Troll
Just try and prove me wrong.

3870
So I finally got my Diamond Radeon HD 3870. The new card from ATi.

I paid $269 in total for it, the competing card, the GeForce 8800 GT was going for $289 at the cheapest places I could find. That is, $289 base price. The $269 includes tax, quick-rma fees, and shipping. So, yeah, I got a better deal on the ATi.

I played the Crysis demo with it, and it played smooth as silk on medium settings at 1600x1200. No, I don't have numbers, go to a review site for that. Unfortunately, that's the only game I've tried on it. I tried a bunch of the samples from the DirectX SDK, which ran as I expected, and for the first time I'm able to get hardware acceleration on the D3D10 samples which is nice.

I haven't had any issues with the drivers yet, but this is ATI, and I'm sure I'll find something sooner or later, I always do.

The card is super quiet. In fact, I can't hear it at all even while it's at load and that of course had me frightened that the fan wasn't kicking in, but keeping an eye on the temperatures alleviated that worry. Compared to the x700's we have installed at the office it's a godsend, those things are like rocket engines.

The temperatures however I'm not entirely thrilled with. At idle I get about 51 degrees C, which is apparently normal and at load it sticks around 89-91 degrees C. Pretty hot. Thankfully it shunts the hot air out through the back of the case so it's not getting inside around the other components. I will be upgrading the stock cooler with a thermaltake du-orb sometime (probably xmas) and that particular cooler has been shown to lower the temps greatly.

So far I'm happy with the card. For what I paid, I would have expected a LOT less. Oh, and it doesn't hurt that there's stock for these cards unlike some other cards I can think of... Seriously nvidia, way to drop the fucking ball. In the end, I'm no ati or nvidia fanboy, I have no loyalty to either company... and why should I? They aren't loyal to you or I. So when one gets a leg up on the other, especially in price, then awesome, because we will always win.

Gorgon
So I ripped out the font system and murdered the font editor in cold blood. I've got it generating the fonts on the fly. Thanks to the OpenTK library I was able to gain some insight into how I could go about this. All the features I had before are still in place, that is, the fonts can be shadowed, or rather, the text-sprites can be shadowed and the fonts can be outlined. Plus I threw in some nifty extras like:

• Multiple texture support - The font will use multiple texture pages if it can't fit within the maximum texture size.
• Customizable maximum texture size - Because what I want is not what you want.
• Custom GDI+ brushes - You can use custom GDI+ brushes like patterns, gradients, textures and so on when generating the fonts. This gives some funky looking effects.
• Standard crap - Like bold, italic and strikeout.

The big advantage over my previous bitmapped fonts is a crisper look. The anti-aliasing looks awesome, and the text overall just looks fantastic. Gotta love GDI+... when it works...

SlimDX
So now that I have me a DirectX 10(.1!) capable card I finally decided to check out what SlimDX has in the way of DX10 support. Looks a little skimpy so far. I had no idea how to enumerate anything, so I checked into the DX10 docs, and I read about something called the DXGI and how I could use that to enumerate (I like to enumerate adapters and video modes, it makes me feel manly). However, these DXGI interfaces don't appear to be in SlimDX, but I could be mistaken. I was hoping to start up a new project sometime in the future with DX10/64bit-only (that's right, I'm a pioneer and/or stupid!) support. Guess I'm going to have to wait.

I wish I had more time to devote, I'd like to be able to commit to helping out in the SlimDX effort. Maybe once I get Gorgon sorted out... that's going to be a long wait.