Recently my graphics card, an Asus 4850 512MB, went up in smoke. Ok, not literally, it just suddenly developed a fever or something. My desktop has lots of little boxes that mess up the screen in lateral zones. The screen equator will be fine, but the Tropic Of Capricorn and Cancer is populated by random tiny boxes of pixel dust. It’s kinda hard to describe, but that’s the best I can do. The POST message is garbled as well, so I kinda figured it’s not a software issue.
I did the next best thing I can do: I begged my wife to buy me a spanking new card.
So on the 27th of July, I dragged my wife to Sim Lim Square where I conned her into buying she gracefully bought me a shiny new Asus 4890 1GB to play with!
Of course, once that card got into my system, I just had to try something out. My brother pestered me to join him in Age Of Conan, which I am currently playing on and off. Definitely not worth my US$15 a month, but hey, no price is too large to have bonding sessions with my brother. MMO’s are a bit boring and a bit reliant on the servers for smooth gameplay as well. So the next most graphically taxing game would be Grand Theft Auto 4.
I did a two-part review for it some time back. It’s a nice game with a nice story (and lots of WTF moments!) but plagued with performance issues on my 4850. So why not revisit it with a much more powerful card?
First thing I noticed: where’s my damn savegames!?!? Apparently, savegames are stored in %APPDATA%, and when I reinstalled Windows after my harddisk died on me, it went to the dodo as well. Sigh.
Oh well, back to square one I guess. This time, I’ll remember to back up my savegames!
Since I’ve starting a new game, my interest in Fallout 2 is waning. Maybe I should chronicle this instead. Hmm… Maybe I will…
Anyway, GTA 4 is running quite smoothly when I told it to auto-detect appropriate settings. Most settings are on High though, not Very High. I want to experiment with different settings, but meh, this seems good enough for me.
Liberty City part deux. This should be interesting.
