Tuesday 18 May 2004

Pic of the day: Avoid.

New graphics card

Today I bought a new graphics card for my PC. It sucks. On the bright side, there is RadLinker.

The graphics card in question is Sapphire Radeon Atlantis 9800 SE. Despite the Radeon name and the ATI logo on the box, this is not exactly an ATI card. Rather, it is made from ATI chips in the 9800 series that failed the testing. Rather than throw these away, ATI sells them cheaply to this company which makes inferior cards and sell them cheaply as well.

As regular readers will know, I have two desktop computers connected to the Internet. The older one has 512MB of RAM, and a 1.7 gigahertz Intel Celeron processor. The newer one has 1GB of RAM and a 2.6 gigahertz Celeron. Despite this, the newer computer ran Dark Age of Camelot only slightly faster, and City of Heroes was actually quite a bit slower on the new machine. The reason for this was obviously the graphics card. The old machine had a GeForce 3 Ti card, while the new one had an ATI 9200. So I decided to upgrade the graphics card so I could play City of Heroes in my living room as well.

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I was fooled, as greedy people usually are. If I had checked this out on the Net before I bought instead of afterwards, I would not have bought it. I seriously thought I had bought an ATI 9800, which is pretty much the top card for gaming at this time.

The card is still faster than the one I had, by approximately 50%. But it is slower than the GeForce, which is just fast enough for a high-speed game such as City of Heroes. Yet all is not lost! the unconquerable Will, and study of RadLinker...

Instead of the usual drivers for ATI cards, I have lately taken to using the Omega drivers from OmegaCorner. These include a RadLinker tab on the advanced properties page... basically, I can right- click anywhere on the desktop and quickly get to a program that changes the clock speed of the graphics processor and/or its memory. During installation the card is set to its optimal speed. But there is still room for experimentation. For instance, it is not strictly necessary to have the same clock speed for the processor and the memory. It seems that on my card the screen will be corrupted and require a reboot if I increase the speed above 270; but the processor speed can go up to at least 330. Admittedly this will cause the computer to grow steadily hotter over the hours of gaming, to the point where even the exterior of the computer chassis is uncomfortably hot on the side where the card is. This cannot possibly be a good thing, so I clock the processor down to 230 when I've finished playing. But with this setting (330/270) the game is running fairly smoothly so I don't get lost or bump into the surroundings. I can even just barely play a character with superspeed.

It took some trial and error to get these numbers (one more trial than error), and if you buy a similar card you will have to do it all over again. Because these are failed chips, they don't adhere to a common standard. Some may have a defective RAM, and in others it may be the processor.

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Next time, if any, it is likely to be a GeForce. Perhaps the rumors are true and the game actually was optimized for one particular brand of graphics cards. Or perhaps this particular card just plain sucks. But now that it works, I am not going to fix it. That's just the kind of man I am.