I like this web comic a lot. The humor is spot on most of the time and is just depraved enough to make me want more. I really have to take my hat off to (Tim?) for developing such a wonderful web space that is not only pleasing to the eye and mind but even more so to the wallet. It's one of the few web pages that will always get my browser traffic at least once a week.

Now on to my beef...

Quote:

"I've also given the Crysis MP beta a whirl. My first impressions were "Wow, these graphics really do live up to the hype. This is incredible."
My second impression was "Holy shit, my framerate sucks." My system isn't exactly a slouch, but clearly you're going to need a computer from the future to run this smoothly on Very High settings. So, the graphics are some of the best I've seen, but I'm not sure how many people will really be able to enjoy them. At least at a decent framerate. I'm still interested in seeing single-player as well."

In comparison to Tim's comp mine IS a little more of a slouch, meaning I have a q6600 @ 2.4ghz and a single 88GTX behind 2 gigs of DDR2 800, and I get great frames at max settings.

Something that Tim forgot to mention is that he is still running Windows XP pro with the older direct X 9 driver set. Of course at the time he built his gaming rig vista had no support for SLI and was frankly a poor choice of OS. However...  I must ask why did he see the need to drop 2 88GTX's into a computer when the most demanding game at the time was Supreme Commander (or GRAW.)  A single GTX with updated drivers could handle the work load that both of these games put out with plenty of room to spare. My guess is that Tim had the money to burn and wanted to make sure no one could accuse him of passing on a game because he lacked the GPU muscle required to get the full experience of a new release.

Being the founder of a video game based religion ( in a de facto comic sort of way) it makes sense that he would need to push the edge of GPU technology but in this case he is just wrong in the direction he has gone with his rig and a great new game has now been touted to the masses as beyond the reach of just about everyone...

If anyone is interested the running requirements for Crysis can be found here.

Here is another link for the specs of the new 8800GT just released, its a sub $200 card that can run Crysis with all the eye candy most people could want.

The real issue here is the fact that Tim is still running XP. While vista has its problems DX10 is NOT one of them. All the hype that came about from Crysis was not just because it has the best visual's of any FPS to date, the real reason was because it was to be the first game that was built for DX10 and not DX9 meaning XP users will take a hit in performance no matter what hardware they have.

Crysis has shown that Vista and DX10 are the future of video games on the PC. In the landscape of Technology Crysis should mark the point at which the torch was passed from DX9 to DX10. Not just another piece of high end eye candy that gamers have to wait 2 years before they can afford the hardware to enjoy the ride.

Score one for Vista and Microsoft here.

~J~