Because I have little else in my life that’s quite so important.

I wondered what I’d be reduced to playing with my backup graphics card today. It’s a NVidia GeForce 3 Ti 200, with 64Mb of video memory and a DirectX 8 level card. So I checked the stats on some of the games I do still play (while currently dealing with my MMO addiction) and found that the minimum requirements came in at:

EQ2, SWG, WoW: 64Mb 3D Card (Pixel Shader & Vertex Shader compatible)
Unreal Tournament 2004: GeForce 2 or superior (64Mb memory or above)
Half-Life 2: DirectX 7 level card
F.E.A.R: 64Mb GeForce 4 Ti or ATI Radeon 9000.

Well, sure enough on checking the fine print, the GeForce 3 has Pixel Shader and Vertex Shader capability. I’ve no idea what it does but the card does it and that makes me happy.

I loaded up Half Life 2 and it ran fine. Okay so it only ran at a small screen resolution of 800×600 but I can live with that. Probably. I can certainly live without playing F.E.A.R for a bit so I should be all right for an interim period. But despite what it says, EQ2 isn’t playing nice. It’s jittery and stutters and, well, just isn’t that much of a pleasure to play graphically speaking at the moment.

So, the dilemma is whether or not to spend thirty quid on a DirectX 9.0 level card with 128Mb (or, dare I say, 256Mb) video RAM*. Is it worth having a backup card that will adequately deal with my gaming needs while my primary card gets repaired?

D’ya know, I remember when all you needed to play a PC** game was 4Mb of RAM. Forget the 3D cards and the physics card and the digital surround environmental 5.1 audio experience card, we had an SVGA chip and liked it. If we were lucky, we might have had a CD-ROM too.

*Oh yes, I remember the days when we just needed 16kb of RAM too.