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In the later part of 2007 I finally had some funds put together to get myself a proper PC gaming rig again.  I settled on the Nvidia 8800 Ultra as my card of choice.  I bought the MSI version for a massive $589 before shipping.  This was actually quite cheap for the Ultra at that time thanks to it being an MSI model.  And then I strapped a $130 waterblock to it.

Yep.  I upgraded from a $300 mid-range video card to a $700 one.  Even in 2007 the 8800 series was getting a bit dated.  The Ultra was discontinued only a couple months after I purchased it.  It wasn’t a good value for the money so they say.

I’ve been using it for a year and a half now and today is the first day it’s let me down.  I can’t run STALKER Clear Sky at 1600×1200 with full eye candy at 30FPS minimum.  FarCry 2, Crysis, Fallout 3, FEAR2 and GTA4 are all games I’ve recently played with it and it’s done amazing on each and every one.  STALKER:CS is a demanding game with amazing lighting effects and at 1600×1200 it will dip down to 20FPS.  Again, with maximum settings.

Except for AA.  I don’t use or like AA.

The problem seems to be video RAM.  768m just isn’t enough anymore if you want full eye candy.  GTA4 is the most noticible when it comes to video ram usage since it provides a handy little utility for guestimating how much you need.  If you want big draw distances you just need a lot more video memory.

Super fast DDR3 helps when you need to swap textures but it’s still a bad idea.  So I have to run STALKER:CS at 1280×960 resolution.  With full eye candy but less resolution I get the 30FPS minimum I want with averages in the mid 40s.  The video memory usuage drops to 600-800m so mcuh more inline with the card.

Don’t know why dropping resolution drops down memory usage but since it does more power too me.

I’ve noticed that I’m not running the card overclocked.  With RivaTuner and the water cooling I can clock this card to over 720MHz core, 1580MHz shader, and 1250MHz vram.  RivaTuner somehow got uninstalled on this machine so it’s only running it’s stock ‘overclock’ of 660/1512/1150MHz.

The stock Ultra is spec’ed for 612/1500/2160MHz.  So MSI really got some solid numbers out of it out of the box.  But don’t let MSI fool you: the card was NEVER stable at those settings with the stock cooling.  You’d get a lot of pixel ‘glitter’ at those settings though underclocking it to stock Ultra settings fixed that.  So did going to water cooling.

As far as the DangerDen cooler well I think it was a waste to be honest.  I love DangerDen products and I’m absolutely glad someone makes such a massive cooler that can also cool the RAM and power components.  But the thing of it is that you just can’t get much more out of the RAM.  RAM tends not to overclock so well on video cards and even when it does it provides very little performance gain.  Having MORE ram is important.  Does the DangerDen cooler sacrifice GPU cooling abilites for the RAM?  The GPU temperatures are quite high.  Well over 65c after intense gaming.  Thermal transfer from the GPU to the water is poor with this block.  That doesn’t stop 720-730MHz core ranges from being unreachable though.  With a little overvolting I think 730-740MHz would be completely stable.  I would like a better GPU block though.

I still think vram is the limiting factor here.  Who cares about a fast core/shader if you’re swapping textures from system RAM all the time?  If this card had 1GB or more of RAM I think I’d be playing at full res on STALKER.

The bottom line for me is that I’ve gotten a lot of use out of this card.  Being able to run PC games with all the lovely eye candy has sort of made me buy and play a ton of PC games in the past 18 months.  I’m still shocked every time I get a new game and go in to the options screen and crank everything up and watch it not struggle at all.  Did I get my moneys worth?  No I don’t think so.  The water cooling kit was too much for what I got out of it.  And the MSI Ultra, while a good deal at the time, wasn’t priced to compete with the slightly better valued 8800 GTX.

But I still don’t need to upgrade.  The Nvidia GTX 285 can be had for under $400 and it’ll have 1GB of RAM.  It’s a tremendous value for that and it’d be my card of choice.  I get to wait for the next series of GPUs to come out before I start feeling the slowdown.

I was thinking about tech company organization the other day and I stumbled upon an interesting thought.  In many ways, working in a development house is like working in a restaurant.  You have customers.  They look at a menu, pick what they find appetizing at that moment in time, and then place the order.  The kitchen springs to life, uses the ingredients and appliances they have to create a meal, and then some one delivers it to the customer.  If all goes well, the customer pays and comes back again for more.  The customer really has almost no idea what goes on in the kitchen and usually doesn’t want to know for fear that they would be appalled.  The customer and chefs almost never communicate with each other unless it’s through a volley of intermediate employees.

Imagine your developers are the guys in the back making the food.  Imagine the development managers are taking the orders.  Imagine the product people or upper management as the customers.  The consumers.

It all sort of fits, doesn’t it?

Customers all want the same basic things.  They want fast service.  They want quality service.  They want reliable service.  And most important of all is that they want it cheap.  It’s easy to tell when when your service is fast at a restaurant.  If you don’t have your food right quick you’ll be bloody hungry!  Quality and reliability are easy to measure too.  If the food tastes like burnt motor oil than they’ve failed on both accounts.

For some reason the customers of the software development world have a much more difficult time of gauging the performance of their ‘kitchens’.  They almost always seem to focus on speed and cheap.  I don’t think they always realize that they’re getting McDonald’s though.

Fast food joints provide a ready supply of expedient food options.  Through clever marketing it even seems cheap.  Your typical fast food meal can cost just as much as eating out somewhere more reputable however.  The real problem with fast food is that it’s completely unhealthy and has a tendency to kill you if you eat too much of it.

Your typical developer is like a fry cook.  You don’t even want to know what this guy would do to your burger.  You certainly wouldn’t want him to take your order cause he’d simply muck it up.  He’s getting paid so little and similar jobs are so readily available that he just doesn’t care about your fries one bit.  So you get soggy fries.  And no matter how bad those fries are you’ll still go back to this place because it’s quite simply a quick fix.

There are nice restaurants though.  There are developers out there who think just like fine chefs.  They want to make something beautiful and tasty because that is their passion.  They design their menu carefully and they charge a lot more so they can go buy the best steaks or wine.  The wait staff is cute and attentive and will certainly know which delightful soup the chef has whipped up.

And the chef will certainly feel a little annoyed if you pour ketchup all over your dry aged filet.

You’d probably like your developers to be chefs and not fry cooks.  You have to give them the leeway to do the kind of work they can be proud of.  Just place your order and sit back and enjoy the appetizers while they assemble something you’ll love.  If the food arrives late and cold than don’t pay!

The sad reality of this, however, is that no matter how good of a restaurant your development house turns out to be, it’s still a restaurant.  Your customers are placing orders and waiting to see what will arrive at the table.  It’s almost always a surprise.  I think this is a terribly ineffective way of building quality software products.

Think baseball team instead.  Everyone has different positions on the team but they still all work as a single unit.  They’re all working for a single goal and the greater good.  They’re playing to win the game.  And in modern times they’re also playing to raise someones stock portfolio.  You can make a lot of money while doing an excellent job and having fun.

Oh sure, every company throws out terms like ‘team building’ but they almost always mean hierarchy building.  And hierarchy is exactly the root cause of the restaurant scenario.  You segregate the people requesting work from the people doing the work and create tiny choke points of failure.  No one ever really seems to know what anyone else wants.  By putting someone over someone else you’ve almost certainly reduced the amount of two-way communication between those people.  Person A might feel intimidated by Person B now.  Or Person B might feel they don’t need to listen to Person A because they value their own opinions more.

I know many development companies have adopted flattened management structures.  Others create things called ‘verticals’ or ‘pods’.  Like communism it sounds good on paper but these types of things always seem to have fundamental flaws.  My personal experiences with pods has been grueling primarily because pods don’t interact well with other pods.

The bottom line I think is that if you have a room full of smart and educated people from developers to managers and everywhere in between, why should communications be one way?  How can one set of people dictating requests to another possibly use the full group’s combined potential?  Bi-directional communication has to be encouraged.  The most junior guy on the team might have the best solution for the project.  The product manager might have thought of a simple approach to a tricky development problem but the developers might immediate dismiss it.

Avoiding conflict is not always the best solution.  But the real trick here is to maximize ideas while minimizing conflict.  In the end I don’t know the proper solution.  And I’m certainly not saying that I work for McDonald’s.  But I’m fascinated by the various attempts at company organization I’ve seen first hand.  I’ve seen the ups and downs of many different kinds of structures.  But what I see the most is company after company always falling back on the old standby of ridged org charts and middle management.

I think the offices of the future are going to be much different than that.

Things I Hate:

Invisible walls.  This is supposed to be a wide open game so why can’t I jump over certain walls or get close to others?

World layout bugs.  Objects through walls, trees floating several inches too high, etc.  These are all things that take away from being totally engrossed in the game.

Incredibly bad car physics.  You do A LOT of driving on this game but it feels so stiff and completely unfun.

Everyone is an enemy.  Surely this isn’t realistic.  Where are all the innocent people to kill?

Enemy respawns.  If you clear an area and go back to it a few minutes later it’s completely rebuilt and full of enemies.  Why not have a much slower respawn rate?

Repetitive audio.  The music is interesting but surely they could have more variety.  Enemy voice acting seems out of place with too many ‘white’ actors and repetitive.  Might as well use the Wilhelm scream.

Audio ESP.  I hate games that change the audio to indicate an enemy is near before I see them.  It’s like cheating.

Can only track one mission at a time.  This wouldn’t be so bad except that missions will randomly take you to opposite ends of the map.  This means a lot of boring driving or re-killing countless guard posts.

Enemy AI.  It’s passable but there are some real problems.  Enemies *always* go far cars it seems.  Kill the driver and the gunner goes to the driver seat.  Enemies are given amazing accuracy.  Shot gun headshot from a mile away.  Right.  They run around a lot which is good but if you fire a gun they’ll STOP and LET YOU shoot them.  Bleh.

Bugs. Game isn’t crashy which is GREAT.  EA could learn something from Ubisoft.  But certain missions don’t work correctly.

Saving.  On the PC after many full saves it now takes the game well over 4 minutes to actually pop open the save dialog.  And the Save Boxes in the game world which make sense on the console versions of this game don’t fit at all on the PC.

Things I Like:

Fire physics.

Gun unreliability and break downs.

Main character voice acting.

Weapon choices.  There is a lot of strategy in this game.

Varied terrain.

Diamond hunting.

Data warehousing has become a sort of personal quest of mine.  I’ve been using computers since I was four and in those few decades I’ve managed to create, acquire, and loose countless precious bits of data.  It’s disheartening to have lost some projects I created in my pre-teen years that I know I poured my soul in to at the time.  And all because of a bad floppy.

What’s worse is that I just recently lost more of this precious data in the past few weeks while upgrading my fileserver.  It’s hard to say just how much I’ve lost.  It’s hard to notice when a rogue file or two goes missing over the years but it happens all the time.  On linux with some historical backups a quick diff or rsync can find problems like that.  Cygwin and Windows doesn’t really work quite as nicely.

So currently I have been sorting through 9 year old backup CDs trying to look for things that have gone missing.  I had been thinking it was silly to keep hanging on to a binder full of ancient CDs but I proved myself wrong today.  In fact I found quite a few little nice surprises that I had thought lost forever.

Windows XP is a terrible tool for archiving or backing up data.  Vista is not much better.  I really wish this thing could be Linux.  Heck, I wouldn’t even mind dual booting if I thought Linux could be trusted with live NTFS partitions.  I don’t mind Ubuntu hacking it’s way through one of my NTFS USB drives but my lovely RAID5 array is another story.

NTFS and Linux is getting better though.  It’s a lot less of a struggle to get it to WRITE to NTFS anyway.

Computers are good at remembering things for us.  From letters we sent to ex landlords to what music we used to listen too and pictures of people we used to work with.  My computer remembers my past a lot better than I do.  I try to focus on making new memories rather than spending time living in the past.  It’s possible that this choice means it’s actually more difficult for me to retrieve older memories.  If you spend enough time dwelling on the past it’ll seem much more clear.  I think that in a sense having an “off-mind” memory storage device is quite beneficial.  If only they were reliable on the cheap.

Amazon S3 is not cheap but it does protect my memories from fire and theives or any other sort of disaster that might befall my house.  It’s money well spent I think.  But like burning CDs or using backup tapes it takes quite a bit of thought and energy.  Archiving anything requires a lot of patience and technical knowledge.  Your average computer user simply doesn’t backup their data properly.

Of course now that the web has become very cost effective one can upload their pictures to Flickr or Snapfish or any number of gallery products out there.  You can probably RAR up your text documents and shove them on to RapidShare or something.  But people have the tendency to unwittingly back things up to the web and this is a trend that should definitely continue.  Archiving data really should be this natural.

For me the problem is sheer quantity.  Home videos and huge print quality photo files and CD and game backups start taking up gigs of space.  I have 3.5TB of storage in my file server and the more I have the more I tend to fill.  The RAID5 array has redudnancy but nothing a power surge or virus can’t wreck in an instant.  So I have backup DVDs.  It can take days to compress and burn just a few dozen gigs worth of data.  So I backup more regularly to portable USB drives.  But this is problematic since Windows XP doesn’t have any good backup utilities to properly handle this.

The real reason I lost data in the move is because In order to back up 2TB of data you need 2TB of backup storage.  I had 1.25TB.  I backed up the most important things, so I thought, and assumed the rest would be safe on the RAID5 array.  After the crash I made sure to buy a 1TB drive for one of my external enclosures and I’ll be sure to be buying more of those.  I really need the ability to have full backup somewhere.

And since I wouldn’t want to squeeze even 1TB in to Amazon S3 I need to consider getting some sort of fireproof safe for the backup drives.  Heck, I’ve even considered hiding a hard drive somewhere in one of my cars.  At least if my house burns down or is robbed I’ll probably have the car with me.  I just don’t know how a hard drive will survive in the car with all the moisture and vibration.  I regret throwing out all those silica gel packets now.

The fun comes from my old Atari 800XL system.  I’m still working on preserving the files I generated when I was eight.  It takes some special hardware to get the data on to a PC but I have managed to get some of it uploaded.  It’s still another time consuming process but one I hope to start in to again soon.  Those old 5-1/4 floppies rot pretty darn quick.