I was a long-time Mac user and finally I bought (actually built) my first Windows PC; of course I got it to play games with my friends (specifically Total Annihilation). Shortly thereafter I picked up Half-Life and it didn’t take very long to get tired of software rendering so I bought my first 3D card ever (Voodoo3 3000 16MB). Wow, what a difference!
Then a couple of years ago all my friends got hooked on Battlefield 1942he PC. I tried playing it with my tired old video card but the poor thing just couldn’t hack it. A buddy of mine loaned me a 32MB TNT2 card so that I could join in the fun until I could afford a new card (thanks Jack!). After a few months I bought an nVidia Ti4200 128MB card which has lasted me a few years now.
So now it’s 2005 and Battlefield 2 has been released (well only the demo so far) and all my buddies are playing that now. I check out the very short list of supported video cards and sure enough mine isn’t there. Thanks to CosmoDNA I found a small executable that was supposed to fool the game into running on my outdated card but sadly when it tried to go from the menu screen to an actual map it crashed to desktop. The sad thing is that Half-Life 2 ran fine on this card and looked pretty damn good, too.
So it appears that I will be upgrading my video card for the third time just to play a specific game. Luckily the Sapphire 256MB Radeon 9600XT cards are right in my price range. Every 3D video card I’ve bought so far has been in the $100-$130 range and these are no exception. Hopefully if I pick one up it will last me for several years again.
