Radeon

As is the usual case about me, I typically trail behind the rest of the world in some way, spiritually, economically, socially, sexually, by a range of years. Socially, I always feel about three to four years behind everyone else and when I get particular 'ah-ha' moments, it's quickly followed by a realization that everyone was there way before me. I don't utterly fall apart about it, but it does take the glow of self-realization and actualization down a notch.

As everyone and their brother know, I've come into gaming late in my life. I certainly don't have the time, money, or energy to compete with those pesky 13-year olds so prevalent on the systems now, but I'm comfortable that I've found a unique little niche for my OCD superhero fetish and have something to occupy myself now that I've given up TV. Little did I realize when I purchased my very new, very expensive desktop last year (thanks, Mom!) that a sub-standard, proletariat video card had been installed. I only found out after a first round of games I'd been purchased last spring failed to load or display correctly. I couldn't even find the product on the company website, it was so obscure. I have no doubt that video card was the technological equivalent to generic Cheerios®, all bland and packaged in a white box with plain black, block lettering spelling out: substandard video card.

So while my current game, City of Heroes, did load and while I can play it in its immersed 3D environment, I kept getting warnings that I needed to upgrade my video card drivers, which I did, to no discernible effect. Then I started asking around about upgrading video cards and what that would entail and how one goes about doing it. I got a lot of mythology and some very wrong answers about having to simultaneously upgrade my system memory at some astronomical cost but eventually, with some research on the net and basic trust in my own skills, I set out to upgrade. The real question I should have been asking myself was why, other than to play those other games, would I upgrade since CoH plays fine? I dunno, honestly. I imagined a cleaner, crisper, smoother, transitioned page and 3D graphics that really blow me away. But I didn’t have anything to base how bad my current graphics were behaving, so my logical assumption, and the basic theory I apply to the rest of the world is, it’s always, always better somewhere else or with some other product or some other service or some other person than with what I have right now. It’s total the-grass-is-always-greener mentality but it’s driven me into situations at times that validate that assumption and so I go on. How Jeff and I have remained together after almost 10 years with that as my guiding force escapes me.

As my recent history can attest, I don't know much about the world of computers but I know enough to be very dangerous to myself and to anyone who thinks I know about computers (Hi Nikki!). I knew enough to know that video cards can be upgraded and my research pointed me, finally, to the Radeon® 9600XT series of accelerators. Honestly, I wouldn’t know whether that card was any better or any worse or any more worth the money than any other card but its statistics looked impressive. I’m taking a marketing class right now and am fully aware of the significance and impact of using meaningless, unverifiable stats in zingy graph charts to unduly influence the stupid and simple. The price, of course, was outrageous too, especially when I think that there is no way to quantify any perceived benefit from the old card to this one. The only way it could even come close to being cost-effective would be if the characters popped off the screen and gave me a free-hand job any time I logged on. But I bought it anyway, pessimistically relived that I could return the damn thing if it didn’t work or more likely, I couldn’t get it installed correctly.

The caveat with me and computer systems are, I have no training, formal or otherwise. I do some reading and try to apply my intuitive powers of understanding regarding whatever I’m trying to figure out. I generally understand the depth and breadth of computer knowledge to be so deep and wide that I, as a health care professional and supposed ‘people person’, have no hopes of understanding or applying anything I read or learn about computers in any discernible way. That being said, I have, on occasion, opened the system to do upgrades. On my old system, I read up on memory upgrades and successfully double my capacity and running environment. This was back in the day when I was so scared about static electric discharge that I stripped down naked and worked on it on the bare wood floor of our apartment, hoping the anxiety-produced sweat wouldn’t bead up on my forehead and drop onto the motherboard, shorting it out.

So I open AMBR the other night, locate the old card, remove it (after having removed the drivers first since, uncharacteristically, I’d read the directions first) and replaced it with the new Radeon® card. It snapped in just perfectly but when I went to hook up the auxiliary power supply (as every manual on the product I’d read indicated I needed to), there was no place to plug it in. I searched the board over and over again but honestly, that four-pronged male to female connection just didn’t exist. So again the pessimism prompted me to just finish up, close the casing and be done with it. If I had to revert to the old card and drivers, nothing really lost and I’ve lived with bruised ego from these kinds of blind jaunts into areas I have no conceivable business messing around in enough to know it doesn’t mean I’m anything but just stupid. I can live with that.

The short of the story is, the system whirred into life, the drivers were installed and there were no preemptive warnings about a failed card. It installed and apparently worked without any conflicts. I was anxious to boot up CoH (cause I was, by that time, totally into getting a free hand job) and see the wonderment that this totally unnecessary, extravagant, guilt-ridden purchase would bring forth. What I found was, my current, favorite character, The Yellow Hanky, was not yellow but blue. Not sad blue, but blue blue…like a blue blueberry. His skin tone was that off. Strange because the rest of the characters were blue also but the surrounding environment was completely normal. Defeated, I logged off, booted the computer off and went to bed, frustrated and with blue balls, hoping AMBR just needed a good nights sleep and everything would be ok in the morning. And it was, initially. The characters were normal colored the next time I logged on but other than that, the 3D environment seemed very similar, if not exactly, like before the new card. No new details jumped out at me, no new renderings or smoothness that I could see. Nothing. And then my character started turning magenta. Seriously. I watched as the skin tone color faded to magenta and then, again, turned blue. I was about to boot down again and just give up, take out the card, and get my refund when I noticed that in the game, it had become night time and a thought dawned on me. So I waited patiently as the night environment progressed in its ten minute cycle as it does, and as the new day’s sun broke over the edge of the city, my skin color faded from blue to yellow and finally back to normal. My very new, very expensive video card now supported the correct chronological lighting caused by day versus night in the game, something that I didn’t even know existed in the gaming environment.

I can honestly say there is no way that that single, identifiable upgrade in game quality is worth the price of the card. The fact that the card installed without any trouble or without me having a blood-gushing stroke makes me feel better in some, indescribable way. I didn’t have to starve this week to afford this card because that would have pissed me off and honestly, these experiences of mucking around in the actual system make me more confident (and thus, more likely to really fuck something up) that I can do these kinds of things successfully and not everyone can say that. So while I’m still years behind those pesky 13-year olds who could have done this with one eye on the TV and the other playing the game, I’m a little bit better for it, overall.