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The Drivers Are a Lie, or, Fuck PC gaming Soooo much
Some Jerk | 2:49 PM on 12.25.2007 12 comments


My PC is an emachines T3828. To say that it's a piece of shit would be an insult to actual pieces of shit, which have a better rendering ability when it comes to bump mapping or the specular mapping on loose chunks of corn. My parents bought it when I started art school two years ago because they don't know the meaning of the term "value" and were trying to be nice. Indeed, it was appreciated and I've since upgraded it. First I bought some RAM, one whole gig, which ran me about 80 of my hard earned dollars. Since then it's run much much faster. This is to say the piece of shit no longer clogs the inter-tubes.

Still, one cannot live on memory alone. If you're to do anything in a 3d program such as Maya or 3DStudioMax you're going to need some raw horsepower, or at least some raw horse-meat. Not one for eating glue, I opted for what I thought at the time was a low-end starter card for my PC. The Nvidia FX 5200 is best known as the worst thing the company has done since that time they killed a hooker at the office Christmas party. It was forged in the depths of hell...by Hitler...I saw him doing it...he gave me a thumbs up.


It runs on baby seal blood. Do you know how expensive that shit is?

Now here's the shit-kicker of the whole thing. The computer cmes with a 2.8 GHz processor, 80 gig of storage, five USB ports and those cool little speakers where one of them shits-out on you after about a month. All this and a monitor was about $300. It seemed for a while, while I was upgrading, that eMachines had finaly made a redeemable product or that perhaps my family had pulled a fast one on them. However, now that I look to upgrade my graphics card I notice something, the damn thing is PCI. If you don't know what that means, imagine working on your car and just as you go to put a new engine in you notice a note from GM telling you to go fuck yourself.

So at least I can take comfort in the fact that my 256mb graphics card will run the latest games on the shitty-looking minimum settings the companies that make them spend all of five minutes developing for. Sure Team Fortress 2 looks like it should be being played on a Nintendo DS, but damnit it's still fun. However, once again PC gaming decides to kick me in the balls and steal my wallet. A while ago I had to reformat, because while I was away at school my sister did something and killed the whole rig. Now not only does the damn thing limit it's own potential, but the drivers are being mistaken for the standard drivers the card installs on.

Every time I try and install the latest drivers, taking all 2,345,245 precautionary steps including but not limited to:
Removing the old drivers
restarting (in safe mode)
using driver sweepr pro
restarting
installing the latest drivers
preforming a sacrificial blood-oath
restarting
getting pissed off when it doesn't work
And what's every technical support type forum's answer? "Download and install the latest drivers from blah blah blah blah blah." It's as if everybody on the internet can't read. The drivers appear as correct on the device manager, but dxdiag and steam's diagnostic tool disagree.

So yeah, my options, if I want to game or animate at a framerate in the double didgits, is to either buy an entirely new motherboard and graphics card combo that probably won't work or an entirely new computer.

Fuck PC gaming.
Fuck PC gaming.
FUCK PC GAMING.



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11 comments | showing # 1 to 11
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ToiletDuck's Avatar - Comment posted on 12/25/2007 15:44
ToiletDuck
Try restarting harder.
Spykron's Avatar - Comment posted on 12/25/2007 15:57
Spykron
i gotta say, starcraft 2 and maybe an mmo here or there are the only things i want to play on a pc. and even those would just be easier on my 360 IF IT FUCKING HAD KEYBOARD AND MOUSE SUPPORT WTFBBQ!

but seriously, starcraft 2.
vexed alex's Avatar - Comment posted on 12/25/2007 16:17
vexed alex
Fuck Tiger Electronic gaming!
Jetsetlemming's Avatar - Comment posted on 12/25/2007 16:25
Jetsetlemming
You obviously aren't l33t enough. You shoulda just got a Radeon 9250 instead, performs far better than an FX at teh cost of Shader 2.0 support, which the FX does so bad it might as well not have it.
Also, your problem is that you're getting the wrong latest drivers. FX is legacy hardware; latest Nvidia drivers don't support it.
Some Jerk's Avatar - Comment posted on 12/25/2007 16:28
Some Jerk
I know, I've tride the legacy drivers.

Doesn't matter if the drivers are new, old, good, bad, or specially chissled into stone by your mother's piss-flap, everything gets recognized as the stock drivers.
Some Jerk's Avatar - Comment posted on 12/25/2007 16:28
Some Jerk
Also,

http://iamralphssmirkingrevenge.ytmnd.com/
Jetsetlemming's Avatar - Comment posted on 12/25/2007 16:38
Jetsetlemming
Ah, I think I know what your problem is.
You know, PC gaming as a whole would have a much better public image if it weren't for NVidia and how they design their installers.
Try these:
http://www.omegadrivers.net/nvidia.php
roleypolinde's Avatar - Comment posted on 12/25/2007 17:59
roleypolinde
Buy a Nvidia 7300gt AGP and get over the fact you have one of the worst 3rd in recent history
Some Jerk's Avatar - Comment posted on 12/25/2007 18:40
Some Jerk
So, with the omega drivers my PC just reboots when a game crashes. Although I must admit, the graphical polish is nice for the five minutes of Team Fortress 2 I played. Oh, that an the heavy playing "The Final Countdown" was pretty epic.

Why would I buy an AGP card if I don't have an AGP motherboard?
Jetsetlemming's Avatar - Comment posted on 12/25/2007 20:35
Jetsetlemming
It's not the drivers causing your PC to reboot instead of CTD when the game crashes, it's the game crashing. ;)

A note: If your card is the exact same thing that's in the image in the blog post, and you're running a cheap shitty PC, there's a huge chance of overheating. Cheap shitty PCs don't tend to have much in the way of cooling and ventilation, since playing solitaire and making excel spreadsheets and browsing the internet doesn't create much heat, and the companies might as well actively discourage you from playing a game with their PCs the way they design them. Did before it crash, or at anytime while playing, graphical artifacts and fuckups appear onscreen?

Another possible culprit is unstable power supply, as putting in extremely shitty underpowered PSUs is another hallmark of brands like emachines and Dell.
Some Jerk's Avatar - Comment posted on 12/25/2007 20:55
Some Jerk
Thanks for all the help.

Well, while both of those are possible, because lord knows eMachines and Best Buy love to take a dump on their customers, I didn't notice any graphical errors. Sure things looked shitty at their lowest setting. The damn interface looked pixelated, which made no fucking sense seeing as most of the models were still pretty spot-on. This thing could use a good dusting, but I doubt that'll stop it from fellating every cock in sight.
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