Graphics Follow-Up

So after being a tad disappointed with the super-duper high-end Nvidia card I'm trying out, I spoke with some from Nvidia who told me to go ahead and crank all the settings in my games up to their highest levels. That means highest resolution, highest quality shadows, lighting, particle effects, anti-aliasing, etc.

This is basically because these chips are now so goddamned powerful that they take almost all the processing load off the CPU. The CPU is now mainly relegated to crunching triangles and physics, and even those will probably get moved over to the GPU in the next few years.

This graphics chip probably has triple the number of transistors on my main processor. It basically consists of 128 "streaming processors" that act in parallel and each of which can dynamically take up whatever task is being demanded of it at the moment.

Previous GPU designs have basically had pipelines dedicated to certain tasks, and so if you were cruising along in a game and something happened, like a massive explosion that threw up all kinds of particles and debris and shadows and shit, the game might bog down because the part of chip dedicated to those effects would be totally used up and unable to offload anywhere else, even if other parts of the chip were lying idle. But the 8800's "unified architecture" means any part of the chip can handle any processing task that comes its way. Idle transistors are dynamically allocated to pick up the slack.

That's just a geeked out way of saying that it doesn't matter what you throw at this fucker -- it's going to chew through it like a hot-buttered scone and pump out a clean, smooth image.

I fired up "Far Cry" (the spiritual predecessor to "Crysis" mentioned in a previous post) and cranked everything as high as it would go. It ran beautifully. (Note: that picture is not a screenshot taken from my machine. I just pulled it off Gamespot).