Confirmed on dual 4870X2s with full screen mode on and Catalyst AI turned to standard to enable Crossfire. Before WoW’s full shadow quality caused blinking shadows when using Crossfire modes (windowed mode forced single GPU mode).

I also saw the flickering shadows in L4D which is what I assume what the 8.12 drivers were released for.

With the gtx280, gtx280+, 4870×2 and other new hardware-craziness happening out there, my aging PC is starting to look like ‘Ol Yeller. At some point I need to forklift it. I don’t know if the Nehalem release this fall will be my trigger flinch point. Nehalem is Intel’s new arch. They called it i7 for some reason, is this the Septimum? I dunno, but 16 threads on 8 cores is crazy (maybe madness — as in useless — for gaming).

3 years ago, I spent $3k like I always do and got a 7800gtx and an AMD fx-57 with ddr400. I put a 8800gts 640mb (older process) about a year ago. It’s incapable of playing Mass Effect, Crysis, any CPU-bound RTS game and DX10 (because I don’t have Vista). It’s fine really. I play WoW most of the time and everything else is consoles (cept Portal and steam-stuff). Valve and Blizzard try to appeal to mass-market and don’t do “tech demos”. That’s fine. However since I got a 24″ LCD, things are running slower at 1080p. I’m getting spoiled on AA settings and image quality (especially in WoW). A new rig could be under $3k and last another 3 years.

I tried posting some questions around the intertubes but no one cares about WoW benchmarks. It’s such a simple game that people don’t even pay attention to it. This was my post in the WoW forums (no response).

If you have a massive new machine that was built for games outside of WoW (but you play WoW anyway), help me understand what life is like.

- What AA setting do you use? I encourage people to talk about 16-24x FSAA at 1080p or higher. :)
- Can you force AFR with SLI or Crossfire cards? Benefit?
- What can you run in the background if you have dual or quad core?
- What transparency modes can you run in? ATI calls this Adaptive AA, Nvidia transparency AA. What’s the nice balance for you?
- In Shatt (which is CPU bound), what FPS do you maintain and what CPU do you have?
- Do you run any hacks to enable larger distance drawing etc?

Since there are few recent WoW benchmarks, can you give me an idea of what FPS you get in CoD4 or Crysis etc (which have no limit on benchmark results)?

So now I’m taking it upon myself to do some testing.

The test

Orgrimmar to Azshara internal /timetest benchmark on WoW 2.4.3. V-sync disabled for timetest. Both

The Hardware

AMD FX-57 PC:
AMD fx-57 2.8ghz
8800gts 640mb
2gb of DDR400 timings at 2-2-2-5
AF 4x (nvidia control panel override)
AA 4x (nvidia control panel override)
AA Transparency off
177.83 driver version
XP 32-bit
1920×1200 (all settings max in WoW client)
Fullscreen

Mac Pro:
Octo-core 2.8ghz 45nm Xeon 2008 model
10gb ddr2 fb-dimms
8800gt video card
OSX 10.5.4
1680×1050 (all settings max in WoW client)
Maximized Windowed Mode
Full screen glow disabled (osx suffers greatly)
4x AA

The Results

What is wrong with OSX drivers? My slower PC looks better (more image quality, more resolution, more effects) and is 3 years old. XP on the Mac Pro is a completely different result! It’s not the hardware. The Mac Pro is a killer workstation for sound and video but that doesn’t mean that a fast nvidia driver is out of the question. There’s one little bit of software that needs to be optimized to open up the Mac Pro for a whole new market and use. I’m not trying to oversimplify the work involved but I’m trying to make a point.

Apple has no pull at Nvidia or ATI. They can no more get faster software than Microsoft can get simpler software. It’s just not in the cards until OSX market share is 50/50 with Windows.

Update: Friend of mine ran this on his G5 with a X1900. 52.812 avg.

I ran this again with a new rig. Forced transparecy AA, Forced 16AF. All other driver settings forced to high-quality. E8600@4ghz,ddr3,4870×2. I ran it once with forced quality (set to insane levels — which looks great) and one with normal settings compared to old PC and Mac.

Updated Results

The quality is so nice and LCDs can’t show more than 60. I think I’ll leave it on.

Final Fantasy XII. It’s a PS2 game that got amazing reviews from most review sites. I won’t bother covering the game itself. You care or you don’t already. In short, it’s a fantastic ride with some of the most convincing acting and modeling I’ve ever seen in any game not to even mention a previous gen platform. Unless you are an Atlus and JRPG elitist with too much time on your hands, this is RPG créme de la créme and cannot be avoided unless you don’t like cream at all.

True to how I beat X & VII, I was on a mission to beat the hardest “weapons” of the game. Then I could blaze through the ending like a warm bullet falling effortlessly through a warm ocean (knife / butter metaphor avoided). Such was FF12. It’s an adventure for about 50-80 hours and then you have a choice to make (as in past ones). Should you just end it or should you spend more time getting everything done? In FFVII, this choice was made when a friend of mine and I decided we’d take on the Ruby and Emerald weapon. This had some implied baggage, firstly that we had to get abilities and gear to make this happen (I can’t remember the exact things). The same decision point came and went and the very same friend and I decided that “yes we were going to uber”.

So we (in parallel game save universes) sought out to get the materials to make The Tournesol (The Sunflower). The best sword in the game. It’s a real beauty and it took forever to get it. It’s just like grinding in an MMO. Kill stuff, sell stuff and get goal done. The mechanics in XII are actually pretty entertaining. You have to sell a number of items and then an item is unlocked to buy. Once you buy it, the item count resets and you could start all over again. Of course, if you read online you can figure out the minimum path to unlocking an item. The Tournesol is such an item that you’d want to follow this path because it could save you 20 hours of gametime. I don’t know what my time was but it took about a week (after work) to get this damn thing. In the end, it’s funny because just like other FF games, you don’t really have the cool stuff until the end and then the game is over. Feh.

So then I’m approaching 150 hours in game and I leveled to about 90ish. Vaan is 90 and most others are low 80s. Time to take on a “weapon”. In XII, there’s a corelation that the Internet hasn’t summarized, Yiazmat is the Ruby Weapon and Omega Mark XII is the Emerald Weapon. There was an Omega Weapon in X, I believe that would be the equivalent of the Ruby Weapon or Yiazmat. They’re not exactly all the same but whatever, those details I don’t care too much about (join a ff forum and argue until you’re a hermit). I’m just trying to set the stage here.

I downed Omega Mark XII, no problem. Tom had beaten him before me and I got all the strategy from watching him. Youtube (as always) has some monkey-see-monkey-do tips that make him a non-issue. I really wish I had the same resources during FFVII for the Ruby Weapon fight. Looking back, I didn’t have gamefaqs or net sharing, just AOL on a 386. Perhaps this is the “walking uphill to school both ways” geezer talk of the modern era. *pause for effect*

So now the game is approaching the singularity point. I’m not maxed out and there’s only one thing left. Yiazmat. Oh noes. I had read about this one. See, in the game it’s described as a fight that NPC’s in the game had heard about from their fathers. Yeah, this boss fight has been passed down from generation to generation. One NPC said his father died after fighting him for a week. Ha! Ok, so this guy is some kind of HP-sink-hole of doom, how bad can he be after I level to 99? Hmm. Reading the Brady game guide, my eyes tear up in horror … “Yiazmat has 50 million hit points”. I then proceded to run around the room like Christopher Lloyd shouting “1.21 gigawatts?! 1.21 gigawatts?!” I put it away for about a week and did other things while muttering “50 million hp … feh”.

Eventually, I started back up again and I piled all my party peoples into the Henne Mines. I set up my gambits to kill the undead bats that drop in on you. It’s a great place to grind out XP. You just mass sleep everything and mass-Curaja “Target: Undead”. I was able to practice drumpad and recording while I slowly leveled everyone to 99. Then when I had a block of time on a weekend, it was time to start on Yiazmat. It wasn’t actually too bad. It took me a little while to learn the best gambit setup and I had to babysit it most of the fight. I only saved once and I was mostly holding the controller for the entire 4.5 hour boss fight. Yes. Longest boss fight ev-ar. 4.5 hours. I ate dinner, I vacuumed the room, I recorded some stuff and I left the room for breaks while my guys pounded away on 50 million hp (6999dmg hits at a time). Eventually he fell and things were done.

After the hardest fights are done, everything else is easy (makes sense). The ending is really, really good. I won’t say anything about it. The ending fights at level 99 is a lot like being 99 and fighting Sepiroth in VII. It’s a non-issue.

Fantastic game. Best game on the PS2 if you ask me.

Birthday was a week+ ago. Wife got a full-on NES bundle as a sweet-ass birthday present. The thing came in the original box, even the original cords and styrofoam. It works like a champ. Funny thing is, I pulled it out and turned it on and there was all this garbage on the screen. So I blew the dust off the cart (you know, the NES trick) and it freaking fixed it! Having something that cliche work was quite a shock, like an airplane meter actually responding after you tap the instrument dial. Cliche.

It came with SMB1 and Duck Hunt. Classics but I wanted to expand my horizons to maybe a humble stack of 10 gray carts. I don’t want to go overboard (see the rest of my life) but the NES carts can really be cheap. I picked up Baseball Simulator 1.000 for $2+$3 shipping and some ones too:

• Baseball Stars
• Baseball Simulator 1.000
• Zelda (yes gold cart)
• Kirby’s Adventure – I used to borrow this one from a friend
• Legacy of the Wizard – was like $3, classic!
• SMB3
• Tecmo Super Bowl (ut! ut! ut!)

The modern TV is kind of puking at the signal but it’s working fine. I really have to chuckle at the size of the carts and no fans anywhere on the box. It’s extremely light compared to the PS3/360. Also, remembering that there’s no save games (outside a code on a napkin) was something I completely forgot about after all these years.

Wife gets a cookie for birthday present from heaven.

Upgraded wordpress, upgraded plugins and snagged this new plugin (which made me fix my theme). Had to add < ?php wp_head(); ?> to my theme. Apparently I wasn’t following the rules.

[Tenacious Defender]

Neat. It’s pretty easy to link to an item. The plugin then caches the info in MySQL, it’s pretty slick (as long as wowhead pays the bandwidth bills). There’s one item that I found funny, the one ring. Read the little note at the bottom of the tooltip. Mild funny, not spicy funny.

[The 1 Ring]

“Not quite as good as the two ring.”

… not even a mouse.

The xmas tree is lit, the wife is making cookies and Santa is killing people. Ho ho hell.

This year, Kristin got her first real-live xmas tree. She’s always had a fake one. We decorated it to the tunes of Xmas music, it was lovely (once the tree stopped falling down — hey it’s my first tree too). After a bit of decorating, Kristin pulled out her baby ornament. It says “Baby’s first Xmas 1977″. She laughed, “we have the same ones!” Sure enough, we held mine next to hers and mine said “Baby’s first Xmas 1977″. And odd coincidence that made for some laughs.

This year we’re heading to NC after the holidays. I can’t wait for some more time off from work. I promise to upload the pictures from Amsterdam soon, there are some key ones worth yawning over.

I’m a moment of weakness, I started playing WoW again. A new patch, a new expansion and voip features drew me in like a swirling vortex of infinite monthly expenses. I resisted for 3 months, a whole quarter year (in boozehound terms). All of my things were still there, frozen in time and restored instantly from some mega-SAN storage unit once a card verification engine gave me a “1″.

My rows in a massive character database probably did something like this:

update player_table set account_status=”active” where player_id=”chris”;

Of course, “Chris” would be a login name or whatever. And I’m sure Blizzard has a crazy SAN/cluster setup that does 100x the work and complexity that I think of. Their job board is very appealing for someone as me who likes to think about how this monstrosity operates. Of course, heading to the West Coast on a whim would upheave habits and ruts. But that doesn’t kill the job posting at Blizzard for a SAN Administrator.

It’s extremely overwhelming to be in the throws again, not knowing what has changed and having a flood of aggravation & memory instantly jogged. I feel like rip-van-winkle and everyone is riding on hoverboards. As far as content, I am a newbie again with so little free-time compared to the people running around in front of me. I think I never want to be resurrected if such technology is devised, I would be constantly be lagging.

Company of Heroes is crashing on my non-stop. I haven’t found a fix. Synergy is also giving me problems. You can read about that on my other neglected tech-only blog (sigh, no … wait… no apologies).

I sent my Xbox 360 packing in a box today. The repair process has started. I feel comforted by the few tens of blogs that actually documented the shipping process. I don’t know if I’ll be surprised if someone has a site about how to throw up poisoned food properly.

The nostromo has an update coming in November. It’s plenty shiny and the “quick keys” is a welcomed improvement. I only used mine for CS and WoW and even then I found it an equal to the standard keyboard. It helps with stress, comfort and has “hover car future svelt” but I put it away. Just as my recall to the MMO, I’ll give it another shot.

The keys on the N52 were a bit slow and changing something familiar is always hard. It took me weeks and weeks to get my system down and the software did a good enough job of making this intrusion easy to manage.

Anyway, that’s it for now. Someone tell Alex Albreicht “hey I knew you and I listen to you podcast”, I’m sick of trying to contact him. Kthx.

Awesome.

So I got my ref number for repair, stripped it down and now I’m just waiting for the UPS box to show up. At least they throw in a month of Xbox gold in (I guess). How many of you have had the red rings?

Halo3, the Microsoft juggernaut, launches tomorrow and seals away a story arc spanning two consoles. Halo was originally a Mac game (as well as Windows) before the Xbox version, that changed and Halo1 was a very successful launch title for the Xbox1. It was really _the_ launch title for the Xbox. The PC versions wouldn’t be released for a couple years later and when they were released, most people had already played the Xbox version.

At the time of release, everyone I knew was into Halo. People bought an Xbox to play Halo with their friends. Of course, Xbox Live has never been free so people signed up for Xbox Live. People also needed to chat so they bought headsets for use with their Xbox. Outside of an active monthly subscription, the headsets would be useless. Online play continued, Red vs Blue got popular and even an online gesture “the tea-bag” was as due to Halo.

To me, Halo was generic when I saw it first. Massive maps, bland textures, obvious color choices and a repeatable military vs aliens theme. It didn’t click. During the gold rush of Halo2, my wife bought me an Xbox1 and a copy. I was grateful. It was something fresh for me and it’s been a sore point of critisizing something as cool as a wife giving you an entire game console. I watch my step because the present itself was extremely rad while the Microsoft disease of hype and design-dearth is anti-rad. So, let it be told from the top of the highest peak of a silent blog that I enjoyed my Xbox1. Wife protection off.

The satisfaction of pulling the right trigger button on the fatty Xbox1 controller to squeeze off real metal rounds into a herd of emotionless monsters is caveman satisfaction. Bill Maher, Dennis Miller and Frasier are closer to my stereotyped intellectual entertainment but sometimes I have a headache and I want knuckle dragging rock. In this vein, Halo delivers a one-note riff.

I played through 1/2 of Halo2 and gave it an honest chance but then put it down for a while. After getting the 360, there’s no save game feature to let me continue so one of these days I’ll have to hook up the Xbox1 and finish it off so I can trade it in. There was a clan I was in with friends called “Gamers with Jobs” but that fizzled for greener CS:Source pastures. There was a headset that I used to play with people online but in the end I ran into too many pre-teens with nothing to say.

And now as I see the Halo Zune and Halo crap-colored 360 (with no specs to back it up), I’m glad that Halo3 ends the story arc. Maybe they’ll reboot the series and go with an ultra modern “Vista” Halo with a translucent suit for Master Chief and heart boxers. “Aliens beware, I have Windows Defender!”

I digress. Halo was was described by gamespy as

the game was tenth on GameSpy’s “Top 25 Most Overrated Games of All Time”; one reviewer stated that the game “recycl[ed] the same areas over and over until you were bored to tears.”

If you have never seen the infamous E3 2007 Halo 3 Special Edition 360! *Crickets* post by Kokatu, please run and watch.

Halo3? For $60 and only 10 hours of gameplay, I can find something better to do; like finish Bioshock.

A few years ago my lovely wife bought an Atari 2600 for my birthday off eBay. Needless to say, any geek would fall over backwards at the prospect of being able to hold real cartridges again. The tactile reality of physical hardware eclipses even the finest emulator.

Hooking up the seldom used VHF connector to a modern LCD was like email morse code. “Good day sir, I find your strange 1080p disturbing. Would we not want to snack on these fine leeks instead?” The 2600 looks superbly craptastic as God intended. 4mhz in an air sealed box. Heating issues? What heat would be generated from a hamster brain? Hamsters don’t have modern issues like headaches and stress. There’s no grills, fans, heatsinks, red rings of death, 1000w power supplies or air conditioning bills to worry about. It’s *plink*, *bonk* and squares.

The system came with the more modern clicking controllers. They are shaped like lima beans and have little red triggers underneath. I was intrigued but this was not the controller I grew up with. I grew up with the Atari 5200 controller with the skirt around the joystick that looks like a 1994 RX-7 manual shifter skirt. So I ordered one off amazon, used, for $12. It came a few weeks later, from a Mom & Pop shop with names I couldn’t pronounce. The controller has a small scratch on the plastic cord as if it’s stripping but there’s plenty of insulation to go before she breaks.

I hooked it up and didn’t get much for video. I giggled some cables, blew the cartridge and flipped the switch and eventually saw a (c) 1981. Ah, brisk.