Technology as a way of life

Glad to be back in action, it seems like i have gone missing for some time... well many things change everyday so it's pretty useless to go in any detail but the 1mil$ question is "what changes faster than life?"
Answer: Technology

Last months were a bit "strange" to put it that way but it's all sorted out now and got myself some new "horsepower". Those of you who know me personally know for sure I'm not talking about anything involving wheels... talking about a new PC of course. Well let's just say it's a big improvement over the "muzeum piece" i used to work on.

OLD Specs (2003):

• Mainboard: ECS P4VMM2 v1.0
• Processor: Intel Pentium 4 @ 2.4Ghz
• Memory: PQI 768MB
• Video card: Asus 6200TD/128Mb AGP @ +40% overclock
• Hard Disk: WD 160GB
• PSU: actually have no idea what brand it was but im sure it was one "super-high china quality 450w" LOL (actually it may be cause its still working after 5 years)
  

New Specs (2008) (PS:now we're talking):

• Mainboard: Asus P5Q-L PRO
  
• Processor: Intel DualCore E8200 2,66 @ stock speed for now
  
• Memory: Kingston 4GB (2x2GB) @ 805Mhz
• Video card: Gigabyte 9800GTX+ @ stock speed for now ;)
  
• HardDisk: WD 400GB, 16Mb, Sata2
• PSU: Corsair TX-650W
• Speakers: Logitech x-530

Enough bragging, let's go down to serious bussiness like nvidia's BigBang II Forceware 180 drivers. The boastfull name is there for several reasons:

1. Better performance (up to 30% in some configurations/games)
2. Support for multi-display SLI on X58 basedmainboards
   
3. Allowing users to dedicate a specific GPU to Physx (meaning u can use another/older card supporting Physx as dedicated, taking the extra processing load off the other card and cpu)
4. Display Port support
5. OpenGL 3.0
6. Hardware video transcoding

The performance optimizations are a continuing process, and a matter of routine. Support for the new standards is a good thing, and HTPC users will like the transcoding support. DisplayPort may now begin to appear on NVIDIA cards. The big news, however, is the PhysX and multimonitor announcements.

I'm not particulary interested in the SLI/multi-display optimizations but they are innovative and fortunately Nvidia was kind to publish some charts for your inner geek entertainment boasting the new features:






Official links to download the drivers: (only compatible with GeForce 200-series, 9-series, and 8800-series desktop GPUs)

• XP 32bit
• XP 64bit
• Vista 32bit
• Vista 64 bit

Non the less these are early BETA drivers, NVIDIA was "forced" to make the driver available so soon because of the release of Far Cry 2. The new 180.42 driver should be the driver you install if you are planning on pick the game up today but don't expect all of the other features mentioned in this article to be officially ready for consumer consumption until the middle of next month.

As for the rest of the "Bang" (PhysX config, X58 SLI support, better performance) it will be tested in the following weeks when a stable driver should be released.