that a normal display must have 1440×900 or 1680×1050 resolution to play Crysis confortably (I did not say “to play cheaply”).
Whoever has been using DirectX software on Windows (and this means PC gamers, and only them) knows that you simultaneously need to continuously install new upgrades of the humongous software package from Microsoft in order to keep the best performance out of the PC games and the will to uninstall it or to come back to an older version of it.
Unfortunately, there are problems:
DirectX is ever bigger and needs a lot of disk space (not counting some memory too)
DirectX is virtually useless to anybody not playing games on their PC
DirectX has incompatibilities with some games or some games have incompatibilities with some versions of DirectX
So, you are constantly oscillating between the will to have the latest version and to come back to an older one. Unfortunately, this is at least difficult and even sometimes downright impossible for the normal PC user.
Here comes a nice little shareware program, DirectX Happy Uninstall. It brings the possibility to move forward and backward into the wealth of installed DirectX versions and configurations. Uninstall, re-install, that’s just $12.95.
Do you remember 2004? In this year, we saw the birth of FarCry, Half Life 2 and Doom 3, three games that really redefined PC gaming. This year, in November, we will see a blooming of new games which are set to retrace the PC gaming industy.
Expect no less than:
Hellgate: London is for multiplayer action
Gears of War brings more action on the PC
Crysis is expected to be the First Person Shooter of the year
John Woo’s Stranglehold is already on the market and looks impressive on wide screens at 1920×1200 resolutions (or more) if you have a good hardware
I can forecast that you will be buying some of these and that it will mean that you will look into multi-core CPUs, new graphics cards and possibly a new Windows Vista (for DirectX 10 compatibility).
Previous Entries
I waited a little while before reacting and writing, but these recent last weeks we have witnessed an interesting move in the little world of graphics cards. While ATI (now AMD) has recently been relegated to the troublingly systematic position of follower or challenger in the competition for the pockets of PC graphics cards buyers, they finally reacted through two noticeable actions:
Crysis, the First Person Shooter PC game of the year is already upon us, but the marketing frenzy is not finished and news are pouring in relation with this FPS game. Let’s have a look at what ended up on this desktop and that I’d like to share.
