The Random Computer Stuff Blog

Google is currently marking every page as harmful to your computer. Just a heads up.

I just don’t think the ESRB gives an Early Childhood rating to games with “Blood and Gore, Violence, Mature Humor”, and other such things.

I was looking for benchmarks on the GTX 280 in Linux, and was unable to find any at Phoronix, which is my usual site for such information. So, I decided to write a quick review myself, after getting in on the $200 Buy.com deal.

A quick word about power and size: this card is big and hungry. At the wall my full system draws 420 watts under load, compared to around 300 max with the 8800gt. As for size, it is about an inch and a half longer than the 8800gt, which means you will need a farily large size case.

Tests were done on Ubuntu x64 8.10. I checked logs of CPU usage, and in general it remained low, although I think bottlenecking may have occurred in OpenArena.

We see scaling ranging from almost nothing to nearly double

OpenArena: At or near 300FPS for both cards shows us that most modern cards can render this game far faster than your monitor can hope to display. The Quake 3 engine is very obsolete by modern standards, but ID has promised to release Quake 4 at some point, so we have that to look forward to.

Unigine: we see gains of roughly 80% here, which is around what we would expect when making a rough comparison of the spec sheets. This is undoubtedly a significant difference, and was also the most stressful test run.

WINE CS:S: about 25% here, which is less than we would expect, but still noticeable. I attribute the relatively poor performance to WINE’s D3D support, although 40FPS is very playable. Although the 8800gt would probably be fine at 1680×1050, for higher resolutions, the GTX 280 is the way to go.

Conclusion: AT higher resolutions and with commercial games, the GTX 280 shows some significant gains. But at lower resolutions and with exiting open source games, many of which are based on Quake 3, the 1/3 the price 8800gt will do you fine.

I was trying to get Steam to work under Ubuntu 8.10 the other day. It turns out that the video rendering engine that WINE uses for Steam does not work properly when Compiz is enabled, so you need to disable it to make the Steam window appear. If I come up with a more elegant solution, I’ll post it.

I have been making use of  Badaboom for the last few weeks to convert DVD’s to my iPhone ( it supports other devices like iPods, AppleTV, PS3, etc). For those of you who don’t know, this is a commercial video encoder based of Nvidia’s CUDA, which works with all 8 series and later graphics cards.

I found that a commercial movie took between 30 and 40 minutes to convert to iPhone format. Overclocking my 8800GT from 600mhz to 700mhz did have a noticable effect on time, to  the tune of about 15%. Overall video quality was good, unlike some of the free iPhone encoders which I have had playback problems with.

It has a solid set of features, while the basic view is aimed to a simpler select and click interface.  Although you will need a program like AnyDVD for commerical disks, once you have done so you can do the conversion straight from the DVD. Overall, the price you pay is worth it over the slower conversion and playback problems found in free alternatives.

(I will cover Avivo later in the week)