Pushing Pixels

A co-worker's husband loaned me his eVGA GeForce 8800 GTS yesterday. He bought it from a friend a few months back but lacks a PCIe motherboard, so it's been sitting around his house collecting dust. So naturally I installed it last night while gulping down my dinner and fired up LOTRO while Melissa took Megan to her weekly gymnastics class (my excuse for staying home was that I needed to cut the front yard). I haven't used an NVIDIA-based graphics board since I reviewed the 6800 I was sent back in 2004, so I was pleasantly surprised at the control panel's load times and intuitive interface. This is definitely an improvement over ATI's CCC, which tends to be rather slow and cumbersome in comnparison. The Radeon 1950 XTX I've been using in my gaming rig has been holding up with newer titles fairly well, yet LOTRO's frame rate could at times be a bit too spluttery for my tastes; not to mention the fact that the stock cooler on the board would constantly spin up and down trying to cool the graphics chip.

So I set the driver options to high quality and fired up LOTRO. Initial impressions after a few minutes of time spent moving about the Trollshaws was that the 8800's improved filtering was definitely handling the terrain's many off-angle surfaces better, particularly in the area of texture aliasing. In addition, the CSAA mode I'd forced in the driver control panel resulted in extremely clean geometry edges; I specifically kept angling my view up to a very light-blue sky with buildings and various other in-game objects in the foreground to create a strong color contrast along polygon edges to better analyze the anti-aliasing quality. I've been a huge, huge fan of good anti-aliasing since the release of 3dfx's Voodoo 5 almost seven years ago and I believe the 8800 GTS was offering the best I've yet seen. The overall image quality produced by this card was simply excellent, at least in my limited LOTRO 'testing'. And that choppy frame rate I'd mentioned earlier? Gone.

Better yet, I found myself wondering why the game's music seemed so loud to my ears, almost intrusive compared to the other game sounds. I knew I hadn't changed that setting and twice adjusted the volume level on my Klipsch speakers. After more time spent playing I suddenly realized that it was unusually quiet in my study, and that the reason for this difference was the lack of noise coming from my computer. The eVGA board, which I believe is using the reference cooler, was whisper quiet throughout my entire LOTRO session. If the contrast between the rendered output of the 1950 and this 8800 was small, though noticeable, the difference in physical characteristics is huge. I'm willing to tolerate a gap in physical characteristics if one part offers overall higher performance or superior output, yet in this case the 8800 was a clean sweap. I'm going to be very, very reluctant to give this loaner board back to its rightful owner.

Gaming aside, my mom's birthday party went over fairly well after all the previous drama. My brother made it up safely and spent Saturday at our house, though we all met at mom's home for her classic chicken & broccoli caserole dinner. I'm also proud to write that of all the children at the party Megan was by far the worst behaved, showing her inherited temper when a boy took a soccer ball she'd been playing with earlier. Her screams of outrage and indignation were probably heard a good 100 yards away. The joys of parenting. Three weeks from today for the scheduled C-section too for Ian's birth. No finalized middle name yet, though I think we've unofficially settled on Andrew due to phonetics.