WarFlail's Archives - September 2000

Go to WarFlail's Archives - October 2000

Since I had been away from home for so long over the past several weeks, my wife Scully and I decided to take some R&R together for a change. We went to Ayers Rock - what an *awesome* place! I managed to climb to the top of the Rock, which was something I've always wanted to do.

Okay, the photos of my recent trip have been developed! (Damn, I wish I had a digital camera...). See below for some choice pics... :-)

I've discovered another glitch in NVIDIA's Detonator 3 reference driver set (both the official 6.18 and the leaked 6.26 versions): the sky and water textures in Quake III Arena look strangely blocky and ugly. I have since found that this can be resolved by turning off texture compression - although this causes a big hit to the frame rate (the demo001 timedemo dropped from 82 to "only" 71 fps in 1024x768 max quality), the image quality is definitely superior. With the frame rate that high, who cares about a "mere" 11 fps performance hit, anyway?! :-)

To turn off texture compression in Q3A, pull down the console and type the following:

r_ext_compress_textures 0
vid_restart

Unless you have been living under a rock in some obscure part of the planet, you would know that today marks the beginning of the Sydney 2000 Olympic Games! The Opening Ceremony is drawing to a close even as I type this. Good luck to all the Olympic athletes, and here's wishing that all the events go smoothly.

Things are looking better all the time with this new graphics card! I downloaded the latest drivers in the Detonator 3 pack and instantly saw a huge performance boost - that Q3A demo from yesterday clocked in at over 82 fps! The default 3DMark2000 benchmark rates a blistering score of 6284 marks! The only problem with these new drivers is that there is no way to increase the monitor refresh rate, so I had to download a third-party freeware application called HzTool, which, by the way, works extremely well.

Again, profuse apologies for the lack of updates to this site - the past several weeks have been extremely busy and I have been away a lot on overseas business trips. This time it was off to Sydney (I left just as the Olympic athletes started to arrive), New York, London and Singapore. Totally exhausting. At least I am racking up those Frequent Flyer points!

Anyway, while I was in Singapore, I visited Sim Lim Square and bought myself an Asus V7700 GeForce 2 GTS 64Mb Pure ("Pure" meaning without TV Out, to keep the price down) to replace my ageing Matrox G400 in my system. Wow, this is one fast graphics card! Quake III Arena blazes at silky smooth frame rates even at maximum settings and 1024x768 resolution (the Timedemo of Demo001 ran at over 63 fps average). In comparison, the G400 couldn't even achieve a quarter of that speed. However, I will miss one feature of the G400 - the 2D desktop isn't as sharp and crisp on the V7700 at resolutions above 1024x768.

Go to WarFlail's Archives - August 2000

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