FA+
Shop
Monday Blues #2: PC Hardware Blues
13 years ago
General
Back from my vacation! Started out a little mucky (migraine and nausea again) but ended on a high with much joy and laughter.
Pondering whether installing my ATI Radeon HD 4670 in my old Intel Pentium D 830 would be worth the trouble, I took the venture and much happiness resulted. Finally, playable frame rates in many a DirectX 9.0c game, including Call of Duty 2 and Half-Life 2 (which tacked-on patches I detest).
Then the horror. The performance of the many modern mods of Half-Life 1 like Sven Co-op and Cry of Fear took a nose dive, both with OpenGL and Direct3D.
After much research, for some reason, HL1, its expansion packs, Team Fortress Classic 1.6 and Counter-Strike 1.6 get away from hurtful performance on AMD/ATI graphics cards and Catalyst drivers for the most part. The poor performance is due to the GoldSrc engine not being allocated faster GPU frame buffer RAM, thus having to resort to slower system RAM.
Still on the topic of PC hardware, I decided to put many of my hard-earned stuff on sale, including the HD 4670, because I am running out of savings due to being unemployed. Alas, no one has been buying any of my stuff.
Still hoping...
Pondering whether installing my ATI Radeon HD 4670 in my old Intel Pentium D 830 would be worth the trouble, I took the venture and much happiness resulted. Finally, playable frame rates in many a DirectX 9.0c game, including Call of Duty 2 and Half-Life 2 (which tacked-on patches I detest).
Then the horror. The performance of the many modern mods of Half-Life 1 like Sven Co-op and Cry of Fear took a nose dive, both with OpenGL and Direct3D.
After much research, for some reason, HL1, its expansion packs, Team Fortress Classic 1.6 and Counter-Strike 1.6 get away from hurtful performance on AMD/ATI graphics cards and Catalyst drivers for the most part. The poor performance is due to the GoldSrc engine not being allocated faster GPU frame buffer RAM, thus having to resort to slower system RAM.
Still on the topic of PC hardware, I decided to put many of my hard-earned stuff on sale, including the HD 4670, because I am running out of savings due to being unemployed. Alas, no one has been buying any of my stuff.
Still hoping...
