Mike Doolittle's blog

Most of the time, PC gamers try to strike a balance between visual fidelity and performance; raising one decreases the other. However, one of the easiest ways to get better picture quality out of your PC gaming without any sacrifice in performance is with "triple buffering." It's totally free, and the difference can be dramatic. Let me explain.

I'm a big hardware nut, so I spend a fair bit of time tweaking my PC. I just recently finished building a new rig, and it's been a much bigger task than I thought it would be – I'm now on my fourth motherboard! But now I've got my rig all optimized and overclocked, and I've finally been able to get into some serious gaming.

Hardware sites are buzzing with news of the release (finally!) of ATI/AMD's new HD2900XT card. It sports some pretty awesome technology, and even has a GPU with an insane 700 million transistors. It does pretty well in 3DMark06. But uh, how does it do in games?

Buzz about AMD/ATI's forthcoming, oft-delayed x2900xt has been simmering for months, with many gamers holding off on purchasing one of nVidia's high-end 8800 cards with the anticipation that ATI would release a monster card that would surpass the 8800GTX's performance.

Ageia, whose PhysX card has been unable to acheive any kind of widespread adoption amongst the PC gaming community, has released a free download of their game/tech demo Cellfactor: Revolution.

I've come across a number of Vista-bashing articles on the web, with titles in the vein of "Ten Reasons Not to Buy Vista" or "Why Vista is the Dumbest Thing Ever Made By Anyone"

I think it's time to talk a little more in depth about the problems I've had with Vista which, few though they are, can be a bit annoying.

It seems like I can't throw a rock at a tech website these days without hitting some kind of negative buzz about Vista. Complaints range from a lack of drivers to niggling compatibility issues to ho-hum impressions of the features.

When the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 were first being shown off, a lot of people got the impression that PC gaming was in its last throes...