End of an Era - Goodbye NVidia

Posted by Stropp on September 26, 2007

I realized yesterday that I have exclusively used NVidia based graphics cards for years. It would be at least ten years, I think, when I bought a TNT Diamond video card to replace a card that wasn’t particularly good.

That exclusivity ended yesterday. You might remember in some of my recent posts, comments about how I wasn’t able to properly evaluate the graphics in my Bioshock Review and in my First Look At Tabula Rasa. Well, yesterday I decided to do something about it.

I hopped in to my local IT Warehouse, and after grilling the salesdude, decided on an ATI Radeon based Sapphire x1950 Pro with 512MB DDR3 RAM for OZ$239 bringing to an end the continuous reign of NVidia cards on my computers.

The X1950 Pro is not the latest in the series. I could have spent another seventy dollars and bought the next step up, but they didn’t have the 512MB version in the store, and the salesdude made a fairly convincing argument that since I wasn’t getting Vista anytime soon, the DX10 features of the new cards wouldn’t make much of a difference.

It took about fifteen minutes to install, and then another fifteen minutes to install the drivers and software (the slowest driver install I can remember) and the computer booted with absolutely no problems whatsoever.

My first test was with Richard Garriott’s Tabula Rasa. I loaded the game up, set the graphics settings to maximum, and with trepidation, logged in. My worries that the card or the computer wouldn’t handle the maximum setting was unfounded. It ran very smoothly, and Tabula Rasa looked pretty darn good.

Tonight I decided to see what Bioshock looks like with the graphics set to high. Wow! I’d seen the opening scenes before at the low setting, but the scene where you are descending for the first time in the bathysphere and Ryan is giving his spiel and the bathysphere comes into the first real view of Rapture. Well, it was jaw-droppingly stunning. As with Tabula Rasa, the gameplay was nice and smooth. In fact I reckon it was smoother than before when I played the game with the graphics set to low. Aiming my weapon was definitely a lot easier.

So now I have no excuse to write about the graphics of games in high detail modes. At least until the DX10 games come out since I don’t have, or intend to get Vista in the foreseeable future.

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