My old graphics card (a Nvidia 8800gts 320) died recently while trying to do a video capture. Poor card started to chew out weird colored pixels and never recovered. Since the warranty for the card has expired a long time ago, I decided to purchase a new one. The revised Nvidia 260GTX with its 216 shader cores, low power consumption on idle (when compared to ATI's equivalent offer the HD4870) and lower temperature on load are the deciding factors I bought one eventually. After testing out the card in a couple of games, I must say I am very impressed with the performance delivered. In fallout 3, I was able to max out the graphics settings at screen resolution of 1680x1050 and the game was still fully playable. In MageDx tech demo II, it doubled the frame rate I got with the 8800 gts 320, going from an average 50~60fps to an impressive 110~120fps. I would recommend this card to anyone looking for an upgrade but beware of the size of the card, measuring at 10.5 inches (26.7cm) long, this card is definitely not for those who has a small casing.
Atmospheric scattering
Over the weekend, I have added atmospheric scattering to MageDx. My implementation is based on the paper "Rendering outdoor light scattering in real time by Hoffman, N., Preetham, A.J.". Getting the sky to display correctly was pretty tricky, it took me quite a bit of time tweaking the rayleigh/mie parameters to get nice sky blue color shown in the screenshot below.
To see the full effect of atmospheric scattering, i recommend looking at the video i have uploaded below. The video shows a simple day-night cycle simulation complete with dynamic lighting and shadowing.Thats it for now! Back to more coding...
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