8600GTS

[FatherJack]

Anyone have one of these? 256M I think. Or know anyone that does?

Work have kindly provided me with one for my work machine, so I can, erm, monitor servers more quickly, but what settings suit it for most games*? I have a widescreen LCD monitor native res 1680x1050 (so I can see more servers) which is actually nicer than my home one, so it'd be nice to be in keeping with that.

LoTRO, TF2 and BioShock seemed to auto-detect with 1680x1050 at either High or Very High settings, but play horribly jerkily. Am I better turning down the detail levels, or reducing the resolution? I'm really not sure what resolutions scale well on widescreen monitors, other than that 4:3 ones look like ass.

Machine's a C2D E2160 (1.8G) with 5300 (667MHz) RAM and feels a little choppy just running XP, but that may just be because of what I'm used to. May do Fista64 at some point, for work-related reasons - it's supposed to be quite good at DX10, but I doubt performance will increase overall.

Needless to say EVE runs fine, but then it ran fine on the onboard graphics card while still looking as impressive as ever.

*Officially: Lunchtime Network Monitoring Applications

[deject]

Am I better turning down the detail levels, or reducing the resolution?

Yes.

[FatherJack]

Yes.

I know it's not the best card, but it was free and I only have to tolerate it for an hour a day. Am I really expecting too much to run at 1680, and if so, what are the traditional "step-down" 16:10 resolutions? I went straight from my 1280x1024/1024x768/800x600/640x480 origins to 1680x1050 widescreen, so have a gap in my knowledge early widescreen adopters might be able to fill.

[deject]

try 1280x800 and Medium settings

[thewombleofdeath]

My 16:10 Widescreen Monitor runs natively on 1440x900, which I think is the next resolution down. Also, it that fails, 1024x768 seems to work.