WoW: With real hardware

Threw down some clams at the local LAN bar today to play WoW with some "real" hardware. Nice. WoW was my first LAN bar experience nearly two years ago, and I can still remember having nearly the same experience I did playing Quake with video acceleration the first time with my Voodoo 2. Going from an iBook that's having a tough time with WoW to a real tower makes it seem like you've nearly a new game.

Now I've got a Windows tower, but wondered what the 256 meg NVidia 6800GT (and AMD 64 3800+, fwiw) would do for me over my 3000+ and Radeon X200. Handled WoW well in 1600x1200 with everything maxed out in the video section. Smooth movement, with one texture glitch and no other problems in 80 minutes of play.

Strangely, though now that I think about it, likely in no small degree because I tend to just solo around, now in Winterspring, the extra hardware was really only useful while travelling. When I was griffing from zone to zone, things were especially good looking, with lots of eye candy. When I was searching for new mobs to smack, I enjoyed seeing relatively impressive landscapes. Pretty cool.

When I'm grinding, though, I'm not paying much attention to the way things look. Heck, I could barely see the furblogs or yeti while I pounded on them. For soloing, the hardware is a bit wasted outside of the large cities and wide open scenes.

I did enjoy being able to see farther and find more paths around spawn points, but that was about it. The headphones were awfully nice too.

Oh well, next time I hope to dig up some next gen console game to play during my paid time. About time I went next-next gen. Perhaps I'll hit a particuarly rough instance soon and drop back by for my WoW tower lease, but the problem with playing on the Aussie server is that my buds aren't usually on before, um, 1pm by the Aussie clock, which is US LAN bar closing time!