Not Again…

Back in March, I had built a $1800 beast of a computer. At that time, I had the best rig of anybody that I knew – Core 2 Duo chugging along at 3.0 GHz, an nVidia GeForce 8800 GTS driving a 22″ widescreen LCD, all plugged into an nForce 680i SLI motherboard. Essentially, everything was bleeding edge, save for the fact it didn’t have DX10 and Vista yet. Every game that was out at the time ran with maxed out settings – but now, over half a year later, I have finally gotten Vista, and the system is brought to a screeching halt by something called Crysis. Well. Not completely.

The 320MB 8800GTS is not enough anymore. I have to back off on the AA and anisotropic filtering settings, as well as tune down the resolution for certain games. The biggest offender is the aforementioned Crysis SP demo. And it’s just a demo for hell’s sake – I have to set the resolution at 960 x 600, turn off AA completely, shadows on medium, volumetric effects on medium and everything else on high. The maxed out settings means everything is at “very high,” not just “high.” The game still looks better than every other game I own running on maxed out settings, but that untapped potential disturbs me. Looking on the bright side, people who own 8800 GTX’es still can’t get the game to run completely maxed out. In fact, nothing of this graphics generation can even handle the game in all its glory, at least not hardware people can buy.

So it’s back to those damn Excel spreadsheets that I used to build the first one. Upgrading is gonna be a bitch, and the old parts are all gonna go to random people I know. In the end, people like me are just chasing waterfalls. But someone’s gotta do it. Anyone wanna buy me a G92 based graphics card for Christmas?