DPT and Mod Progress…

Okay, its been a really busy week, i’ve been working on the DPT stuff during the day and my evenings have been working on the design doc for our game mod. I’ve completed a rough version of the dpt program but there are still some issues with it, i think the problem is with the algorithm and not the implementation. I need to have it completed before friday so i’ll stressing a little bit… I’m gonna meet with my dad tomorrow and discuss it and hopefully we can figure out whats going on…

As for my game mod, i’ve finally started on the design document for it, it a very rough badly written version but its enough to give to the writer and have her strat on an actual little episode storyline, once that is done we can actually start implementing it. I’ve got a rough idea for the game rule system but the control scheme we had envisioned would probably prove troublesome, so i’ll need to work out some of the kinks. Hopefully i can provide something a bit more solid soon.

 I’m going put the link to the design document here so you see what i’ve done so far…

here it is: Game Design Document Initial pre-alpha Version (please be gently with it, haha)

 anyways i’ve been working for over 8 hours straight now and i’m starting to lose it so i’m off home to pass out…

A long weekend: 8800gtx

What was supposed to be an exciting and fun weekend turn out to be a complete nightmare filled with swearing regret, some blood, some embarrasment, some more swearing, a lot of bandwidth wasted on campus researching and finally some screaming and yet more swearing…

I received an 8800gtx for work, i’m going to be doing some GPGPU programming on the card using CUDA for another image processing project and I’m going to start learning directX 10 programming. Stay tuned for those blogs as they promise to be quite interesting. I’m going to learn a lot in the next couple of weeks.

 I was super excited when i got this card as my 7800gt was starting to show its age, an absolute gem of a card but sadly it needed to be retired. I received the card and rushed home, ripped out the 7800gt and grabbed the “what then seemed a slightly larger card” 8800gtx to install it in its place. Then the swearing started, see if you can see why in the below image?

The damn card wouldnt fit inside the case! And i have (had) a full tower! The lip of the hard drive bays blocked the card. I have(had) a high end case that i thought would last me for years to come. except that the card wont fit, nor will this card fit in 80% of the cases on the market!!! it seems there are some select few case with an 8800gtx compatible rating.

anyways the second problem is due to immense size of the cooler the card wont fit over my chipset cooler, so i’m reduced to using the second PCI-e slot which unfortuneatly on my motherboard is an 8x slot and not a 16x slot, since i never planned on running two cards in SLI i bought a 570 chipset motherboard, I figure one 16x slot was more that enough. The performance drop should be minor, somewhere around 5-10% (i hope)…

At the end of the day i did get the card installed after 10 minutes of twisting and angling the card to get past the lip of the drive bays, once installed i was left with a wonderful 1-2mm of clearance between the bays and the card.

Thank goodness, its all over… So i got into windows installed the drivers, configured the card and fired up on the the games i was currently playing (since i’m on holiday now i actually have the time to sit and play for a bit, plus so many amazing titles have just been released), 15minutes in my machine blue screens with a nv4dsip error (nvidia driver error), an error with which i’m extremely familiar thanks to hours spent overclocking, the new card was overheating. I tried to manually set the fan via the drivers to 100% and i figured this had worked so i tried playing again at which point it crashed again, i was really getting pissed off now as i hadnt expected a stock card to overheat, not to mention the fact i was hoping to overclock the card a bit. So i ripped off the side panel and slapped my house fan blowing directly on the card and fired up the game, maxed out the graphics settings and tried to kill the card! No luck, Rock stable! Finally…

On the upside, this card is a monster, nothing i could throw at it slowed it down, its terrifying. The absolute raw processing power of this card is exceptional but this performance comes at a price (apart from the monetary cost of course ), the card runs extremely hot,  idling at around 70c and at load hitting the mid to high 80s… absolutely scary. I even comtemplated importing a water cooling setup for it. 

I was gonna planning on buying an aftermarket cooler for the card even before i got it and i usually need to justify those kind of purchases to myself and it takes a while but this time its starting to look like i wont have to, since its not just a nice add-on, its a necessity…

Also I sold my 7800GT for R800 and i this morning, I was also forced to sell my case for R650 (i loved my case so this isnt something i’m all that happy about) – so now i have r1450 for a new case… (money which i was going to use for a new hard drive or 2)

Since now the card is stable (albeit using a ghetto solution), i came in to the office to ensure the CUDA framework downloads had finished (which they hadnt due to varsity’s atrocious connection of late) and to do some research on a new case.

As for cases there are two candidates: the gorgeous, cool and expensive cooler master CM 832 – r2000 or the elegant but hotter(temperature wise) and much, much heavier antec p182 - r1300. there is also the cheaper antec 900 case -r1000 but its ugly as hell and pretty small, and i’d literally pay money to not have to look at it! All the other cases are either not large enough for the card or just look cheap with millions of flashing lights and fragile plastic bits. One nice thing about anec and cooler master, both those cases are built like tanks so i know they’ll last, both have won numerous awards and both are considered the top two cases on the market right now, you’re starting to see why this choice is hard… I’m really undecided between the two cases as each one has its pro’s and cons… money isnt really an issue here, i just want to get the best case possible, one that will last me years…

 

Coolermaster CM Stacker 832

Antec p182

Antec 900

While doing this i also did some research on a bug (cant disable aspect ratio scaling) i found in the nvidia drivers and stumbled upon the reason for my overheating, there is a bug in the drivers for the 8800gtx that never turns the fan on the card’s cooler to 100% since it tries to keep the noise levels down, but in africa with our high ambient temps this is required. This was the first thing i had done and now i find out that it had been disregarded due to a driver bug and that i needed an external  program to do this manually…

So what was supposed to be my first tast of CUDA ended up a very frustrating and now potentially expensive weekend. I’m going home now to the very unwelcome sight of my PC’s innards lying bare on my desk, i’m going to eat something and just go to bed…