Note: As with the last entry, this is not about programming, so skip if you came for programming information.
So as told in my last post I got that new shiny GeForce 6800 and I decided to play some newer games and replay some of the recent ones with the higher details I can now set. Sad thing is that I have almost no free time due to personal reasons, so it’s about 1 or 2 hours of spare time a day in the end. And so I don’t think that I’ll do programming within the next few days (which also may affect posting frequency on this blog).
As far as the games go, I tried Doom3 (and it’s expansion) and it now runs smooth at 1280x1024 with 4xAA/8xAF and just looks gorgeous on my 22" monitor. In D3D the performance difference is big, but in OpenGL it’s huge, as NVidia is more comitted to OpenGL than ATI. I’m really impressed and I didn’t think that the difference would be so big.
And one thing I also do whenever I get a new graphics card is to test out my recent programmed stuff. And well, there was only one older application (which used glSlang, shadow volumes and occlusion queries) that didn’t work as expected (shadows were not visible), but all my other stuff is working like it should. So no bug-hunting in my rendering code for my newer stuff like the NewtonPlayGround, and I’m rather glad about that.
Last but not least I’m also kind of happy to be back at NVidia’s drivers. Though ATI has improved on that field since I initially bought my Radeon 9700, I never was really happy about the Catalyst Drivers. Just recently I was rather upset that I had to use go back three driver releases in order to play the Dawn of War - Addon without heavy stuttering, but those drivers had problems with F.E.A.R. And the current NVidia driver (which may also have problems, but I didn’t came across any) plays all my current games and applications without any hassles.