The New Computer, Quake 4 on AMD64

So I got video card #2 yesterday. This time it’s an eVGA (nVidia GeForce 6800GT) from newegg. I thought I could save some money by getting the video card from ebay, but the MSI one I got turned out to be fried (nasty snow & artifacts constantly all over the screen). Ebay/Paypal buyer protection to the rescue, though! I filed a complaint, and I just need to pay to ship the card back to the guy (who does NOT communicate to me), put the tracking number into a web page, and I get my refund. So not all is lost…

This machine seriously hauls ass. Everything is snappy as ever, and games run amazingly well. That means 1280×1024 at the highest details running solid well over 60fps with the latest games. I don’t mean to brag, but that just feels good. :)

I had some trouble getting Quake 4 to run on Ubuntu 64. Apparently Quake 4 depends on the 32bit version of libsdl. Since all my system libraries are compiled to 64bit binaries, Quake 4 simply complained that it couldn’t find the libsdl shared library. It turns out, that the fix is to put the 32bit libsdl (which I found in my Neverwinter Nights installation) in my quake4’s lib directory and prepend ”./lib” to the LD_LIBRARY_PATH exported in the launcher shell script.

I don’t usually like to attain software by dishonest means, but I just had to try this one out. You can bet I’ll be acquiring this title come this holiday season.