A little while back, I said I finally “caved” and bought an expensive video card. Well, let me tell you right now, my nVidia GeForce 7800 was worth every penny.
It speeds ALL sorts of things up, it really does. You need the RAM for it — I’ve got 1.5 gig, which is just a bit over what it probably wants — but RAM is cheap.
The games, of course, are stunningly beautiful. Especially first or third-person shooters. The ambiance in F.E.AR., for instance, is unbelievable.
So, anyway, it’s worth it. All my tightwad tactics came to nothing. It’s also really easy to install — just goes right in your AGP port where your old card (assuming you weren’t an idiot and bought a computer with a PCI video card) went. The only slight hold up is that you need to free up a power cable (they fit into the ends of hard drives, those thinga) and power up the card mostly because of the internal fan it uses to cool down when it’s processing memory-hungry applications.
Ah well, that’s all. 🙂