Ok.
I am a gamer. There, I said it.
You now have an image of me that's mostly not true. I do have an outside life, a job, friends; my skin has seen the sun more than once this year.
I admit that Warhammer 40K totally geeks me out.
So, mostly not true. Some of it is; some of it's not.
But I know a hell of a lot about computer stuff. This is because I'm a gamer; I've been tweaking hardware to run games since there were hardware DIP switches on the motherboard.
As such, I've installed countless graphics cards and upgrades; swapped hard disks, memory, and even system boards more often than I like to really admit; installed drivers so often my head spins; and reinstalled Windows so many times I reflexively hum along with the Windows XP startup sound.
But I've never, ever seen what happened to us the other day.
When you install a new computer game, the first thing it does is typically examine your hardware and determine what settings your computer can run it at.
This makes a bit of difficulty for game companies, because they have to write their games to work on a huge range of hardware, from the most impressive new cool toys, to grandma's kludgy 800MHz from 7 years ago.
Mostly, they do a good job. The really cool special effects are only available to those with the money for the really crazy systems, but that doesn't mean the game can't run on grandma's machine; it just means it will look like something run on grandma's machine.
For example; Half-Life 2. Came out last year, so it's not BRAND-brand new, but pretty top-of-the-line in any event. It ran fine on our computer, as long as we left some of the settings at less than highest - like, "high" instead of "omgwtf."
Good framerate, no stutters, no heat issues, everything A-OK.
And then, we tried out Oblivion.
For those of you who don't know, or care, Oblivion is the fourth in an open-ended series of games called "The Elder Scrolls," by Bethesda Softworks. The series has been a serious contender for best RPG series ever, ever since the get-go.
Being as I had played the first three, and Tara loved the third one, we decided to give it a go.
Minor mistake.
I say minor for reasons I will explain later.
At any rate, it installed fine; after a minor bobble with Bink Video, the opening movie played fine; and we went into the options. Oblivion had suggested its lowest graphics settings, after its hardware scan; we tried it.
We should never have even attempted it.
The first thing we noticed was a framerate of maybe 3? Or 4? Frames per second. Bad sign.
The second thing we noticed was white-out textures, everywhere. It rendered surfaces fine; you could see 3D objects; but the graphics card in my wife's computer was not equipped to render and fill at the same time with that much detail, apparently.
So, we exited out, disappointed, and decided to keep it in case of a pretty serious hardware upgrade in the future.
We had no idea how soon that was due to happen.
Soon after (about 30 minutes) we exited Oblivion, and went back to Windows-land, we started seeing screen flickers. (WTF?) Then, the computer crashed. (!!!) After rebooting, it crashed again. (OMGWTF!?!)
So, I opened it up, figuring I could change the graphics card for the one from my defunct computer, since it was more powerful, and maybe we might be able to play Oblivion on mine. (This is the reason it was a minor mistake, BTW - if I hadn't still had mine, we would have been SOL, for sure.)
Pulled out Tara's graphics card - an MSI GeForce 4 Ti4800 SE, for those of you who give a damn.
This is what I saw.
You probably don't see it yet. Let me show you.
Notice that there's no MSI logo to be found. There was when I installed the card. Hmmmmmm...
Upon closer inspection, I noticed something odd. Take another look.
WTF?!? Not only is the sticker gone, the fan housing is... Melted?!?
OMGWTF?!?
Yeah, that's heat damage. Attempting to play Oblivion on the GeForce 4 card LITERALLY MELTED THE FUCKING GRAPHICS CARD.
Excuse me while I don't rape my Radeon 9800 Pro with this game, thanks.
I can understand if the game detects hardware that can't play, and says "You can't play!"
Really, I do.
But "You can play, just not as well," and then MELTING AND DESTROYING my computer hardware? There goes a good chunk of change.
Lessons learned; "Oblivion is too cool for us," as Tara so eloquently puts it.
