Cooper McKay's Blog (5)

How I became interested in PC Hardware

I still remember my first upgrade. For Christmas in 1995 I received a CD Rom drive bundled with a game called Myst. I was so excited! Of course I was 10 years old, and had no idea how to install it. My dad helped me install it on my 133 Mhz AMD 5x86 and soon I was enjoying Myst. (This wasn't my first CD Rom drive, I had one on my 33 Mhz Intel 486 prior to this in the early 90's) Since then I enjoyed upgrading my computer, but I had much to learn. In 1997, I wanted to play a game called Comanche… Continue

Added by Cooper McKay on December 17, 2009 at 8:00am — 7 Comments

What is a PPU and why PC Gamers should care

PPU stands for physics processing unit. Not to be confused with PSU, (Power Supply Unit) or GPU, (Graphics Processing Unit) A PPU is a dedicated processor for handling the physics processing in a computer game, it increases performance by offloading the physics calculations off the CPU and GPU. There are a few ways to handle physics in games. There are middleware physics engines (ex. Havoc) Onboard GPU physics acceleration such as Nvidia's Quantum Effects Technology or ATI's version, which I am… Continue

Added by Cooper McKay on December 17, 2009 at 8:00am — 3 Comments

3 Programs I think will see new use among PC Gamers

Here are three relatively old programs that I think will start to be used more often. The first 2 are to lock refresh rates and the 3rd is an IPX emulator to play older games. Powerstrip & Reforce - These are two programs that among other things, lock a monitors refresh rate when you run a full screen application or computer game. Basically a refresh rate is how quickly a monitor refreshes an image. Higher refresh rates cause less eye strain and have a smoother more "realistic" feel in movi… Continue

Added by Cooper McKay on December 8, 2009 at 5:42am — 2 Comments

My Competive Gaming history

My first online game was Tribes (1998) and my first LAN game was Doom (1993) I have been into games since a child (the first game i played was mario land for the gameboy in 1989), mostly PC games because my brother was the one who owned the TV when we were little, and we had seperate rooms. But soon I become a PC only snob., probably around the time Halflife was released in late 1998. PC games are so much more competitve in my opinion. When TFC was released in 1999, I was HOOKED. Every day after… Continue

Added by Cooper McKay on January 11, 2009 at 6:30am — No Comments