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Old 05-10-2007, 08:13 AM   #581
Tiny Turtle
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Kinda interesting comment from the girl who refuses to post any pictures of herself here...
Thanks to Morgan, Tiny Snapshots is up and running again with "Tiny Järvafält" as the latest addition – Go have a look and tell me what you think.

"We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried, most people were silent.
I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita. Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty and to impress him takes on his multi-armed form and says,
'Now, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.'
I suppose we all thought that, one way or another.
" /Robert Oppenheimer on witnessing the first thermonuclear detonation in history.
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Old 05-10-2007, 09:33 AM   #582
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It wasn't meant as an insult, just something about him reminded me of that guy.

Life isn't about waiting for the storm to pass....It's learning to Dance in the Rain.
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Old 05-10-2007, 10:11 AM   #583
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Ha, ha - When I was young people told me I looked like James Garner, then in later years Regis Philbin, then Johnny Carson. Now I've evolved into Jack Albertson.
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Old 05-10-2007, 10:42 AM   #584
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Embarassed

well this is my face i look different every few seconds... check my avatar

now its your turn grape_jellyfish (sandy)
Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups !
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Old 05-10-2007, 03:34 PM   #585
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OK, I fugured out the problem with the nVidia card, and have the MA3 Beta working properly on it now. The issue was so technical that it wouldn't make any sense to anyone here, so I won't go into it.

Regarding the nVidia 5200 card: except for the Pixel Shader capability, the card is actually a step DOWN from the on-board Intel graphics chip in this HP machine. Everying runs a little slower in every mode - about 10% fewer frames-per-second. First I tried it with the default Microsoft XP drivers, then I loaded in the nVidia drivers that came with the card. I haven't tried downloading any drivers yet.

(And yes, I did remember to disable the on-board card. The nVidia card is the only device being seen by the program.)
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Old 05-10-2007, 03:44 PM   #586
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Jim,

Make sure that if you go to nvidia for drivers that you look in the "Products Supported" section on the drivers page before you install anything. Some of the later driver will not work well with older cards.
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Old 05-10-2007, 07:02 PM   #587
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nVidia Drivers from Microsoft = bad
nVidia Drivers from the CD = bad
nVidia Drivers from the website = good
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Old 05-10-2007, 09:34 PM   #588
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All three had identical performance in this case.
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Old 05-11-2007, 08:48 AM   #589
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That's really crappy results Jim (nVidias - not yours). I looked around a bit and found a Video Card Performance Chart on Tom's Hardware. They rank the 5200 somewhere in between a fast GeForce 2 and a slow GeForce 3. The 6200 ranks about the same as the performance models of the GeForce 4 series.
Thanks to Morgan, Tiny Snapshots is up and running again with "Tiny Järvafält" as the latest addition – Go have a look and tell me what you think.

"We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried, most people were silent.
I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita. Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty and to impress him takes on his multi-armed form and says,
'Now, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.'
I suppose we all thought that, one way or another.
" /Robert Oppenheimer on witnessing the first thermonuclear detonation in history.
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Old 05-11-2007, 09:19 AM   #590
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Though the card itself is disappointing, I'm REALLY glad I got it. It might have been a long time before I caught that bug otherwise. Now I have two platforms in one machine, and can easily switch between them. We're heading back up to Oregon on Monday, and my machine there has a different Intel chip, and a weak ATI card. That pretty much covers the three major manufacturers, now I just need something with more power. I guess I'll have to break down and buy a bare-bones computer with a PCI-E slot.
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Old 05-11-2007, 10:05 AM   #591
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Building a new rig?
"Paging doctor Fish. Paging doctor Fish!"
Thanks to Morgan, Tiny Snapshots is up and running again with "Tiny Järvafält" as the latest addition – Go have a look and tell me what you think.

"We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried, most people were silent.
I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita. Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty and to impress him takes on his multi-armed form and says,
'Now, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.'
I suppose we all thought that, one way or another.
" /Robert Oppenheimer on witnessing the first thermonuclear detonation in history.
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Old 05-11-2007, 10:11 AM   #592
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Even the briefest of web searches will reveal massive criticism of the 5xxx series of nVidia cards. They really fell on their face with that series and ATI took full advantage of their weakness. Of course nVidia got their stuff together and came out with the serious 6xxx series. I have a 6800 XT 512MB and love it.

One thing to watch for though is value priced 6xxx series cards. It is almost impossible to tell looking at the box whether you are holding a card that is severely crippled either in memory (some have 64MB on board and use 256MB of your RAM, also some use cheaper RAM like the 6100's and some 6300's which use DDR1 instead of DDR2 or DDR3), GPU (some have memory pipelines intentionally turned off), or bus speed (some are really hobbled).

Unless you can heavily research what you are buying, I wouldn't get any number under 6400. And I realize you are in a strange situation where your motherboard has neither AGP nor PCI Express.
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Old 05-11-2007, 11:00 AM   #593
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Originally posted by Tiny Turtle:
Building a new rig?
"Paging doctor Fish. Paging doctor Fish!"  
I was going to resist but I'll bite...

Jim, bare-bones? Come on, us über-users are craving something that will bring our mega-rigs to their knees... Scalability; build it so the masses can run it and the power users can sell it. If your system can render 1,000 bubbles mine can render 50,000, or using a different technique it could probably be made to look like it's rendering countless hundreds of thousands... ...I know that imperfections look worse the more realistically things are rendered but that's where the artist part of the job comes in... Anyway, I'm already rambling... *smack*

My suggestion, get a 8600 based card and a Core2Duo based computer, that way you could always retire it from development in favor of a life as a HTPC...

I'll build it, stress test it, and ship it to you at cost.
I don't watch commercials.
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Old 05-11-2007, 09:20 PM   #594
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Originally posted by Jim Sachs:
All three had identical performance in this case.  
Back in the day, the MS nVidia drivers did not have OpenGL support. Now, they pretty much jsut release manufacturer drivers. Although I 'm guessing they are WHQL drivers.

Originally posted by drfish:
If your system can render 1,000 bubbles mine can render 50,000, or using a different technique it could probably be made to look like it's rendering countless hundreds of thousands...  
Jim has a bubble that looks like a ball of mercury that a Banshee can render.

I hope Jim wants PCIe for R&D and not as a requirement for running 3.0.
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Old 05-11-2007, 11:04 PM   #595
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Doc - by "bare-bones", I meant just a fast video card and CPU. No giant hard drive, card readers, DVD-writers, surround sound, fancy case and such. I won't be building one, I have much better luck buying off-the-shelf units. I'll probably get something with Vista on it next week in Oregon.
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Old 05-12-2007, 05:03 PM   #596
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Please go to a small computer store instead of a mega big box store like Best Buy, Circuit City, etc.
"Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed. Everything else is public relations." - George Orwell
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Old 05-12-2007, 05:28 PM   #597
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They are all gone. Of the 50-or-so computer stores I used to visit when selling Saucer Attack, only one remains - and they just do repairs.
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Old 05-12-2007, 06:54 PM   #598
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Yep, they are all dropping like flies. It's too hard for the little guy to compete with the big chains. In the lates 90's, it was obvious that the mega corporatiosn were trying to increase the cost of upgrading. The little people had to start buy no-name brand junk to survive. Usually those parts are not good. At the same time, the big corporations started discounting whole systems. That leads us to today. It's really sad.

We'll all be happy when 3.0 launches.
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Old 05-12-2007, 10:33 PM   #599
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There are about a dozen places in Houston. Go figure.
"Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed. Everything else is public relations." - George Orwell
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Old 05-13-2007, 07:55 AM   #600
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Originally posted by Jim Sachs:
Doc - by "bare-bones", I meant just a fast video card and CPU.  
Sorry Jim, I should have known you'd use the right term... It's just that so many people I deal with day to day use "bare-bone" to describe a low end system...

In that case get an 8800 something (the system should least support DX10 even if the aquarium won't) and maybe even a quad core CPU like Jav and I have.
I don't watch commercials.
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