All good things come to those who wait

Oh sweet holy of holy holies. Bestoweth upon me with great benevolence your glorious powers of exceptional GPU performance.

How did this happen? Who! What? When?

Was I walking around with my head in the sand all this time? How did NVIDIA manage to sneak this new line of graphic cards by me? I've been fixated on the 8800GTS, GTX, Ultra and Black Pearl, but just yesterday I learned that there's another line of the 8800s coming out. It looks like they just launched.

Insert your dork comment aimed in my direction here.

Why is this so cool? Well, NVIDIA first put out the 8600 series to try and capture the market space that didn't want to fork over upwards of $400 for a card, but the 8600s aren't all that spectacular, especially when considering the new games that are coming out, or when considering the bloated needs of the new Vista OS.

The 8800GT line is going to be the sweet spot for gamers who want the DirectX10 capability (and who are brave enough to be running Vista without SP1), who want to be able to run all their games with high settings so as to take advantage of all the texturing, shading, and steady framerate, but don't want to drop 4 bills to make it happen. Games like Crysis, BioShock, and Unreal Tournament 3 are going to devour older cards. Transistors and subpar boards will lay strewn in the wake of these resource hungry beasts, which, if tamed, will grant the player with an unparalleled experience.

It's not surprising to see that practically all vendors are presently sold out of these cards.

BCCHardware has a great review of the 8800GT compared against the 8600GTS, and Tech Report has another one comparing the 8800GT to the big boys, although I haven't yet seen the card priced between $199 and $249, but from the vendors I've seen it's close.

Here comes Santa Claus, here comes Santa Claus...

Crysis Trailer

The gaming gods have been good to us this year, and have blessed us with titles such as BioShock and the Half-Life 2 Orange Box. Next up will the spiritual successor for FarCry: Crysis, developed by Crytek and published by EA. The recent trailer demonstrates the beautiful in-game graphics, which come at a cost.

The specs to run this game are steep:

Recommended System Requirements
OS - Windows XP / Vista
Processor - Intel Core 2 DUO @ 2.2GHz or AMD Athlon 64 X2 4400+
Memory - 2.0 GB RAM
GPU - NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTS/640 or similar

Minimum System Requirements
OS - Windows XP or Windows Vista
Processor - 2.8 GHz or faster (XP) or 3.2 GHz or faster (Vista)
Memory - 1.0 GB RAM (XP) or 1.5 GB RAM (Vista)
Video Card -256 MB
Hard Drive - 12GB
Sound Card - DirectX 9.0c compatible

What looks to be one of the cooler features of the game is the Nano Suit. It allows the player to enhance strength (you can knock people 20 feet back with a punch and jump onto rooftops), initiate camouflage, speed (you can run like a gazelle...but you have high tech firearms), and armor (bullets bounce off your suit).

Similar to BioShock, we see how abilities such as this allow the player to dictate strategy and play style using either brute force, stealth, or a symbiosis of the two in order to negotiate obstacles.

I've heard this somewhere else, but soon these games will look so good that we'll be saying the graphics on real life aren't as good as those in the game.

Crysis release date for U.S.

Finally. 11/16/2007.

Don't knock the enthusiasm for games. Word on the street is that Al-Qaida is using Worlds of Warcraft and the Second Life online virtual community to run simulated terrorist activities because they can't do dry runs in real life.

Best. Game. Ever.

This year Take Two Interactive and Irrational Games are producing what looks to be the most awesomest FPS game ever: Bioshock.

It looks like they modeled in aspects of our current cultures obsession with aesthetics and the looming figure of genetic modifications and ran with an idea couched in a glorious first-person shooter.

The character arrives in an underwater city originally designed to be a Utopian home for wealthy and brainy elites. It turns out that genetic modifications eventually turned everyone both chock full o' nuts where their insanity also manifests in bizarre physiological abilities.

Current gameplay was recently released by the development team at Irrational Games, and from what's seen here, it looks absolutely brilliant. It's coming out sometime late this year, according to the publisher.

I'm not discounting Crysis to also blow up the scene for DirectX 10 FPS gaming. Additionally, the Half-Life Episode 2 Orange Box (includes Portal, Epsiode 1/2, and more) is coming out this year as well.

Jeez, Portal looks sweet. And what a cool trailer.

Lord, give the time to play these games, and the patience and wisdom to know when to play hooky from work. Amen.

I don't know if I'll make use of it all, but I want it

AMD will be coming out with a new, completely redesigned multi-core processor , which will compete with Intel's dual multi-core processor model. It's going to be sick I tell you...sick!

AMD lost some of their momentum in the chip market because Intel came out with their design first, but AMD apparently wanted to re-engineer the processor in order to differentiate themselves from Intel's 2-chip model.

Put simply, there are actually 4 distinct cores in the AMD Agena (branded now as "Barcelona" for servers, and "Phenom" for desktops) 10h architecture. Intel's "quad-core" product is actually 2 dual-core processors, which basically exhibit the same performance of their earlier chips.

AMD's are redesigned from the ground up. According to an article on Informationweek.com, each core's clock cycles operate independently in order to maximize instruction processing within each core. Previous AMD and Intel dual-core architecture had each core maxing out for all tasks, which could cause some systems to hang should some intensive calculations be required. From the looks of it, Barcelona and Phenom change all this, as the 10h architecture looks to optimize power usage, which should also help keep the temperature down. I'd imagine these systems are going to run a little hot.

Why do you care? Well if you just use your computer to rip music, burn CDs, send email, and update spreadsheets, probably nothing. You won't need to upgrade anytime soon.

For those that are drooling for DirectX 10 games like Crysis and Bioshock, this news coupled with the upcoming release of the nVidia 8800 Ultra Superclocked PCI-E video card should make your implants shudder and quiver with cybernetic ecstasy. Barcelona is supposed to be available this summer, with Phenom will following shortly after.

Haven't seen the Bioshock footage? Check some out...

IGN has an excellent collection of additional Bioshock media. I recommend the Developer Commentary. It's a bit long, but contains great highlights without spoiling anything.

Goodbye consoles...I love you, but I'm just not in love with you

I took back my Xbox 360 I recently bought. It called me a jerk and asked me why I had been so persistent in engaging in the relationship only to retract my committment once I had sampled the goods. It wasn't an easy decision. Take back one of the most sickest consoles on the market?! "WHAT?" you ask? I debated long and hard about it, but the decision was made based on several factors:

1. The Xbox 360 is loud. Real loud;
2. My TV isn't HD-compliant;
3. To integrate it into my PC domain I'd have to purchase a different sound system that features an auxiliary input;
4. Console games are more expensive than those for the PC;
5. I won't be able to play Crysis on the 360.

For these reasons I took it back and pocketed my rather fat refund. To which computer-related purchase do I allocate that money? Fry's had the Seagate 750GB 3.0MB/s SATA II drive on sale for $329. That's cheap...but I don't have that much porn or mp3s to necessitate that much space. More RAM? I have 2GBs. That's good for now.

Most likely, it'll be an 8800 series graphic card. Homer-like drool is pooling in my lap as I think of this big fat sexy card. Directx10 compliant...Crysis...mmmm...768 MBs of DDR3 onboard RAM...384-bit interface...superclocked core running at 626MHz...memory clock at 2000MHz...128 stream processors...dual DVI outputs...HDTV output. I'm almost scared to invest so many primal emotions in it. Am I setting myself up for a let-down? Shhhh...I'll always love you, baby. Always.

Just what are the system requirements for Crysis? According to *sources*, these are them:

Minimum
CPU: Athlon 64 3000+/Intel 2.8ghz
Graphics: Nvidia 6200 or ATI X1300 - Shader Model 2.0
RAM: 768MB on Windows XP or 1GB on Windows Vista
HDD: 6GB
Internet: 256k+
Optical Drive: DVD
Software: DX9.0c with Windows XP

Recommended
CPU: Dual-core CPU
Graphics: Nvidia 7600 or ATI X1600 Pro (SM 3.0) or DX10 equivalent
RAM: 1.5GB+
HDD: 6GB
Internet: 512k+ (128k+ upstream)
Optical Drive: DVD
Software: DX10 with Windows XP