yeasty

from theinquirer.net: "The game that will benefit the most is Lock on: Modern Air combat where you will be able to see an incredible fifty per cent performance increase just by installing a new 5.6 Catalyst driver. ATI catalyst AI enables texture compression of the clouds resulting with no visual impact and massive performance impact at the same time. Sounds good to us if it works like described. We know that Nvidia test team will definitely try to find any image quality flaws and problems and scream to the rest of the world if it found any difference. We would do it too so let's hope that all is correct here. The new Catalyst comes in just a few days, it's free and I recommend you get it, if you have an ATI card, and enjoy it." http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=23594

sorry dude, but there's no way around it: you have a crappy video card. next time read some reviews before making your purchasing decision (they were pretty much unanimous about not buying the geforce 5XXX series). it's a testament to ED's programming skill that the game is even playable.

all right. i guess grandma is going to have to go live in a home, because i have to get an SLI rig. it will be mine. oh, yes. it will be mine.

i'll keep an eye out for benchmarks of those new drivers and i'll post here if i find anything.

we had this discussion earlier, and i blamed ubisoft for not giving ED enough time to optimize their game. but it turns out that nvidia is the culprit. in short, SLI only works in around 16 games right now. getting SLI to work with a game doesn't require developer support, but it does require nvidia to create an "SLI profile" for each specific game. until nvidia gets around to creating these profiles, SLI won't provide any performance benefit whatsoever. the good news is: nvidia is working on a profile updater, so new official profiles can be automatically downloaded between driver updates. they're also going to release tools for people to create their own profiles, which may be the only way we'll ever see LOMAC support SLI. so hopefully soon some enterprising LOMAC junkie will be able to make a kick-ass SLI profile for the community.

i'd rather see flaming cliffs delayed than see it ship without SLI support. perhaps they could use the extra time to add the AFM to the other flyables.

a single geforce 6800 gt/ultra can run doom 3 or half-life 2 at a high enough resolution to make anti-aliasing basically moot. however, the second GPU can buy you 8X or 16x anisotropic filtering, which is noticeable. so i guess an argument can be made for SLI in today's games. i'd love to see some screens of doom 3 running at 1600x1200, ultra quality, with 16x AF.

i didn't mean to imply that you weren't smart. let me rephrase my suggestion as "a good compromise between price and performance if you're budget conscious."

the smart thing to do is to buy a single video card now, then add the second one later when the price comes down. SLI buys you a big, but barely perceptible performance increase with today's games (the difference between 60 fps and 80 fps is almost negligible). the performance increase will be very noticeable, however, with the next generation of games. in the end, you'll save a couple hundred bucks by waiting until you really need the extra speed.

i doubt the nvidia driver is the culprit. nvidia claims that SLI doesn't require any extra developer support whatsoever; the same techniques that work for single-GPU systems work for multi-GPU systems as well. i think LOMAC's sucky performance with SLI is probably the result of ubisoft pressuring ED to release LOMAC prematurely, without proper optimization. remember, LOMAC performance sucked to begin with. the good news: if i'm right, flaming cliffs should work just fine with SLI, since ED now has time to fix what's broken.

he is EXACTLY right. these are the two biggest bugs in lock on. together, they completely ruin the multiplayer experience. please please please fix them.