So, I got a new laptop. Yes, I’m such a trader of tech. I get teased about it way too often 😉 I see something that’s really kewl, or something that seems really kewl and I trade for it. eBay is my is truly my geek heaven. My iBook is eBay fodder–though I did get 90% of the value for it which payed for most of the new laptop 😀

Anyway, this new laptop has a Radeon x600. It features 128MB of dedicated video memory (it’s a hybrid card of shared/dedicated memory bringing total available video memory to 256MB).

I was playing Half-Life: 2 Lost Coast this early evening because WoW was down. I found out, because I hadn’t played around in the settings much before, that the video card has HDR capability!!

HDR (High Dynamic Range) Rendering is a brand new technology in video cards (it’s been around since 1985, actually) that was used in the Lost Coast episode of HL: 2 to simulate how the human eye reacts to light.

The video card on my desktop doesn’t currently support HDR, but I will probably be upgrading the video card fairly soon and it will more than likely have that capability thereafter.

Anyway, I was totally blown away by what it looked like. Below are screenshots of what I saw. It may not seem like much, but to a gaming geek like myself, it’s frickin’ amazing. Really, to have the full impact, you need to have the screenshots side-by-side.

Church windows (HDR off)
Church windows (HDR on)
Hallway (HDR off)
Hallway (HDR on)