A Flightsimmer's Hardware Guide

In this second report, Nick Adams, a FlightSim.Com user wrote me pointing out some things that I found very educational about the new line of Nvidia and GEForce cards. Below, Nick explains why people have trouble with these cards and will offer great advice for those planning upgrades or an entirely new computer. His advice may save you the pain I have had with my Dell P3 500 and lockups when using only Nvidia based cards.

NVIDIA make some of the best video chipsets in the world. Their new GeForce card has revolutionised the industry with the new "Quad-Engine". All graphics cards pre-GeForce were able to do were render the images brought to them from the CPU bus. This left the CPU to do all the Transform and Lighting calculations as well as the standard physic's calculations involved with so many popular games. These calculations are the ones that breathe realism into the pictures we see. NVIDIA were responsible for taking the T&L (Transform and Lighting) calculations away from the CPU to the new Graphics Processing Unit (GPU). This essentially frees up CPU cycles to do other game and Artificial Intelligence calculations. Unfortunately this new technology is yet to be embraced by game manufacturers.

Although the GPU is not the only new feature on the NVIDIA cards, high-speed RAM and bus speeds allow more data to flow throughout the AGP port at a higher 256 bits. This new high speed RAM can flow at two data rates depending on the type of card. "Single Data Rate", where the RAM cycles once every clock cycle (for those of us who were just muffed by this, just think "half speed"), and the "Double Data Rate" where, you guessed it, operates twice a clock cycle ("full speed"). Surprisingly these data transfer rates are in the gigabytes per second range! With these super high-speed clock rates you really need reliable hardware to back this beast up.

When looking through the local computer shop I first spotted the Leadtek GeForce. After doing many hours of research on the card I was sold on getting one. At the time, I was running a Celeron 433 on a real lousy WINS motherboard (never heard of them??? I don't blame you!). After slamming the card in my APG port I was terrified to see that it didn't work. The sales rep suggested I get some quality components….he was right! I bought an Aopen motherboard (it was an AX6BC containing 6xPCI 2xISA 4xDIMM 1xAGP and a bundle of other goodies), 192MB PC-100 APACER SDRAM and a SoundBlaster Live card. This all set me back about $500…a worthwhile investment. After startup everything worked extremely fast, it hasn't skipped a beat yet!

There are a number of undocumented rules to follow if you wish to run a GeForce to an acceptable standard: