Tell them, my song.

I know that I’m a nutcase, you don’t need to tell me. Didn’t I once say that the main reason why I bought the Xbox 360 was not to have to upgrade my PC/Mac again only to play computer games? Well, here I am, the living contradiction: My new nVidia 8800 GT graphics card arrived today, and she’s a real beast!

To make it short: Crysis and STALKER run at playable framerates at 1920×1200 with high detail settings on my Quad Xeon Mac Pro on Vista Ultimate Edition 32 Bit. It’s quite amazing how well these games look and how detailed their game worlds are. Still, I already know that my Mac Pro is maxed out with these games, and that probably later in the game, when more enemies arrive, I’ll have to reduce the resolution to get better performance. To be honest, I wouldn’t have expected Crysis to run at all at 1920×1200 - I am really surprised that it does, and I am even more surprised that it is really playable.

The other problem that I have now: What do I do with my third display? Vista’s Direct X 10 drivers already crashed on my while I still had the old 7300 GT cards in my computer. Only after removing them Crysis stopped crashing.

Furthermore, Aperture still showed the erratic display behavior when it’s running on a system with more than one graphics card.

So I think it might be better for my peace of mind to just leave it at having only one graphics card in my system, namely the new 8800 GT. But do I use her with my two 20″ Cinema Displays or with the 24″ HP TFT and one 20″ Cinema Display? Tough call. Although I originally had bought the HP display only for my Xbox, I have grown quite attached to it in the meantime.

I guess I have to sleep over it.

Maybe I was having a little bit too much on my hands in the last days, but I’ve re-installed Vista Ultimate Edition 32 Bit SP1 on a 160 GB disk on my Mac Pro (which is what people nowadays call ‘running Windows in BootCamp’).

My Mac Pro has 8 GB RAM, and that’s too much for a 32 Bit OS; Vista correctly reports that there are 8 GB in the system, but it also says that only two GB memory are available for applications. I could get myself a 64 Bit version of Vista, but the problem with that is that Apple only provides 64 Bit Windows drivers for the second generation Mac Pros, and mine is a first generation model. I’ve finally reached the age where I want my computers to ‘just work’, so I don’t want to go to that uncharted territory anymore.

It’s already problematic enough to get Apple’s latest software running on officially supported systems. For example, I did not manage to install the BootCamp 2.1 drivers update - Apple’s setup file just does not work on a German Vista version (with the display language set to English). A quick research on Google told me that I am not the only one with that issue, and it seems that Apple just does not care enough to fix this. Anyway. Everything runs well enough with the original BootCamp drivers that are being shipped with Leopard. Did I say ‘well enough’? Well, the truth is that Vista with SP1 runs snappier on the Mac Pro than Leopard 10.5.4; the Microsoft system is very responsive and fun to use on this machine.

But what was the reason why I installed Vista in the first place? Right: Games.

I hadn’t played Far Cry in quite a while, so I’ve installed it with the 1.40 32-Bit patch. Not caring much for the recommended system settings that the game suggested, I cranked up everything to the maximum: 1920×1200 resolution, all details set as high as possible.

At first, I had a problem with the mouse in Far Cry - it only worked in the menus, but not in the game itself. Googling helped immediately: In the game’s control settings, you have to select “default”, apply, quit Far Cry, start it again - and voilá, the mouse now also works in the game!

What can I tell you about the game experience? Well, I currently only have two GeForce GT 7300 graphic cards in the Mac, but Far Cry runs extremely smooth on my configuration - no lags, delays, frame drops, hiccups, nothing. I’d never seen the game on that detail level, so it was an all new experience for me. I knew that there would be fish in the water on high details settings, and they really look nice. But I didn’t know that there were also pigs, parrots, dragonflies, fireflies and flocks of other birds flying through the game world. Far Cry’s fauna really is amazing on a powerful enough computer.

But talking about birds, here’s a nice one from last night’s gaming session: There’s a mercenary patrolling on a wooden bridge that I need to cross. From a long distance, I grab my sniper rifle and take the guy in my sights. The moment I pull the trigger, a bird crosses the path of the bullet. The merc remains unharmed, but through my scope I see white feathers everywhere. Oops.