The Official Graphics Card and PC gaming Thread

I agree with sam. The Phenom 9950 is pretty slow, and limited from what i've read. I had the same thought sam. 1700$ is pretty steep for outdated equipment. I also had the same thought about only utilizing one core. I have multiple programs that only utilize one core. And will show between 26-29% cpu usage. But on the phenomII that single core is usually extremely quick.

 

ahh yes, what program is he using btw?

is it propietry?

 

Proprietary? You mean a program written CHIEFLY for themselves, and not for the mass population?

 

aye

 

I can't wait til I can do some basic programming. I have some ideas that seem plausible, but since I don't even have some basic programming skills...

 

Hey guys, thanks for the help.

The program is Auto Cad.

It looks like the correct numbers were he spent about $1300 for the whole thing - still got ripped off - although it included a monitor. Why he didn't consult me - I don't know.

Sam and Shaff - the discussion of the quadro fx and the firegl cards was quite interesting - I learned a bunch especially going out on google - I thought gaming cards were the high end - pro cards are 5 to 10 times more expensive for a very similar card with a specialized set of drivers.

The cards are optimized in terms of drivers that specialize in cad applications - open gl support - kind of a different type of dx 10.3 - the cad version.

Another forum guy had this to say:

So guys, let me ask, in case he declines to fork out $1200 for a pro ati card, or $1500 to $3000 for a pro nvidia card, what single gpu solution should he go for - the gtx 285 with 2 gigs ram for about $450?

How much slower will it be than spending the extra $700 to $1000 for the cad-specialized card with unique drivers?

Rich

 

The quadro or fireGL will absolutely flatten the GTX285 at 3D video rendering.

 

I agree. Not only are there driver optimizations, the memory and processing architecture are made for rendering a single 3D frame at a time, not several in rapid succession. Thus the need for "render farms" in 3D animation. Professional cards are also much higher precision and support many graphical techniques that are far beyond the abilities of consumer-grade graphics. Even in game studios the testing is all done on consumer cards but every minute detail of development is done on professional cards.

 

Wow, Sam and Jeff, thanks. I'm going to send over to Joe your comments word for word.

I was thinking the same thing, Jeff - Miles at Valve probably uses some specialized graphics cards in his modelling and animation work. I gave Joe both of Miles' phone numbers.

Rich

Edit: Getting off the video card (quadro fx or firegl) and back to the actual processor - we were talking about i7 before. We have surmised that auto cad is single-threaded - but that doesn't mean necessarily that future versions won't start adding parallel processing (or does it.)

Still, even if single-threaded, a 920 overclocked to 4 ghz or thereabouts will provide 8 64-bit cores hyperthreaded for 4 tasks in parallel - each task is blazing fast and the other three can handle background vista stuff.

Along comes a forum poster that Joe emailed me about, talking about the W3520 nehalem xeon processor. I did some reading in wikipedia about xeon in general - some of them have hyper threading already disabled, extra added cache, etc.

Should Joe get the i7 920 and a good motherboard and overclock to 4.0 ghz or thereabouts, or should he get the latest xeon nehalem version?

 

if you hyperthread it, the jobs won't be amazingly fast, you're just going to turn the i7 into a dual core since that program is single threaded. If an application doesn't support multiple threads, HT is exactly what you don't want.

 

http://www.gametrailers.com/video/multiplayer-trailer-modern-warfare/53382

 

Nice trailer buddy. That last moment had me laughing!!! Was "Modern Warfare" the first any good?

 

You never played Call of Duty 4? Shame!

 

im really not the one to be asking that, im veruy biasd, having played over 1500 hours off it. its one of my fav games of all time... i love it to death, or till MW2

 

It's also about the only PC game he's ever played. I've played a fair few other games and do enjoy COD4 quite a lot, but more for the single player than the multiplayer.

 

I briefly played C.O.D. 5. Im not buying anymore games til I come at least close to mastering my others LOL!

 

I never liked COD5 much, but then it's a treyarch game, not a proper Infinity one like 1,2,4 and 6.

 

duke nukem 3d and the red alerts aswell ooo and rollercoaser tycoon

 

I must admit, I want to pick RCT up again over the holidays, I promised myself I'd finish it over the holidays and rather fell by the wayside on that promise.

 

I love RollerCoaster Tycoon - was one of the first PC games I played, and shall always be a favourite Check out Transport Tycoon if you haven't played it before (I always make custom maps on it with huge towns, flat land, and loads of industries and just have fun ) - look up OpenTTD, it's an open source port of the original game.

I honestly don't know why Treyarch bother, 3 was mediocre and I didn't even play past the second level of 5. 1, on the other hand, was another of my favourite games, same with 2 and 4. Infinity Ward have a knack for a good storyline and well set out levels, Treyarch literally fail...

In other news, where's my Episode 3? >:[