Steve Dougherty – Page 9 – Steve Dougherty's Blog

XFX Card

XFX sent me back a replacement for my PCI-E 7600 GT with 256MB RAM. I was delighted to find that the replacement was a 9500 GT with 512MB RAM!

Benchmarks – average of FPS of two runs unless otherwise stated:

Lost Coast Stress Test:

1280×1024 Recommended: 68.92

1280×1024 Maximum: 52.54 (three runs)

1024×768 Recommended: 66.83

1024×768 Recommended with color correction and vsync: 52.52

Counter-Strike Source Stress Test:

1280×1024 Recommended: 126.49

1280×1024 Maximum: 59.48 (three runs)

1024×768 Recommended: 126.40

I suppose I ran the max tests three times each because they were so very pretty. It’s weird that a lower resolution with vsync and color correction would run more slowly than a higher resolution set to that and more. In the past, every time I ran maxed tests, its reflections contained the easily recognized purple checkers of missing textures. When I went from maxed to recommended settings and the purple checkers persisted, I realized that the missing textures never had anything to do with the abilities of the machine, and were indeed missing textures. I restarted the game to reload the textures, although I think mat_reloadtextures might do the same thing faster. (Found here.)

It is interesting to note that dropping to 1024×768 doesn’t provide too much of a boost in framerate, if any. This may be because 1280×1024 is the native resolution of the LCD, so no scaling is needed. After running tests, the console had an error about bench_upload being a cheat command. I enabled cheats in the hope that it would successfully upload my benchmark statistics. I could probably run a packet sniffer to see if it’s actually uploading. In Counter-Strike: Source, sv_cheats 1 made the benchmark’s movements accelerated: the camera moved faster, the blocks spun faster, the water flowed faster, the flames flickered frantically – and the overall framerate was lower.

Windows fell back to software rendering when first booting with the new card. When my card died, Linux fell back to open source drivers for the onboard. I installed ATI’s propritory drivers in the hope that they would make the thing slightly more useful. It seems although NVIDIA’s drivers stepped aside when their card was unaccessable, ATI’s did no such thing, reducing X to an unsettling and intermittently flickering blank screen. The uninstall script in /usr/share/fglrx was nowhere to be found, which was odd because I manually installed the drivers from ATI’s installation script. Removing xorg.conf had no effect as it seemed to still use fglrx. I had not installed the propritory drivers from the repos. I ended up starting in single user (aka recovery) mode, starting an ssh server, resuming the boot process with telinit 3, logging in from elsewhere to stop gdm, then installing NVIDIA’s driver and rebooting. It works quite well now. I was even informed of telinit 3 by the NVIDIA driver installer itself, which was very nice!

EDIT: I found the uninstall script in /usr/share/ati.

Power Outage

The site was down due to a power outage. I took the downtime as an opportunity to move the shelving the machines are on a foot or two away from the wall so I can get to the back of them. One of the zombies’ networking didn’t come up properly, even with a /etc/init.d/networking stop and restart, but upon reboot it worked correctly. I wish I knew the underlying cause of that.

Scientific American Frontiers

I am delighted to discover that PBS’s Scientific American Frontiers has an online archive of shows.

ToneMatrix

This is an amazing Flash applet. You draw on a grid and it makes really nice music. Strangely enchanting… ToneMatrix!

Nvidia 182.50 Drivers Broken!

Newer drivers have less bugs and better performance, right? Not in this case, at least if you’re running an AGP GeForce 6800XT like me. The device fails to properly start, the device manager complains, and falls back on very ugly software rendering. Installing previous drivers – in my case 178.24 – fixed the problem. I learned that EVE will not launch with software acceleration.

On my eMachine where I am currently using my onboard card, (sigh) the fitting screen in EVE took what felt like several seconds to finish the intro animation, but on my machine at mom’s, it takes a fraction of a second or so. I find it amazing just how bad onboard graphics card performance is.

Dark Messiah Might and Magic

I just finished Dark Messiah Might and Magic. I got to see all four endings. Disappointingly, all the endings were rather vague and didn’t really answer what ended up happening to the world in each situation. The plot and voice acting was meh to bad. It wasn’t all bad, though, and the combat was fun at times, even if it occasionally seemed like enemies could take away a final third of my HP in a single hit. The jumping puzzles are often infuriating, some of the combat is cheap or simply slow and boring. The level design can be pretty confusing, and my guide was sometimes annoying. It probably would have been closer to impossible without the heal spell, even though potions for mana and health are usually plentiful. The skill tree allowed for useful upgrades. I found stealth and strength to be an awesome combination. Because I’m still running on my onboard graphics card, it was pretty ugly with bad framerates. Hopefully it will be better once I get a real card again. I noticed that there is no run of Dark Messiah Might and Magic on speeddemosarchive…

Chrome and WP-Cache

I’m using Google Chrome now. I’ll probably set up Privoxy to get rid of ads, as I kinda miss Adblock Plus already. On a more philisophical note, I’m somewhat confused as to why more sites don’t offer subscriptions or donations instead of ads. When the house was quiet and I pulled up Chrome, I noticed it was almost constantly accessing my disk. Through Google I learned that the solution is to disable pishing and malware detection, which is somewhat concerning, but I don’t want the thing abusing my hard drive. I uninstalled WP-Super Cache and now I’m just using WP-Cache. With lighttpd I think I only used the WP-Cache part of WP-Super Cache anyway.

Also, I found a screenshot of 4chan on Reddit, where someone had posted this sentence:

Has anyone really been far even as decided to use even go want to do look more like?

The strange part is when I first read that I didn’t immediately realize that it was nonsensical. Chrome is also reminding me just how horrible my favicon is by putting it in a more noticable place. I should change it to something more bearable.

Cleanup

Just as Vertex mentioned, it is much, much easier to do a fresh Windows install and move over documents than it is to clean up an existing one. Apparently Dell puts (or put, this is an old machine, but I wouldn’t expect this to have changed) RAM that is slower than what the motherboard can take as a cost-saving measure. This things really flies now, and it POSTs so fast that I have trouble getting to BIOS or the boot device menu in time.

That being said, I am once again appalled by the out-of-the-box driver support in a fresh Windows install, even that provided by an SP3 CD. The device manager was no help for finding out the names of the sound, video, and ethernet drivers I needed, so I booted up into Damn Small Linux and did an lspci, which told me what I needed to know. Searching for drivers based on chipset versioning is not too fun, but it worked. The graphics were greatly improved from the 4-bit color, very low resolution they started out in, which was nice. The ethernet driver was a bit harder, because when I downloaded it, it wasn’t an installer, just a series of folders with three files. I went to the add hardware wizard, but it turned out I needed to let it fail, get past the check Windows Update pane, and then it would let me tell it where to look. The operating system seemed too proud of itself when it completed.

I had trouble finding an audio driver, and so did Windows even with a Windows update connection. I was very pleased to find that Dell had the audio drivers, which they made easy to find and download. Adobe annoyed me when I installed Acrobat Reader, as my client requested, because it decided to place another shortcut on the desktop that I didn’t ask for, and I feel it tricked me into installing Adobe AIR. The shortcut then wouldn’t go away – I couldn’t delete it – so I ended up booting into System Rescue CD to get rid of it because it annoyed me so much. I couldn’t delete it even running as administrator.

The whole thing ended up taking somewhere around 7 hours, but closer to 4 or so of those were actual work, lots of it was waiting for a virus scan. I wonder what I can do in the future while waiting for progress bars. I did start installing XP while I waited. I’ve also moved to a different method of charging for my labor. When I was working on friends’ gaming rigs, I just charged 10% of the hardware costs, which seemed reasonable. Dad suggested I charge hourly. I have a cap, though, as to not let labor prices get too high. I feel uncomfortable charging large amounts of money.

Logic Tables!

I was instructed to make code that toggled a Boolean if an input was currently true and had been false during the last loop. I did not realize that this was my task until I had taken a vague understanding from my given assignment and made a table of the possibilities, which Mike called a logic table when I showed it to him. I also learned that two false fed to and does not produce true. And only produces true if both inputs are true. In my defense, my thinking was getting fuzzier as I was getting confused, I was just trying various combinations to see if they worked, and I haven’t done logic loops like this before. I’m glad I know this now, it should prove to be useful.

Graphics Card Dead?

I think I just fried my graphics card by trying to put on a new heatsink. It only booted up once, and for a few seconds before the screen went blank. Now it won’t POST with the card in.

I was having problems with the fan making annoying noises. Over a period of a few months, XFX managed to send me a new heatsink. There were no instructions, so I looked up some guides on YouTube. I think the problem was that the coat of Arctic Silver wasn’t complete when I first booted up. I’ve had bad things happen every time I’ve used Arctic Silver. With it, I’ve gummed up a processor, killed a motherboard and CPU, and now fried a graphics card. Maybe I should get generic thermal paste and just leave Arctic Silver alone.