It’s me, live with it

I just downloaded the Nurien demo from nvidia, you can find it here, more information here. The demo is basically shows some girls walking on a runway, while showing what Physx can do with their hair and clothes. Well, basically, it makes them (the hair and clothes) act more believable.

There is a catch, though. Back in the beginning of its popularity, we need a separate card to calculate physics. The only card capable of doing that was the Ageia Physx card. Now, though, Nvidia took over the fun by making Physx accesible using only nvidia cards, specifically the CUDA-capable one. My 8600GT is on the list, so I downloaded the demo and gave it a try.

This is the first girl on the demo. Like I said, this demo showcases what Physx can do with clothing and hair.

See?

Now, my 8600GT is already crawling helplessly with one girl on screen. And now there are three of them.

This is what my humble 8600GT managed. Remember, this card is still reasonably stronger than what most people are using, yet it was humiliated with this game. Granted, I was using the 175.16 driver, instead of CUDA-enabled one, so I’ll try with one of those later.

 Here’s a quote about Nurien:

Nurien is a new category of social networking service where we can give our users more powerful ways to express their identities by enabling them to create their own unique avatars, fashions, 3D objects, legacy media (such as photo, video, and text) and share them with the world via their own 3D rooms that are accessible from a web-browser as well as our software clients. Users will use their own unique avatars to play various fun games and also partake on social applications like fashion shows, and music video contests.

Now, let me ask you a question: How many social networking fans are actually using anything better than 8600GT?

And: How many of them are girls?

Yeah, I know, it’s sad.

UPDATE: I installed nvidia’s 177.89 beta drivers. With this, I managed to get around 10% improvement in nurien demo in software physx mode. Using Geforce Physx, I got 50% improvements, but with a lot of weird texture glitches. I’m pretty sure the problem lies in CUDA implementation. I still think this is a nice development over the old 175.16 drivers.

I have another PC besides the one I always uses. This PC here have served its purpose as a media center PC (as in, TV replacement) and working PC for my sister. And today, It showed weird problem.

It keeps turning off itself, and by turning off, I mean it just goes dead, not politely showing any shutdown screen. That, by itself ruled out any virus-related, or even software-related problem. I made that point sure by leaving it idle at the bios screen. It goes dead.

Knowing that it’s a hardware problem, I opened the lid of the PC, and found that the case fan isn’t connected. I then connected it, close the lid, and turned it on, idling at the bios screen. It died, again.

I grabbed my spare Power supply unit (You always need one) from the cupboard, and replaced the one on the PC. Plugged everything, close the lid, leaving it idling at the bios screen. It still dies.

Now, the PC is placed under the desk in the corner of the room, where it is kinda hard to do any work on the PC. So I carried it to my desk to see what’s wrong. And in a minute, I figured it out. The CPU fan is dead.

I feel stupid for not realising it earlier, I closed the lid everytime I changed something before, so I didn’t see it. And the fan was never a noisy one to begin with, so I can’t tell by listening.

Anyway, the solution for this problem is simple enough, I grabbed another CPU fan sitting around and installed it. Problem solved.

This is not a hard problem. I just took the wrong step by closing the lid of the PC before making sure everything is in order. Keep your head cool and double-check everything if you find such problem. I just forget those words. Silly me.