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Last week I bought a Gigabyte GV-N62128DE, the Nvidia Geforce 6200 video card, with 128MB of RAM. Even though I know better, usually, to avoid buying a card with 64bit memory, and would have ordinarily bought the one with 128bit memory, this time it was a matter of power consumption.

All of the Geforce 6200 cards that I could find that used 128bit memory required a power supply connector. While that in itself isn’t a big deal, the fact that my HP 873n has a mere 200 Watt power supply gave me great concern. Most cards also indicate a minimum PSU rating… all above the 200 watts mine can provide.

Then there’s also the whole overkill aspect. I’m not a gamer, in the same way that I’m not an audiophile, or videophile. I don’t see the point in spending excessive amounts of money in order to eek out just a tiny bit more performance. There is a certain factor with “good enough” that works for me.

I paid roughly $60 for this card, the 128bit memory versions cost twice that. I’d also feel compelled to upgrade the PSU… making the upgrade cost considerably more at roughly $160. I figured that if this card did not perform to my expectations/requirements I’d return it and then get something with more oomph.

Keep in mind, of course, that I was previously running a Geforce 4 MX-420, one of the biggest hunks of graphics shit Nvidia ever produced. Playing Doom3, even on the lowest settings, was a slideshow.

While not a benchmark, my glxgears frames per second doubled with the swap in of this new video card. I loaded up URU: Ages Beyond Myst and WOW, I was able to play at full native resolution (1280×1024) and have the graphics at their highest settings… while I don’t know what the FPS actually was, I know that the game experience was definitely more than just playable.

I then downloaded the demo of Half Life 2, the game automatically set the graphics to ‘High’ and I loaded it up. Full native resolution, again, highest settings, and the game was perfectly playable and my goodness, the first time I could actually use the phrase “life-like” when it comes to any game.

I decided, based on the demo, to go ahead and spend the $30 to buy the game… and consequently spent most of yesterday playing it. If I turn on anti-aliasing on the card I get a slideshow, but otherwise it’s perfect. I have trilinear filtering turned on, the default based on graphics performance as detected by the game, though I have to admit I don’t know really what that does.

I don’t mind the lack of anti-aliasing, as I’ve never been able to use it anyway… for the first time though, I can almost see why so-called gamers have the zeal they do for getting the latest and greatest hardware. If I was so impressed with HL2 using this ‘crippled’ Geforce 6200, if I had enough oomph on my graphics card to do the anti-aliasing, it’d be considerably more of a wow factor.

Now that I’ve taken a little moment to actually look up what anisotropic filtering is, I can see the benefit again of having more oomph; but, again one gets to the point of… good enough for $$ or extra good for $$$ or $$$$. I could never imagine spending the kind of money that some do, but then, I suppose that’s because I have so many interests, with playing the occasional computer game a pretty low priority compared to so many other things.

All in all, I think I made a great choice with this particular card… it fits my needs. I can play the games I want to play in full native resolution and at their highest quality settings. I’m not going into overkill, thus now ‘wasting’ money for something that doesn’t really get used much. The 2D aspect of video cards is pretty much a standstill of technology, you’re paying for the 3D rendering. Linux and Windows (With possible exception of Windows Vista, still in development, but the jury is still out on if that is ‘fake’ or real) do not use 3D rendering for anything on the desktop. The xcompmgr app I was playing with the other day enables the use of the 3D hardware to draw the desktop, which also allows for all sorts of cool transparency and shadowing, but it’s horribly buggy. Mac OSX, on the other hand does use 3D rendering to create all the eyecandy, which is why those of us, such as me with my pre-G4 iBook, get a bit screwed in the eyecandy area.. our onboard graphics cards were not included in the list of cards, thus doesn’t support the hardware rendering.

With all that said, I still find myself wanting a dual core 64bit AMD CPU, my P4 is still fast, but… it’s now at the lower end of fast, and while Windows apps don’t really yet take advantage of all that extra processing oomph thanks to the 64bit processing or dual cores, at least with Linux I can recompile the apps myself. Sadly, I’d probably find myself actually shelling out for a license of the 64bit Windows XP… it’s kind of sickening to even consider such a thing. I’m going to put all of that onto my ‘maybe late next year’ list… a new iBook, or Powerbook has to come first, it’s really starting to drag at a measly 600Ghz, G3 at that. Historically I’ve taken to only buying a new CPU when I could double the processing speed. I started out with a 200Mhz Pentium, then moved to a 400Mhz Pentium II. I then bought an 800Mhz AMD Duron, but when that motherboard failed prompting a new computer immediately (I later bought a new board and reused the CPU) I skipped over that doubling of speed philosophy by getting a P4 2.53Ghz. Honestly, it really wasn’t that specatular of a difference for everyday computer usage, going from .8Ghz to 2.53Ghz. This time around, I’d probably have to go for slightly less than double, to avoid spending mega-bucks. That’s assuming AMD has 5000+ processors at the time of upgrade, of course. They do have a 4800+ 64 X2 right now, so it’s a safe assumption… I guess it isn’t bad if you’re willing to pay $900 for just the CPU, heh… I’m not.

Oh, and it sort of bugged me at first that I ‘had’ to buy HL2. Now, this isn’t one of those pro-piracy rants or anything like. I simply believe in household sharing when it comes to media. Would you buy a DVD that you could only play on a single TV? That once you’ve played it, you’ve locked it in, and you couldn’t then take it to another room and watch it? That’s basically what Valve and their Steam engine does. You’re not so much purchasing the game, but licensing it for use by one person. When you install the game, you need to register with Steam, your CD key then decrypts the game after their server has authenticated your key. I suppose that you could play the game anywhere that has a legal/valid install, simply by using your own Steam login that has a legal/valid key associated with it. I just don’t know, because I have no reason or way to try.

You see, my brother David had bought HL2 last year when it first came out. I wanted to play it, only to discover that I couldn’t install it on my computer because he’d installed it already. I’d need another CD key, for use with my own account. This may not be entirely accurate as to how the system works, but regardless, I’d basically need to login as him if it’d even let me use it.

While I may be pretty open about downloading music, I actually tend toward legal use of my OS and Games. The games thing is questionable I guess, because I see absolutely nothing wrong with you or your brother buying it, and then both of you being able to play it on separate computers. That’s just like the little DVD metaphor, or like a CD… we’d not tolerate a music CD being locked to play on only one device and not being able to take it with us or loan it to a friend.

I bought the Sims, shared it with my brother, we both bought expansion packs and shared them between us, then when Sims2 came out, he bought that and shared it with me. With HL2 this intra-family sharing was impossible. One might argue that this is a totally different thing, but to me it isn’t. There is a legal copy of the software, we ought to be able to share it between us. Just like, again, why would a family purchase 2 copies of the same audio CD? They could just share it, right?

Perhaps they need to setup something like Apple does, with having a ‘family license’ for the OS. Of course, since the OS runs only on Apple hardware (not counting the latest Intel builds that people are pirating), and Apple is a hardware company, the OS isn’t as important as a revenue stream.

These annoyances are just what we have to live with, so that companies can continue to create new software, I can live with it, I just don’t have to like it. The same thing that is stopping me from borrowing HL2 from my brother is the same thing that stops thousands of unlicensed copies from being played out there too.

The thing though, that I actually have come to like about the whole Valve/Steam HL2 insanity, is that one is no longer required to have the CD or DVD in the drive. One can safely put away their CDs and not have to worry about them becoming scratched or otherwise damaged. I know when I buy an audio CD (and, I actually do, from time to time) the first step is to rip to MP3, I never touch the CD from then on out. Previously to play a game without the CD there’d have to be a no-cd crack and you’d need to keep the disc image on your hard drive all the time… which is exactly the same thing you have to do when you’re pirating the game, ironically.

There’s also this little thing about pricing. It’s amazing what chopping $20 off a software title will do. The price of HL2 was originally $50. I just couldn’t justify spending that much for a game. Yesterday when I went to buy it, or at least to look and think about buying it, I was pleasantly surprised to see it now cost $30 (at Walmart anyway). I have no problems at all buying a game for $30. So, this is a little note to game software publishing companies… cut the price, you’ll make it up in volume. You’ll have fewer people pirating the software because it’s easier to just drop the $30 and get it all legal and nice, everyone benefits. As it stands, I’ll just wait until the game is ‘old’ and thus no longer demands that price premium. Doom3 is going for a mere $20 at Walmart now, I almost picked that up too; even though I’d played it already.