Changed the look again, felt it needed to be a bit more autumnal in shade...

I wasn't happy with the presentation on my portfolio pages, so I've tried another style. I quite like it, I'd prefer a layered window to open with the image on, but this is a nice workaround. I finally got round to scanning in some of only-on-paper portfolio pieces so they're a bit more up-to-date.

First impressions.

Well I'm using a Mac Pro 8-core version 2.1 (sold in 2007), so I wasn't expecting everything to work that well.

But surprise, surprise my old machine feels brand new again. The graphics drivers are much better for my 8800GT, everything is snappier and smoother. I'll put this down to the new OpenCL architecture that uses more of the actual GPU, this means Apple or nVidia had to rewrite the drivers as they were a bit sluggish under Leopard. Everything is snappier though, especially the Finder which has been rewritten in 64-code and it shows. Same goes for Safari, though iTunes 9 is still pretty sluggish as it's running Universal Binary and, lets face it, is extremely bloated these days.

A few problems with CS3 - can't drop multiple files onto photoshop for instance, but on the whole everything has been working fine for me and I didn't do a clean install (too much to re-setup up), though I did keep my old Leopard partition for a couple of weeks just in case.

As to any 64-bit of multi-core speed up, I can't say I've noticed Grand Central Dispatch doing anything yet - needs the developers to get into that. My main softwares Cinema4D has been true 64-bit for a while now, but the CS3 suite (other than After Effects) doesn't use anything - I may as well have only 1 processor (instead of 8-cores). Handbrake which is use to recode video has also utilized the 8-cores for a while now - it's quite nice seeing 8-cores maxing out, you don't see it very often if ever.

So looking forward to the CS5 (I'll give CS4 a miss thanks) suite that should finally have a multi-core and 64-bit ready version of Photoshop, which is looking very dated these days.

I’ve updated my CV on the downloads page...

I recently updated this website - added some new portfolio work and animations.

Also made a better banner for the top here. Not exactly right - can't get it to show around the buttons but I'm using RapidWeaver for this as I have little interest in coding.
Dreamweaver to learn next if there's enough years left in me.

Grunge inspired :)

Well my 8800GT is all installed (as well as a fresh install of XP), my COD4 settings can be maxed out without any noticeable loss in speed. The game looks amazing at 1680x1050. Also played some Portal - one of the best games released last year - especially in terms of originality.

I have to say I had to wait nearly 3 months for Apple to make the drivers for us 2007 Mac Pro users. Not good and they’re quite poor drivers, I wonder if Snow Leopard will sort out the issues that many of us are having. The card is good enough for most stuff and hardly anyone uses a mac for gaming - not when you just switch to Bootcamp and run the games in Windows as they were meant to be played. I’m always glad to come back to the Mac side when I need to do anything else. Like create something. Which is most of the time.

Cinema 4D viewport is much quicker, but the drivers seem a bit slow - I guess that's what happens when Apple make the drivers and not nVidia. Hopefully this will be improved in the future.

Just a short entry. This is my first foray into blogging. I can't see me doing much of it as I'm more visually orientated. But… hey.

This will have some of my private and professional work. I'm a Digital Artist with around 18 years experience in various fields. Mainly visualising, implementation and artwork. Recently found an interest for 3D work, music and motion graphics (mograph) so there's some of that stuff on here too.

cheers
StructAural.