Re: TNT - oh, um, well, you guys really don't want to know _my_ opinion of that silly TNT-thing do you? While the market's closed? Before I've had a chance to dump my shares...
Frankly, Quake2 on the TNT looks frigging gorgeous. Screenshots really don't help you see the difference. You have to play the cards side-by-side or on the same system. There is a significant, tangible increase in the quakity of the screen display. The colors are deeper, richer, etc. and the textures appear more detailed. When I first saw it running at 1024x768, I was ready to free up a couple of slots in my system...
HOWEVER,
...after playing multiplayer with the card for a couple of hours, I now also see its limitations. Here are some observations on Quake2 play on my TNT. Keep in mind that I don't have the latest drivers and I suspect that they might fix some of the problems I encountered.
1.) Railgun trails are missing or _very_ faint. Big problem when you are getting sniped.
2.) At 1024x768, when I quickly turn my head, I will often see a horizontal line where the lower half of the frame is out of sync with the upper half (i.e., the lower half is off-set several pixels to the right or left). This is very fleeting but highly annoying.
3.) There are painful pauses whenever entering new parts of a new level. Texture loading or something dumb is happening. Bad for single-player mode because that's where you usually encounter a monster.
4.) The opening Quake2 AVI is all messed up.
5.) The default gamma setting for the card is way too dark. I'm hopeful I can fix that by tweaking the driver settings - changing the game settings is a pain.
6.) I played a multiplayer match last night half-n-half. The first half was with the TNT and I was doing poorly. The second half was with my V2 SLI setup and I did much, much better. Not sure why and it's surely not scientific, but it is the truth. More investigation is required.
Finally, I've also played Shogo, Sin, and Half-Life with both cards. Sin and Half-Life look almost identical - very little difference between the cards to my eye. Shogo, on the other hand, is dramatically better on the TNT card. No more washed out look. It's truly a better game with the new card. Unreal currently crashes immediately with the TNT, and I haven't spent much time figuring out why.
So Quake2 and Shogo show dramatic improvements in image quality but framerates are decreased noticeably. Next step is to get the latest drivers and do more testing, but that's what I've seen so far. Now let's agree never to speak of this again...
Chip "Asbestos" Anderson
209.20.237.88 |
