Good Morning

November 20th, 2004 - 11:48 | 2 comments

I’m still back.

Two weeks have gone by! All sorts of things have happened:

Fox hunting got banned! Wooooo. They’re apparently planning a campaign of ‘civil disobedience’. Sure, that’ll win you public sympathy. Not at all pathetic there, guys.
Boris Johnson was sacked. Hands up who knew he was even in the shadow cabinet? I like Boris because I quite often mistype his name as Biros. However he apparently had an affair, which means he ranks only just above wasps on the Johnny Vaughn scale of annoying.
I bought an Asus 6800GT graphics card, along with a copy of Half-Life 2. I was excited Unfortunately I’m suffering from the stuttering problem which spoilt it somewhat, so I’ve stopped playing until that’s fixed. Hopefully it won’t take too long. I’d recommend you don’t hang around in the steam forums, btw, as I’ve seen a couple of spoilers I wish I hadn’t People do put major plot points in the post titles, and although the moderators stomp on them pretty quickly there’s often something.
My friend Helen was on TV. That’s yet another famous person I know! I’m an IT guy. Heh. See what I did there? Yeah.
I found out that Katie Melua is the best selling UK artist of 2004. Cool or what. That’s entirely due to my blog post of last year pushing her album, I think. Maybe a bit of help from Terry Wogan.
Argh, I’ve just discovered that all the old posts have lost their paragraph breaks. Sigh. I’ll try to fix that later.
I’m HUNGRY! I haven’t had any breakfast!

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2 Responses to “Good Morning”

1 Simon Nov 20th, 2004 at 4:12 pm

I have experienced similar things in doom 3. Generally speaking I get reasonable performance but when I step into a new section it just seems to stall for a second or two. Since that article suggests its texture related I would have thought that people running pci express systems would be better off than people running agp, but this would depend on whether the bandwidth is near saturation on agp. In my system my 9800pro is certainly the weakest component but it should still be technically good enough to run the game, leading me to look towards the bus feeding it data as a likely cause. I am planning to acquire hl2 shortly, so I will be able to tell you my experience soon.

Doom3 and HL2 are the first example of a new generation of game engine. I am not convinced they have overtaken the capability of top end hardware (or atleast, the devs should have realised that they need to cater for todays hardware and scaled back suitably) but it does look like they may have missed some of the weak links. The only real solution to stalls due to texture memory would be to be able to predict where the player was going next and to preload some of the stuff in the background. But, hopefully dual core processors and optimized threaded code will allow for some other approaches based around LOD. Like, give them a crap place holder texture so they can keep playing while loading the proper textures in a more civilized manner. Do you remember interlaced gifs on the internet?
2 Lil Nov 21st, 2004 at 10:34 am

Oh how I love your summary of the fox hunting situation!! =DDD

I wish I had a graphics card =’)

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