Salute, fellow Wulffen!

I finally bit the bullet and upgraded my video card.  Whoa…have they come down in price from when I built this rig five years ago!  See system specs in my signature below.  The new card was only $139 (compared to the $380 I spent on the old card back in 2007!).  I also doubled my RAM from 2GB to 4GB, since DDR2 RAM is becoming scarce nowadays.

Although the new card is certainly not top-of-the-line, it's a HUGE step up from the old GT7950 card that I had with only 512MB of RAM on it.  I put it to a "stress test" tonight by setting up a quick mission "skirmish" with a full load of 30 planes in the air…a furball that would have been little more than a slide show with the old card.  I played around with various graphics settings, starting with everything maxed out, and I did end up having to pull some of my graphics settings down.  But the sim still looks fabulous and it ran pretty darn smooth.  I am definitely one happy camper! 

I pulled the anisotropic setting all the way down to bilinear, and I pulled the antialiasing down to 4x.  I kept the forest visibility at "very far" and didn't exceed "high" on any other setting.  Compared to verything maxed out, I honestly can't see the difference in the graphics, but I can definitely see the difference in performance when I pull back on a few things. 

The nicest thing about the new card is that I now can turn on all of the nifty lighting and shadow effects.  Very cool!