The Official Graphics Card and PC gaming Thread

Very informative! Appreciate that. I get the feeling I should have purchased the UD4H board. With the efficient S-ata port placement! Making way for dual GPU's without blocking the S-ata ports! Because, either way I go(Nvidia/Ati), im gonna wanna purchase a twin card, for dual action as well as surviving the times a little bit longer. When the prices plummet that is LOL!

 

Dual cards worth having will never be any cheaper than they are now. They only become cheap when they are obsoleted by a single GPU card that does the same job. The purpose of dual GPU cards is to be faster than any single GPU card you can buy, and they will therefore be priced accordingly. The only borderline for that is the HD4850X2 which is around the performance level of the GTX285, but often higher, priced at $280 with a $15 MIR. However, the HD4850X2 has a particularly poor cooler and it is standard practice to replace it with a pair of VF900s and the appropriate auxiliaries. The HD4870X2 is a much better product, and very fast indeed, but costs $440 and for reasons I do not fully understand, Newegg are withdrawing from sale, only the Sapphire is left.

nVidia do not currently offer any worthwhile dual cards. The 9800GX2 is eclipsed by the single GPU GTX275, and the GTX295 is too severely limited by poor memory control to be competitive against the HD4870X2.

 

yah...I like my board anyway. And as ive said, not a huge gamer. So being 1 or 2 steps behind the other guy doesn't bother me I am by no means, competing LOL!

So...the 295 was released before its time? Drivers should solve that issue ehh?

 

It's not a driver issue, it's a fundamentally flawed design. nVidia hardware has never managed memory as well as ATI, which is why they went to 640,768 and 892MB/1GB cards before ATI did. The 1GB to the HD4870 and older HD2900XT was in fact a retrofit, they were originally all 512MB cards. The first natively 1GB card was the HD4890. With only 892MB memory per GPU, when the going gets tough, the GTX295 runs out and performance plummets. The 1GB per GPU of a GTX280 or 285 SLI config allows them to keep going longer, but the 1GB per GPU of HD4850/HD4870/HD4890 Crossfire configs and the HD4850 and HD4870X2 allow them to go even further before plummeting. One company, I think Sapphire has produced a 2GB HD4870, but it's a little needless. A single HD4870 GPU runs out of power long before 2GB is used.

 

hmmm. Thats rather disappointing. Im an Amd fanboy anyway sooo...It will be the 4870. Price is right, it'll run the game better than I can imagine im sure LOL! Please dont take that comment the wrong way. I have nothing against Intel. Ive never bought them, So I wont bash them.

The reason the 65C concerned me is because I also have a 6200 XFX! It would lock up EVERYTIME it hit 70C! Thats why temps in that range concern me. I imagine it was simply the card protecting itself, or simply coincidence.

 

Badly engineered card then. Trust me, 90C is normal for a lot of modern cards (except the 4890 which runs a lot cooler).
Just tried running GTA4 with the -norestrictions tab at max res. (heh, game thinks I need 1680MB of video memory!)
Frame rate, while wildly fluctuating was relatively good. However, the game only rendered half the textures if that. My car, the road, and other cars were there, but the rest was dark blue, no sky, people, buildings, walls, anything. Suspect I can fix this by installing the patch but also hear old versions of RivaTuner can cause this, so I've updated and will test that.

Reloaded the game and found it has another safeguard, the RESC10 trap. Don't think that one will be so easy to remove.

 

Wow! No matter how much I upgrade, im gonna be impressed! For the first time, Im running 2 separate videos on 2 different monitors, and its running flawlessly. The 4870 is gonna knock my socks off!!!

 

90C!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I wanna say something else, but it would be inappropriate. Thats darn near BOILING point bud!!! Wow. I guess it would have been a bad card then. It did not have a fan, if that means anything. Thats why I bought the Cooler we talked about a few days ago.

 

1.03 Patch and I seem to have got the game working at max settings, but the lag was ridiculous. I then found out that was because my PC was trying to use 5GB of RAM and I only have 4. Closing the game reveals I'm using 2.3GB of RAM at the windows desktop. Maybe it is time to go 8GB after all...

 

hmmm...the 1.0.3.0 patch seemed to correct a Windows games live update problem I was having, or it was simply coincidence. Because after update, the problem was fine. And I have nearly no video issues. Believe me though, I wanna move forward from this card. This card is the only outdated component in my rig!!!

 

See the following post! SORRY, some kinda glitch occurred.

 

Here's something interesting(to me anyway). It looks(To me) like Nvidia is smoking Ati!!! Sam, you say that Nvidia has poor memory controllers. And yet Im seeing some interesting figures here. Memory Transfer rates are pretty high for the higher Nvidia line. Infact, if one were going by this guidline, then the 260 darn near keeps up with the 4870X2! Please understand, my understanding of Graphics is Grossly limited LOL!
ATI comparison
Nvidia comparison
Oh heck, here's a snap shot of the two pages. Probably easier!

Hmm...now I may be seeing some mistakes on this graph!!! Surely the 4870 X 2 should have the larger memory clock over the single version!
And the 295 should have a larger memory transfer rate! LOL, its core clock is identical to the 260!!! Infact most of its info is! ROFL! I think somebody screwed up.

 

With relative haste I'm going to dismiss all of that. Graphics specifications, clock speeds, shader cores, memory bandwidth are completely irrelevant. They are only important when comparing like cards from the same series on the same architecture

Saying the HD4870X2 is 750mhz and the GTX295 is only 576mhz is rather like saying a Core i7 920 is 2.66Ghz but a Pentium D940 is 3.2Ghz! The speed is irrelevant because of the architecture design.
Similarly, the pixel processors on the nvidias are way outnumbered, but that doesn't make them slower for it.

The HD4870X2 is indeed a slightly slower product (and doesn't overclock as far) as the HD4870 because it is a much tighter fit. Two cards in pretty much their entirity are occupying a space barely 20% larger than what is used for one. The memory chips are double-density, and some aren't heatsinked. However, the 2.6Ghz is a typo, it should be 3.6Ghz by default, they messed that up.

 

Well...Here she is!
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814143173
I know, I know. Could have done better right. Something about this one just feels good. Others have said they've OC'd to 280 Stats, runs cool, its a Black edition! And heck, ive had a pretty good run with Nvidia. I figure i'll go one more round. Never experienced BFG before, should be interesting. If my 8600Gt, that everyone seems to sneer at, can handle GTA IV, than this new card, should handle it VERY nicely!!! And I should be fine for at least a year. Who knows, perhaps next tax return, I can go Sli/CF! Maybe even do another Mobo upgrade!

 

I didn't realise just how much you cared about GTA4. Ah well... enjoy.

 

My 8800GTS is a BFG and I've been very happy with it for the past two years. It should come with a lifetime warranty and will probably OC very well. Since you decided to go with Nividia are you going to be doing some folding?

 

Quite a bit LOL! The game is friggin awesome to say the least. Next to Photoshop, its the best thing ive installed! Minus a few glitches, and the headaches of installation LOL! Definitely NOT for the faint of heart LOL!

@eparker - FOLDING??? Do you mean cuda?

By the way, I found an Xbox 360 CONTROLLER emulator. Here's for those interested. Its working perfectly with my Basic Logitech controller.
Im afraid I dont recall which model it is. Ive had it for over 2 years, and I no longer have the package. I imagine if M$ catches wind of this though...
xinputemu3.zip

 

The best Software I've used for Gamepads is Xpadder. Use a Gamepad even in software with no pad support at all!

 

Probably better than throwing .dll files in the installation folder than huh? What im using seems more like mickey mousing than fixing the problem. It does work though. Do you think this Xpadder will work with GTA IV?

EDITED - wrong file extension LOL!

 

Depends if there's any analogue interface. Xpadder's usually more used for the replication of keyboard and mouse controls than native gamepads, but I'm not sure.