Well, no thanks to the Taiwanese tech support guys, I managed to get my video card working. I was about to pull it out and put my old card back in so that my computer could be somewhat normal for awhile, and then I decided to put it back in and give it one more shot. Appearently, I didn’t have the card seated right, because this time it worked right off the bat. Turns out AGP cards have this odd little snap that you have to press in to insert the card, which I had forgotten about. I’m not sure why it’s there. It’s not like cards fall out of their slots all the time normally…
Anyways, the good news is that my new video card is functional, and it plays all my games very very well. Halo PC looks incredible, rivalling the way it looks on the XBox, and Doom now runs at 800×600 in high resolution mode, instead of 640×480 in low resolution mode. I could actually run it at 1024×768, but I suffer a slight framerate hit. It’s probably tolerable, but it runs just a bit smoother at 800×600, and I couldn’t see any difference in the graphics, so I’m leaving it at 800 and getting dynamite results.
It’ll be exiciting to see what kind of results I can get with Half Life 2 next month.
I'm a 30-year-old 
Oh yeah … I meant to say something about this. AGP cards have this odd little snap that you have to press in to insert the card. You want to watch out for that …
August 15th, 2004 at 3:21 pm
Regarding Doom 3:
http://www.forumplanet.com/planetdoom/topic.asp?fid=5733&tid=1438663
It talks about upping the cache as follows:
In the game’s \base directory, open DoomConfig.cfg in Notepad and find the following lines:
seta image_useCache “0″
seta image_cacheMegs “20″
seta image_cacheMinK “200″
Change them to read:
seta image_useCache “1″
seta image_cacheMegs “256″
seta image_cacheMinK “20480″
Those numbers are if you have 1GB of memory. If you have 512MB, cut the last two numbers in half (leaving the “1″ in the first line as is).
You should notice a drastic increase in performance.
September 6th, 2004 at 2:18 am
w00t! Thanks for the tip, Matt! I’ve got 1.2GB, so those numbers should work well for me - I’ll give this a whirl tonight!
September 6th, 2004 at 8:33 am