From: Matthew McKeon
Subject: Re: FF7 RIVA Patch

Just thought you might be interested in a little followup on that FF7 patch... check out the gaming discussion board @ www.rivazone.com. This patch is a swift, ugly, brutal hack, and usually breaks video boards running OEM drivers rather than nVidia's reference drivers. Even if you install the refs, the patch requires up to 500 meg of swap space to function, since all those 8-bit palleted textures are simply bumped up to 16-bit and gobble four times as much memory. Needless to say, even if you do allocate that much swap the bloody thing thrashes constantly.

I'm VERY angry and disappointed in Eidos and nVidia for releasing this update... the only reason I bought FF7 was their promise of a Riva patch, and I am not willing to abandon the functionality of my OEM drivers or cough up an obscene amount of system resources just to run a game. The LEAST they could've done was admit that this sloppy bugger was shoved out the door without testing, or that the solution they were implementing would be far less desirable than running FF7 with an originally supported chipset.

No way, Bud. If people really did respect this, the first thing people (like myself) would do is use it as a dodge. Someone passes me by, I type one character, and then frag 'em from behind at close range.

I think Quake needs pay phones. Step into the booth, no one can shoot you, you can't shoot anyone else. We'll need a "roll of quarters" pick-up.

Regarding the high FPS issue: I've read several opinions stating that high FPS are a waste. I couldn't disagree more. Two reasons:

1) The notion that the brain can only process so many FPS is absurd. The brain is an analog instrument. Movies are shown at 22 FPS [Editor's note: actually 24 FPS -- nitpicky Blue]. Ever notice that you never see a long series of rapid pans? Because even with motion-blurring, it looks too staccato and you get disoriented without enough reference points. In real life, you can turn your head as fast as you like without getting disoriented (if your sense of balance doesn't fail).

1) When using a mouse to look in Quake, if you yank the mouse quickly to spin around (after getting shot from behind, for example), you can get disoriented very easily if running low FPS. At 90+ FPS, you don't get disoriented. Why? You have more than a frame or two of reference points displayed during the quick motion. Your brain may or may not interpret some arbitrarily low number of FPS, but at least IT gets to decide which "frames" to process (and blend together), and it seems to do a much better job than any video card could.

I run Quake II on a P300 with SLI Voodoo2...at 1024x768/120Hz. It's so velvety smooth it seems like real life. If I cap the FPS at 60, there is a VERY noticeable difference. Not near as velvety and fluid. I did a "blind" test on a non-gaming friend, to make sure it wasn't just that I was biased knowing what the FPS was. It was obvious to her too. Now how could we tell the difference, if the brain was in fact "limited" to some arbitrary FPS (where are they getting this pseudo-science bullshit from anyway)?