The Official Graphics Card and PC gaming Thread

Oblivion only did a better job of pop-in after 3rd party mods. Oblivion is still the worst game in history for draw distance failures until you mod it. 1600x1200 textures in front, dropped to i think it was 240x160 beyond about 10 metres.

Sounds a lot like Crysis, but without the demanding-ness.

In other news I had my first windows 7 complete network structure failure today. Not a good sign, even vista too longer to fail than that.
Example of network structure failure (this particular example):
Bandwidth cap (incoming and outgoing) of 1.5KB/s for extended periods
10 second waiting period for DNS requests
followed by complete rejection of fixed DNS addresses.

Not as terminal as the vista failure as it didn't require a reformat, or even a reboot to fix, but I am now stuck with a dynamic IP address, until I reformat and dynamic DNSes are unreliable.

 

Sorry to hear that buddy. My experience with Windows 7 has been smooth for the most part. Probably about 95% efficient. Some minor little bugs that would probably irritate the layman LOL! Slight challenge getting the printers going, since there is no dedicated driver for windows 7 yet. Otherwise, more than likely, I will be in line when it hits the shelves.

 

To be honest, apart from the little needless glitches, windows 7 still has the most fundamental issues that vista has, as it's the same operating system really, so it will suffer from the same issues that are the fault of the OS' design, rather than the software on top of it.

 

Sam - you're right of course - and I found a Freezer 7 pro open box at newegg - the whole thing with tax and shipping is only $22. I hope I don't get screwed by the open box - they'll let me return it if I have to. This whole thing is Jeff's fault.

I can't tell you how good this p4 is looking to me with those new air filters - it looks so efficient! And I didn't run the stress test yet - the weather has been coolish - but I jacked the gpu clock way up above the 695 - even past the 702 to about 724 where I once had it - and I can't get it to overheat - won't climb above 60 - the vf1000 just kills the temps. And my cpu is breathing so much better with the dust off the sink - it won't even get to 60 so far. So the freezer 7 pro will work really great with all the ventilation in this case.

Sounds suspicious mate. Are you CIA?

Wow, call of juarez again. The great thing about the demo was riding the horse! Nice professional review Jeff.

Hey guys - Call of Duty world at war is half price on steam 2 days only through tomorrow at $25. Should I do it?

 

http://www.pureoverclock.com/article794.html

 

Nope Oblivion did it much better at stock as it only had bad fade-in with textures. Call of Juarez does it with like 50% of the geometry. So tell me which was worse :S

It reminded me of Crysis slightly in that regard but no. Crysis' worst points are way better than Call of Juarez'. But CoJ's best points are damn near as good as Crysis'. Like I said, what looks good looks awesome. On average though Crysis whoops it hardcore.

Wait so I'm at fault for what? Got aftermarket cooling frenzy?

VERY NICE ON THE TEMPS!!!!!!! Wow what a difference

Haha thanks

It's a fun game but it's not really great. One thing I'll say is your system could probably max it at 1920 with a decent framerate.

If you really like WWII games it's completely worth a buy. I liked it quite a bit but it wasn't as good as CoD2, one of my older and most beloved PC games of all time

 

Somehow I don't think the CIA have agents in Yorkshire pit villages.

Sorry I didn't make it clear in that image probably because the thing I'd decided should stay colour was quite grey. What you do is you double up your layers and desaturate the bottom layer then mask the top one...

 

Open box is usually fine for a cooler, but it might not come with thermal paste attached, or a manual. Since you need no manual or screws to install a bog-standard 775-mounted cooler, you should be fine if you have some arctic silver lying around.
COD:WAW is up to you, I didn't like it that much, but as a die-hard WW2 fan, it's worth picking up. Personally, I find WW2 games dull, which may be part of the reason I didn't finish it (the othe reason is that it will only play properly on a single GPU or SLI system)
As for the i7 vs AMD article, I personally think it's crap. What they've done is compare a mild i7 overclock that took absolutely no skill or fault-finding, and put it up against a Phenom II running flat out with no room for further overclocking. Congrats, if you overclock a cheap CPU to the hilt, it can match an expensive one not overclocked very far. We've already established the i7 isn't designed for dominating games anyway.

 

Sorry for rather posting in a weird order and stuff but I must say I've had about as many problems and so on with 7 RC that I had with XP (I was to stubborn to even try Vista). The 7 beta weirded out a couple of times but a quick transfer file and re-install later and all was well. It must be the best OS there is at the moment.

 

LOL! Sounds about like me. Xp was rough at first. In fact, there are still kinks with its code. I suppose that could just be me LOL! But windows 7 performs just about as well as the XP champ. I must admit, I'm disappointed about OC'ing in 7. Much like vista, its touchy. But then, that could be a good thing. Perhaps the OS is picking up on a nasty OC calculation, that could become a problem later...

 

Windows 7 is no better or worse than XP, but for different reasons - this is mainly due to the fact that Windows 7 has more nice features than XP, but these new features are offset by the fact that it has bigger problems. I'm curious to see if the RTM release has these.

 

I've discovered something awesome on FUEL! If you run the game windowed a right-click menu becomes accessible allowing you to drive off the map without being re-spawned on it but the screen is filtered orange. You can then drive on forever as the terrain is generated automatically by the game engine albeit with no roads or water or anything but a massive surprise is that it can generate canyons, hills, vegetation, buildings.
Its really cool just take a look at what it can produce, All by it self!!!!

See what I mean about the orange filter :-(

Imageshacks bulk uploaders sooooo much faster then doing them through the web site.

Erk I forgot to activate Windows....

 

Hahaha, Jon, that orange thing with the hills reminds me of the secret game the original excel developers built into the code - behind a big hill was like a movie theater with the names of everybody who worked on the project. That looks very entertaining (for about 3 or 4 minutes, lol.) Interesting find.

I got the open box freezer pro and - yes, you're right, missing the thermal paste - but it did have the instructions. Yes, I have arctic silver 5 lying around which I used on Jeff's vf1000. Everything else seems to be there - I popped off the pwm fan and I am going to plug it into the mobo and run it (for just a couple seconds so I don't burn up my cpu) to see if it works so I don't have to return the cooler. It looks like I saved a bunch of $$$.

The shaff article was quite interesting - when you can spend the identical money and get two 4890s for the savings from athlon to i7, hopefully that will keep AMD from going under, so they can keep developing good stuff on the ati side of the house.

Edit:

Sam this is where I'm confused. The 5200 has a front side bus of 800, like the p4. The 5200 is 2.5ghz - the p4 670 is 3.8 ghz. The 5200 has 2mb L2 cache, like the 670. The 5200 is 64 bits, the 670 P4 is 64 bits. The 5200 has two complete cores - the P4 has two cores but not two data paths and therefore uses hyperthreading, which I disable for gaming - so I am using one core. On games, being single-threaded for the most part, except for newer ones, you will only be running the game on one core of the 5200.

How can one core of the 5200 be twice as powerful as one core of the P4 - what am I missing? L2 cache=same, 64 bits=same, speed same by overclocking 5200, fsb same. This is where I need help understanding processor speed as related to running games. Thanks

Rich

 

Once again, it's irrelevant because the CPU comparison is worthles...

 

Hey sam you were posting as I was editing, so I know you didn't read my edit yet - please comment on 5200 vs 670 when you have the chance.

 

The E5200 is the core 2 architecture, which means one 2.5Ghz core is equal to one 5Ghz core on the P4.

 

Hmmmmmm, interesting!

But why?

Just off the tip of your tongue, what can you recall that it is about the architecture - it's still got the northbridge data path unlike the i7 which got rid of that, sort of.

Are you saying the internal architecture of the core two duo chip, beyond the number of bits, like larger registers, etc. etc. stuff like that?

After your post I'll do a bunch of googling and reading, but just whatever you can recall without looking anything up.

thanks mate

Edit:
Well, it's complicated as hell - started to read a bit:

Lots of stuff about memory access - since the p4 3.8 is running at 19 times the fsb clock of 200mhz, every memory cycle spent supplying a waiting cpu results in 19 lost cpu cycles - one article said a cpu missing 200 to 300 cycles at a time is not uncommon - so the faster the cpu, the more cycles it sits and spins waiting for memory coming down the 200mhz bus. Getting data to the cpu becomes ultra important:

Just the tip of the iceberg. Hmmmmm.

More stuff:

It is interesting that this 2006 article talked about the absence of hyperthreading - which is now back in i7.

The folks in Israel, through a bunch of very fancy techniques, increased the effective processing power of the cpu per clock cycle with the data going down one single thread (for each core.)

In the little bit of reading so far - they did things like: 1. building in 4 decoders (breaking complex instructions down into simpler ones - whereas p4 has only 1 decoder) 2. they allowed loads to get ahead of stores (send the data ahead even though you haven't decoded what address it is going to - use prediction circuitry to help - if you guess wrong you lose 20 cycles - but real world is, on average, you make huge gains), 3. provide massive 256 bit wide data paths from cache to increase bandwidth, and 4. use micro-fusion to put together two little instructions - intel claiming you can do this once every ten instructions - for a 10-11 percent gain just from this one technique.

He mentions the free lunch because prior to the core development, the resounding point of view was that multiple cpus and lots of threads being processed at the same time was where performance increases were going to come from. So they had been telling software developers "there is no free lunch - you have to implement parallel processing." But then along came core, which was an outgrowth of several different earlier design philosophies, temporarily tossing out hyperthreading, and achieving, as Sam said, twice the data processing capability, clock for clock, as hyperthreading p4. Wow!

But the article was from 3 years ago. So now, with i7, we are back to hyperthreading - which means we are taking all the single thread gains from the core design philosophy, and now adding in the original concepts behind SMT - Simultaneous Multi Threading (hyperthreading.)

The author in this 3-year old article saw that coming, when he said: "When I suggested to Jack Doweck that the massive execution resources may not be fully used until SMT is applied, he agreed completely." So three years ago the Israeli designer (Doweck) agreed that hyperthreading - some years to come (now here) - would help this new core architecture fulfill its potential.

OK SAM - I'M STARTING TO GET IT!

Massive improvement in architecture means one 2.5 ghz E5200 core = 5.0 ghz p4 core! (Complicated and complex as hell!) LOL

 

Inside the CPU, a Core 2 or Pentium E is completely different. The overall design has entirely changed and essentially means that for every clock cycle there's a hell of a lot more going on in there. The memory access thing is one that people hint at for low FSB CPUs, but the E5200 has the same low FSB of 200.
Your info underneath essentially summarises some of the reasons why a 2.5Ghz E5200 busts the chops of a 4Ghz Pentium D of old, and for 50W of power, not 140.
Cheap though the P4 670 was, you still paid $70 for a CPU worth $25. Remember that.

 

An interesting and rather disappointing bit of news for high end system builders, after a 12 month reign on the graphics market, the hd4870x2 has been discontinued by ATI and will no longer be sold. The reason is still as yet unknown, but now the only proficient GPU products out there are the HD4850X2 and the GTX295. Looks like the price of high end dual graphics PCs will be going up by about £100...

 

Does this mean they'll actually make a motherboard where quad-card crossfire is actually possible? Or are we stuck with pitiful dual-card? (yes I am aware some boards have quad crossfire stamped on them yet can't actually do it with modern high-end cards (like mine (I'm still bitter (even though its a fairly kickass board anyway)))) (That's a lot of needless brackets).

Been having a flick through a few sites and have decided I must buy/pre-order: Dirt 2, Split/Second, GT5, Blur, NFS: Shift, Assassin’s Creed 2, Left 4 dead 2, Bioshock 2, Modern Warfare 2, Call of Juarez: Bound In Blood, Prototype and a decent PSU (mines started making funny noises). List is incomplete. And I'm about to order Crysis because its only a tenner off play.