Painting, Computers and more

Good Monday everyone!

I trust you have all had a good weekend.

Mine was a combination of joy and frustration.

So Friday came and the evening was spent on the sofa, brushes in hand doing some painting. After all with my computer out if service I had nothing to do with it.

I spent about 4 hours in total painting, and I must be honest, it feels like I've done next to nothing.

Most of my time was spent lightening up the skin on my demons and Neverborn, but annoyingly so, when I look back at the work I've done, they don't 'really' look any different.

That was annoying, but I will withhold judgement until they're finished.

***********

Alongside painting we were also using the time to clear some of the skybox hdd, involving the last three episodes of Dexter I had yet to watch.

Now I don't know about everyone else, but I've been a massive fan of this show since Episode 2 of Series 1 (Episode 1's Dexter wasn't likeable enough) but I feel that this ending to the show did not do it justice.

I know it was supposed to be emotive etc, but all I walked away with was a feeling that Dexter was a prick and not the likeable character that I had been watching up until this point.

It was almost as if the writers didn't want to commit to an actual final ending for him, so copped out and chose the middle ground: "making him happy would annoy those who want justice", while "making him pay for his crimes would annoy those who want him happy" so instead they went for "we'll go down the 'meh' route instead!"

***************

Anyway, Saturday came and with it my new graphics card!

I was so excited, like a child on Xmas morning. I installed it, ran a game, and then sat there gob-smacked as a card developed in 2011 turned out worse than my 2008 card.

Yeah I didn't really do my research so it's my own fault to be honest. My previous card was a HD 4850 and was beautiful! It would run the latest games at maximum quality with an average FPS of about 30-40, which is more than playable if you MUST have max graphics. The only drawback was the lack of DX11.

My new card is a HD 6450, so a whole two generations higher, it would stand to reason that it should be better.

It was also super cheap at only £30.

Yeah... What was running at 30FPS now ran at 3.

I was annoyed, but more so at myself for not checking this out first.

I had a look at some benchmark tables and found my old GPU had a score in the 400s, my new card, in the 200s.

It's really not for games.

Apparently it's awesome for watching films etc, but rendering games? Yeah...

But it works. If I turn the quality down low I can still play lots of my fave games, and that's better than the current state of my old card which won't even stay powered on for more than 10 mins.

So now I play the waiting game, waiting for Friday the 29th to roll around so that I can buy another graphics card, a HD7750, which has a benchmark score of just over 1000! So well over double the power of my old card. This time, it will be good!

*********

Anyway, the weekend passed, now I'm on my way to work.

It's annoying as it's going to be a 6 day week as I have to work Saturday. The good news however is that I get next Monday off as a result.

So on that note, take care and I'll see you Cryptside!

- Your friendly neighbourhood Doctor Loxley