Hm.. uninteresting!! I never signed up for this! Okay, I got a profile at Gamespot.com. Have had that since.. nearly the beginning of gamespot.com, but now some dumb rude corporation has taken over and added my brilliance to their pathetic site and it shines already (even though the WYSIWYG editor still sucks), but they obviously want more and dares to mock me for not contributing to their reviews.. 
So what is happening to the internet community when user contentand user accounts are freely distributed at the hosting company's convenience and desire without the consent of the user in question. How come MovieTome seems to think that it's okay to do that?
I'm paralyzed.
ATi-AMDhas finally made a compelling new alternative to Nvidia's Geforce 8 series of GPU's: The ATi 3800 Series DirectX 10.1 compatibles with two variants: The 3850 and the 3870. Higher number, better card. No weirdmodel numbers and prefixesto confuse the matter like the Gefore 8 Series of GT, GTS, GTX, ULTRA or ATi's own XT, PRO, GTO, XTX, SE, uh...
There are already a lot of different reviews of the cards. Generally misconstrued reviews consisting of extreme hardware setups running extreme games at extreme settings far, far, far away from me and a helluva lot of other people. I've got a 19" monitor with a max resolution of 1280x1024, and every piece of hardware in my rig has one thing in common: it was fairly cheap.
As a gamer I often see the Nvidia logo in games "Nvidia - the way it's meant to be played", but what does that mean? Does it mean that the game has been optimised for Nvidia? Does it favor Nvidia? Why should I trust a comparative result based on a game with this bias? Why should I trust a result in the first place, when it's run on the platform of a mortal enemy? Is it even reasonable to expect fair play? I don't know, but as it so happens the majority of Reviews are based upon the SAME games and synthetic benchmarks: Fear, Prey, CoD, Quake, Crysis, Call of Juarez.. and the classical 3DMark05/06.
While it's nice to see these extreme results, they mean nothing to me. I still don't know, what to expect fromthis or thatcard under normal circumstances. Furthermore, I am really unsure whether they will run at all, because all of these hardware setups include a monstrous 750W or higher PSU.
From PC-Perspective:
"The results with the HD 3870 appear to be just as impressive with an idle power usage that is nearly 50watts less than theNvidia 8800 GT system. I specify the "system" here because while the AMD cards were tested on an Intel 975X motherboard theNvidia cards were on an nForce 680i motherboard and the 680i chipset is known to use a bit more power than Intel's own."
Hm.. interesting slip up. I wonder if the HD3850 and HD3870 would perform differently if it was given the same conditions as the Nvidia brand. It happens too often that a Nvidia SLI board is used to compare ATi and Nvidia. Would the ATi cards perform positively different on an ATi-AMD system with an AMD CPU?
I'm suspicious, because my own shift from AMD64 to Intel Core 2 was only a conditional success. The Intel System doesn't outperform AMD in every way, even though the AMDwas only single core and the Intel is a dual core.
Even the old DDR memory yielded better results in SiSoft Sandra for AMD, than the supposedly faster DDR2 running at double speeds on the Intel for me.
(Sigh.. I am getting really tired of how this new gamespot editor seems to cut spaces between words.. )
If only biology class had been this much exitement...
It seems that good games are near extinction. The last two "good games" I played, Vampire TM: Bloodlines and Knights of the Old RepublicII:The Sith Lords had allkinds of bugs and incompleteness about them (which have been solved by their gaming communities in the mean time). I wonder if the production environment that attracts the creative and inspiring content and design developers repels the talented and skilled programmers as well or maybe it's just a biohazard of being a former employee of Interplay that does it, hm... nevertheless it's a really dull and bland future gaming world that unfolds itself these days. I wonder if the reason why games become dumber and dumber is because dumber and dumber kids are taking over, where 'we' left off - except I didn't leave, which I probably should have.. I see now..
Bioshock is different as well as the developer backgrounds countingSystem Shock and Deus Ex (which on the other hand seem very alike somehow). Bioshock is more balanced than any of the two games I've mentioned as the 'good games', but it seems to be a balance of only modestly talented content, design and programming talents. It's a big step down in the wrong direction, but still on the light side. Just don't dig too much and we can all live happily ever after in the belief that it was actually a very good game. Normally I would complete a game like Bioshock during a weekend or maybe in the full lenght of a saturday, but since games I find interesting seems to be gettingnear extinctionI am onlyplaying a few hours a week of Bioshock.
The one grief I have with Bioshock is the help system, which is really out of character. Instead ofmaking it a personal logbook where the main character is 'sort of' trying to explain the mechanics of the game based on facts and speculation it is insteadsimply a guide from the devs. This is ONE of those places thatreally sets'only modestly talented' in perspective. I prefer not to use it, because it reminds me that I am just playing a game - instead of being part of it.
The only other thing I am going to comment briefly on are the invisible and inaccessibleborders of the game and the clumsy movement setup. It comes as no surprise that these limitations exist considering the developer backgrounds. I remember how Deus Ex was being hailed for its open-ended design and how shallow and limited that open'ness really was. I think open-ended in that context is actually based on areal case scenariothatwent on something like "I'm a dev and it could be really fun to open a part of the game here and add a new and hiddenoptional path, heck I'm gonna do it... a few hours laters the project-leader notice the change before it's finished and end's it, before it's completesaying:was-open-but-now-it's-ended and then pausing like 'Hm interesting concept let's see what the PR duds can make of that' and a few hours later they come up with'open-ended'". Maybe not that scenario, but that's whatthey meant. A revolting thought. Ugh, that thought made me sick. BRRRRRRR.
