Having for many years suffered under the nominal speed of my NVIDIA Geforce 5900XT graphics card, Windows Vista persuaded me through the use of its Aero interface to upgrade. The thought and indeed desire of having something faster for my new flashy desktop inspired me to ask around on my personal discussion forum for some advice and thanks to one of the members, I have now invested in a new swanky ATI card.
I have always purchased 3DFX (of course they don’t exist anymore!), then NVIDIA (their support for Vista wasn’t brilliant though and AGP forgotten) and now my first ATi card. Having only an AGP slot, I was not going to replace my motherboard and other components just for a faster PCI Express graphics card, so with this limitation and a budget to follow I opted for the ATI Sapphire X1950Pro 512MB DDR3 Dual DVI VIVO AGP.
The graphics are stunning and this has certainly had a surprising reaction for me. I used to be a very active PC gamer, but I was so fed up of drivers, incompatibilities and system crashes, I turned to console gaming in the shape of the Microsoft Xbox and now the Xbox 360. Now though I am having (at least a brief) return to PC gaming and will be meeting up with some old clan friends in the next few days who I haven’t spoken to in years!
Lately I have been enjoying Unreal Tournament 2004, Half Life 2, Call of Duty 2 and quite a few more. It is so nice to crank up the levels to maximum and have the ability to use full scene anti-aliasing (to get rid of those jaggies), with extremely good frame rates.
I will always be an avid supporter of the Xbox 360 platform, but it is nice to venture back into the PC realm once more and enjoy online multiplayer with a keyboard and mouse. I certainly miss Xbox Live though, it has to be said!
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New hardware does that :) I also got tired of PC gaming’s requirements for upkeep and moved entirely to consoles for a good few years. Now I’m sort of back – I don’t at the moment play much on the PC, but it’s interesting me again. Currently I’m going through stuff I missed when I was without a gaming PC – Vampire: Bloodlines, Rome: Total War, Company Of Heroes, FEAR and Far Cry. Oh, and Trackmania.
I was buying a new PC anyway for everyday use and it didn’t seem like much of a stretch to go ahead and buy enough hardware to at least make PC gaming a possibility. Of course now I’m lamenting a bit that DX10 is out of my reach, but isn’t it always like this? At least much of the interesting DX10 stuff is going to be on the Xbox 360, too.
Thanks for your comment Joonas :)
Yeah Direct X10 **gulp** There are some very impressive looking games coming out on Windows Vista, however for anything like that I will be looking towards my Xbox 360 as you are. There is no way I am spending upwards of £750 to prepare my PC for this new era.
well i’ll be, now i’m going ot have to get the new ATI card when it comes out. I didn’t want to but we can’t be having this. you havent had a better pc card than me for 6 years!! i’m glad you are finding your lost love and it’s treating you well my friend.