And the verdict is in...

For the past 6 months or so I've had the problem that games coming into the market can't run on my PC, or run very badly. Lately I've resorted to playing independent or specialised games because they tend not to focus on graphics as much. For example Micro Machines V4. A brilliant arcade game with just enough graphics to stay current. Or Silent Hill 3, originally designed for the PS2 (and indeed available on it), the loading areas in the game were small enough for it to handle quite impressive rendering (they also won a few awards for creature design, so look it up if you please). And the ever-popular (at least to me) Vampyres, The Masquerade. OK graphics, but gets very laggy very quickly with no support for filtering*...

So the point I'm trying to make is as follows: I bought this PC because I couldn't play FEAR or Oblivion. I would only be satisfied that my money was well-spent if I see said games running on my new machine, if not at full graphics at least a decent part of the way there.

Last night I installed Oblivion. When the game tried to detect the ability of my PC it said that it couldn't. That's expected as the game was released before dual-core CPU's and the GeForce 7600 was available. So I went about setting the graphics myself, putting everything at the default settings except upping the resolution to LCD-res**.

And what do you know. According the FPS*** readout on the LCD on my keyboard**** my old PC gave about 4fps in the first scene of the game, which is just a cell in a dungeon. Nothing major in comparison to the rest of the game. On the new PC... 48fps minimum, even when swinging the camera around ferociously! Yay!

After about an hour's gameplay I finally walked outside and saw the world in its full glory. Not perfect, though. The grass looks like a flat surface on the hill over there and the longer blades and flowers only become visible about 100m in front of me, but I get a constant 37fps.

My R8000 is well-spent*****.

Notes:
*Bilinear, trilinear or anisotropic filtering is a system where far-away objects are drawn in less detail, because you can't see that far anyway. Less detail means better performance

**Resolution is a way of saying how many little dots make up the screen. The more there are, the smaller they can be and the finer the detail. For example, turn on your TV (this doesn't count for HDTVs) and put your face about 30cm from the screen. See the dots? Does your computer's monitor do that? No. The TV screen has a lower resolution than your computer's monitor.

***FPS = Frames per second. How many times per second the screen is redrawn from top to bottom. Anything above 24fps looks fluent to the naked eye, but in some fast-paced games up to 60fps is required to prevent it from feeling like you're underwater. Lower fps can also make the mouse hard to control.

**** I have a Logitech G15.

It looks like this,

it has this,

and at night it does this.

*****My full PC setup is as follows:

• AMD Dual-Core 3800+, 1GB RAM Dual-DDR, GeForce 7600GT.
• LG FLATRON L1750S 17LCD with 4ms response time
• Logitech G15 Gaming Keyboard
• Microsoft Wireless Intellimouse Explorer 2.0 (I wanted a Logitech G7)
• Logitech Wireless Rumblepad 2 (basically a PS2 controller for PC)

Comes to about R15 000 in value.