GeForce Time

Well I finally did it... I "sold out" and gave up my loyalty to Matrox graphics cards and jumped on the nVidia bandwagon. This past weekend, I went to the Glendale computer show, which was pretty lame compared to Pomona, but I got a good deal on an IBM 30G hard drive (to replace my Maxtor 30G which crapped out after only one month), and an Asus V7700 GeForce2 GTS 64MB.

The first thing I did was install Red Hat 7, since I knew Red Hat 6.2 wasn't gonna have drivers for the GeForce. So I did that and it recognized everything beautifully. The only thing I need to figure out are the Linux drivers that are posted on nVidia's site. I tried them, but every time I try to use something that uses OpenGL calls, X core dumps and drops me to the console. Hmm. So no GL in Linux for now.

After that was done, I tried installing Win2k because I wanted to play Quake 3 with SMP support. But the Win2k drivers for the GeForce were highly unstable. It would just hang after a few minutes of usage. Sooo back to Win98 again, which means no SMP support. But this time, the driver installed all nice-like. Installed Q3 and ran a test. Holy shite this thing is fast. With the rez set to 1024x768 and all the detail settings set to high, I got 90fps in demo01. With the Matrox, I could only get 70fps – and that was at 800x600 with detail settings set to medium. I think I'll try those settings and see what the GeForce can do! =)