Earlier this week I noticed that video on my computer was behaving oddly. Strange artifacts now and again, things I would have attributed 20 years ago to problems with video memory.
Then last night when I poked my nose into Lord of the Rings Online, that was enough to push the card over the edge into failure mode. All 3D operations appear to have ceased. The card, thankfully, has fallen back to some minimal operation state, so I can still do things like type angry blog posts (without pictures), but everything is very slow on the screen.
Are you old enough to remember when scrolling text in a large Word document was a stress test for a video card? Yeah, I’m operating with that level of video support now. Scrolling down the page on my blog is a test of my patience.
The card, my second 8800GT after the first one failed almost a year back (also while playing LOTRO) has not given me a lot of faith in nVidia for the moment.
So for my next video card, just in time to be my birthday present I suppose, I think I will jump back to the ATi side of the video world with a 4850 based card.
But no Lord of the Rings Online for a while, not until I get the card replaced. At least I can update my EVE Online skill training on our iMac. Go CCP and Mac OSX support!