The Official Graphics Card and PC gaming Thread

problem solved..... powercycled the monitor and it now works..... ODD!


need epic facepalm

 

Told ya so!

Hahahaha!

Good! Way to go!!

 

FurMark and the OCCT graphics test are serious hardcore. When all four GPUs run a well-scaled game like Left 4 Dead they run at 89-90ºC at around 3800rpm fan speed. Run OCCT on them, they run at 97-99ºC at the full 5000rpm fan speed and power usage rises from typical 700W to around 840W. Add the CPU test on top and it comes out at around 920W. Needless to say I stopped that test!
I don't believe 35C was the outside temperature in London for a minute, there isn't that much of a difference from where I am.

 

Yeah not a lot of room for temp variation. Isn't England like smaller than California? Eh I know quite a few countries smaller than Wisconsin even. Throws off my perspective XD

 

England is 50,000 square miles (The whole of the UK is 95,000) California is 160,000 square miles.

 

moved...

 

Ok can anyone help me out with a quick question; Ive been having issues with blocky shadows in some games, my shadow settings/texture settings are always set to max with very good FPS but I end up with shadows that look like this: http://img199.imageshack.us/img199/1074/blockyshadows.jpg - this being Call of duty 5: WaW, Ive noticed these types of shadows in other games I own such as Devil May cry 4 and Assassin's creed. Is this just game programming or a flaw with my card/not using my card to its fullest? or even my card's inability to handle the shadows fully?


specs: ASUS G50VT-X5
Processor Intel Core 2 Duo P8700 / 2.53 GHz
RAM: 4gb
Graphics Processor / Vendor NVIDIA GeForce 9800M GS
Video Memory GDDR3 SDRAM - 512 MB

 

updated drivers?

 

Your PC is fully capable that just happens to be how the shadows look. I might recommend a round of driver updates for everything in your system though if you haven't done so recently. New drivers, more often than not, will usually fix most of your problems instantly. This could be especially true with your laptop video card as they need different drivers and often tend to have compatibility issues with some games unless they are fully updated.

 

Interesting post Keith. And how big is California? Well, probably about twice as big as Oregon, wouldn't you think? So about twice as big as Great Britain.

Man, I loaded Far Cry - the original. I finally remembered I had given my copy to my little gaming Mexican friend Fernando, so I had to buy it on ebay for $8 total with shipping. I'm going to load up this computer and then let anybody game on it - friends of my brother's - relatives, etc. out in the sunroom - when I replace it here in my trailer/office with the new build. So I decided the game collection wasn't complete without Far Cry.

But I wasn't ready for the cinematic experience of last night! On my 3850, I can play Far Cry at 2560x1600 - all settings maxed - and still 40 to 50 fps! And is it beautiful - man oh man!!

I seriously used to play the hell out of that game 3 to 4 years ago. I beat it on highest difficulty (which means you get to repeat lots of stuff, lol - no quick-save) - I even played just the demo for countless hours before finally buying the game. In fact, on the demo, one time I worked for almost two weeks to get three helicopters crashed and burning on top of the fort all at the same time, which is hard as hell to do - you have to time it just right. I only did it the one time - got close a couple other times. I took screen shots, so that I could try to stop myself from playing that one 5-minute finale over and over again, lol.

By the way, on another part of Fort, (same as demo) did you know that you can run the jeep up from the beach and crash into the mercs, landing it halfway up the stairs - jump out and grenade it - and if you time it just right the jeep explodes in a huge fireball as the gas tank ignites, killing most of the rest of the mercs that you didn't flatten on your run up the stairs? That is a rush, hahaha. (Usually I hit a tree - when it all came together it was SO much fun!)

But nothing compares to playing Far Cry last night on the Big Dell at 2560x1600, all settings maxed, with frames of 40 and 50 fps. The main thing I wanted to remember to tell you guys, is that there are gorgeous parrots in that game flying around - lots of them - each one an extravagant bursts of rich colors as only a flat panel can render! All my prior hundreds of hours of playing Far Cry was on a CRT. I never noticed any parrots.

And there are beautiful yellow and black tropical fish with their little heads down on the sand eating whatever little fishees eat - I dove underwater again and again so I could watch them. And of course, the vibrant tropical plants, with flowers oozing rich colors of red and yellow. But nothing beats the parrots. I stayed up all night and got through the first 8 chapters or so - until Val and Jack Carter jump out of the helicopter. I played it on highest setting - it's the only way to make the game challenging, but you do have to have patience.

I started to say the mercs are idiots - unlike real life they won't fire on an empty bush in case that's where the guy is who's been killing all their buddies - but this time they actually DID do that. (Funny there's a sniper section in Brothers in Arms, Road to Hill 30, that is always troublesome - multiple snipers hiding behind bushes and trees - but a couple days ago in "testing" the game after reload, I just mowed down all the bushes and tree areas with the BAR. Sure enough, two dead snipers and no more problem with that section.) I knew the mercs couldn't see me, cause I couldn't see them. But all of a sudden my thick folaige was under sporadic fire and I ran the hell back toward the beach. Then later I watched them fire on other areas after I had already back-tracked. I guess the game throws in some extra fancy merc AI if you crank up the difficulty.

And what is amazing, I played a whole mini-campaign that I never played before, and never knew was in the game. Virtually a whole new chapter! When you fly the hang glider for the first time, after blowing up the com tower in Fort - I always found the helicopter shoots you down way too fast - so I used to stop using the glider and just worked my way down the path. But after COD4 where I got used to shooting the gunner, last night I decided to fire on the heli with the AR, and if you hit him enough, the gunner falls to his death and the helicopter is rendered impotent and flies away.

Then I angled the kite to the right to avoid gunship fire from the river, and, putting the Colt in zoom mode (right-mouse) for better accuracy, I killed two of the mercs manning a hilltop outpost that were shooting at me as I was trying to land. I was surprised when on earlier attempts I had gotten way up behind the mercs in order to come down behind them, that slightly farther inland on the hill was a watchtower with sniper, lol, and then beyond that was an entire camp of mercs, with about 10 large buildings, firing range, 3 watch towers, fuel depot, etc. Plus Doyle radiod me with a new assignment - to bomb the munition depot to create a diversion so he could come and pick me up - none of this had I ever played before!

Anyway, as regards the thrilling graphics experience, now I know what you guys - especially Sam and Jeff - have been raving about regarding Crysis. That makes me doubly firm in my resolution to not play Crysis, although I will be installing it today (and I have played the demo at low settings on a crt) until I have the hardware to run it at 2560x1600 in all its full glory.

The experience of Far Cry last night was profound - and THAT technology is from 3-4 years ago. Now I know what Jeff means when he talks running around the Crysis jungle for a couple hours at a time, taking it all in!

Those parrots - my god - it is true, in real life some of them are almost unbelievable in their colour display. I never noticed the little rascals before in my pre-30" Dell life. Haha.

Rich

 

I've updated the drivers from the nvidia site already, that did fix some fps issues I had with a few other titles but as for the shadows it didnt change anything. Are there optional driver packs for nvidia cards or is the base pack of drivers for 9m series the only one that would help?

 

Nope I'm afraid that's as good as it gets then. I'm fairly sure the shadows are just like that on any system. It could possibly be an optimization made for mobile GPUs but I doubt it.

 

10,991 km2 -- Jamaica (no she wanted to come )
14,000 km2 -- FUEL game world
14,139 km2 -- Northern Ireland
225,171 km2 -- Minnesota (2008 Population: 5,220,393)
227,416 km2 -- Victoria (Australia) (2007 Population: 5,205,200)
229,850 km2 -- Great Britain
236,040 km2 -- Uganda (2007 Population: 30,900,000)
236,700 km2 -- Guangxi
236,800 km2 -- Laos
237,500 km2 -- Romania (2008 Population: 21,504,442)
238,540 km2 -- Ghana (2008 Population: 23,832,495)
238,566 km2 -- Uttar Pradesh, state in India
241,590 km2 -- United Kingdom (land)
244,820 km2 -- United Kingdom (2009 Population: 61,612,300)
244,938 km2 -- Chihuahua (largest Mexican state) (2005 Population: 3,241,444)
245,857 km2 -- Guinea
248,209 km2 -- São Paulo (state) in Brazil
250,494 km2 -- Michigan (2008 Population: 10,003,422)
253,336 km2 -- Wyoming (2008 Population: 532,668)
254,805 km2 -- Oregon (2008 Population: 3,790,060)
255,804 km2 -- Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (before breakup)
256,370 km2 -- Ecuador (2009 Population: 13,625,000)
263,953 km2 -- Hulunbuir (largest city in the world) (2004 Population: 2,710,000)
267,667 km2 -- Gabon
268,680 km2 -- New Zealand (2009 Population: 4,315,800)
423,970 km² -- California (2008 Population: 36,756,666)
514,000 km2 -- Thailand (2009 Population: 67,764,000)
9,826,630 km2 -- United States (2009 Population: 307,269,000)

I've added more stuff and deleted the original (we were beginning to look pathetic)....

Yay actually ordered the Corsair

 

Cheesepie: That's no bug, that's simply how games that aren't well coded look. Crap isn't it? Still, softer shadows is one of the things that games designers usually can't implement without massive hardware requirements.
Rich: I played Far Cry at 2560x1600 on my PCIe HD3870 and got about 55fps with the AA turned up (and remember how bad the HD3800 series is for AA), looked quite nice but showing its age, even then.

REALLY?

 

"REALLY!"

Haha. Good point Sam.

What I had meant to say, is that I was buried in foliage so thick I couldn't see a thing - I was just waiting for the red alarm to subside a bit - and I had just entered that position from a lot of other dense foliage twenty feet away. Also I was on the small hill overlooking the village at the beginning of Fort, so the mercs were below me, and I know damn well from tons of hours on that game that none of those mercs could see my red shirt - no way, no how.

Word!

Hahahaha!

FAR CRY AI SURPRISED ME!
The AI started doing random spraying in the game, which I verified later by watching them from a distance. I don't remember ever seeing that before, and it impressed me greatly, as it seemed much more realistic - much better than "Where'd he go!" or "Lost contact!" Duhhh!

The mercs always say "Let's flush him out!" and their definition of "flush him out" is about six guys all slowly approach from wide-open position, in the general direction of where they think you might be hiding, with nobody changing that strategy when buddies start dropping left and right. Hahahaha. Real life it ain't.

Real life would be "Let's flush him out!" meaning, "Let's spray and grenade all the local bushes" like I did a couple days ago with the BAR on three or four main tree and bush areas, in Road to Hill 30, killing both normally very deadly snipers (and no red crosshairs in the game to let you know you're hitting anything - that section has always been very difficult for me.)

BUT THEY'RE STILL MORONS
So that's why I say that the mercs essentially are idiots, and for the style of gameplay I prefer, I have to max the difficulty level to make the game half-way challenging. On the other hand, my relative, Miles, the Valve animator, plays everything on normal, and is not really that interested in spending that much time on any one game.

I think my style comes from when I first played Counter Strike about 5 years ago, and at the beginning I was completely raped. Real players who have been playing for a while are not Far Cry mercernaries. I couldn't get started without being instantly dead and having no idea who had killed me. It took quite a while to start surviving and making my own kills and winding up in the upper third of the team on many occasions. So from that I maybe developed a lot of patience for fine-tuning my strategies.

SOMETIMES STEALTH IS NOT BEST
But sometimes my patience runs out. At one point last night, I have to admit I was getting upset. It took me 8 restarts to complete a section on breaking into the science bunker, and the last three efforts I threw caution to the winds and abandoned stealth.

Early on I killed the sniper on the wall, with MY sniper rifle. I got the other guys coming down from left and the guys coming up from the right. I edged close to the main wall on far left and after five minutes I finally got the one more guy who appeared from time to time on top. Then I checked out the whole area with binoculars for mercs. Okay, safe. All this took about 20 minutes on my 5th attempt.

Then edging along the front of the bunker, all of a sudden an explosion and I am barely alive. WTF! And then frantically looking around to see whom I had missed, I just barely caught sight of a rocket heading my way from a way high tower about a quarter mile away at the other huge building. "A goddamn tower a hundred miles away!" I yelled at myself in disgust as the game went to Main Menu. "Goddamm it!"

I LOVE JEEP ROCKETS
So now, completely NOT in a mood for stealth, I restarted the section driving in, jumped out of the jeep to eliminate the sniper, jumped back in this time - and activated the jeep rockets, having suddenly realized that this jeep had both rockets and machine gun. Then, rocketing away on everybody, including that distant tower, including the guys on the left coming down from the big bunker, including the two teams of guys in the middle manning the blockage, including the big logs blocking the road - I had much quicker gratifying success!

It still took me three tries - the sniper got me while I was trying to get him with rockets instead of my sniper rifle - then the jeep got stuck on the sandbags. But no problem. Those two attempts were much faster and way more fun. The ragdoll bodies fly about 20 feet into the air when you hit close to a merc with a rocket, which always makes me laugh! So I was in a good mood for attempt three with the jeep, and everything worked fine.

I love shooting rockets! Things in Far Cry fly everywhere when they get hit! You have about 25 so you have plenty to inflict major damage in all directions, lol. Then, carefully crossing the bridge on foot, after binocular checking in all directions, I saw that beloved "Game Saved" checkpoint marker. Whew! An hour on just that one section!

(That reminds me of three years ago, when I spent over an hour - maybe two - to no avail trying to infiltrate a merc camp after gliding to the island. Patrol after patrol came out to get me, and the boat down below was hounding me at the same time. Finally, I changed strategies, and killed the boat guys with the colt on single shot mode. It has long-range power - about two thirds of the distance of the sniper rifle I would say. Then in the patrol boat, turning on the rockets, staying out beyond merc rifle range, I went all around that island, taking out towers, taking out patrols - in half an hour almost everybody on the island was dead! Hahaha.)

SILENCER
One last thing on Far Cry - the Silenced M5 SMG. When I saw the 6-man patrol outside the new mercenary camp that I discovered by staying on the glider, I decided to go back one section to the last part of fort where I had dropped the silenced M5 for the rocket launcher. Quickly taking out the two patrol boats with the rocket launcher allows one to return to the machine gun, and take out the two attacking helicopter if you time it right.

As for the silencer, in all the time I played Far Cry I never had much use for it, but when I saw all those patrol guys, and realized that the camp was going to be loaded with mercenaries, I decided to add in a little more stealth from a distance to my normal hiding in bushes techniques.

Normally I much prefer the P90 for larger capacity clip of 50 rounds, versus 30 - and conventional Far Cry wisdom is that there is no point carrying them both - they both draw from the same ammo pool. You want weapons that draw from a separate ammo pool so you can maximize your ammo. But I went back to do exactly that, carry them both, because you know what they say, "silenced is golden", lol.

With silenced smg in single-shot mode - zooming in - and trying to steady the mouse, if you can hit a distant guy with two quick shots to the head, it's all over for him, and the other 5 patrol guys have no clue where you are. You can often keep picking them off that way, and there is NO bang or muzzle flash to give away your position. The VERY LOUD sniper rifle on the other hand, is a one-shot kill of course, at great distances, but sniper rounds are hard to come by, so I decided to use them only in extreme cases - WAY distant tower guards with matching sniper rifles, or very well-hidden positions where the scope helped me to peer through bushes, etc.

I had never taken advantage of the silenced SMG that way before in all the months of former playing of Far Cry. I think my skills have improved, as Jeff said recently when he went back to experience some of Far Cry again.

I think I have learned a lot in some of the more-recent COD4 game play - and even from L4D where I have learned to FOCUS - and especially LISTEN, lol. (Not only for the SUPER IMPORTANT horde-is-coming music, but also for the menacing but often subtle growl of a waiting Tank.)

I kept the silencer as long as I could, dropping it only when the auto shotgun came along. A shotgun, of course, is indispensable for those god-awful ferocious and hard-to-kill trigent apes. My load-out after that was auto shottie, P90, AR, and sniper rifle.

Rich

 

So heres the deal, i currently have an ATI Raedon X1950 Pro running from a 500w psu. I am thinking of upgrading to a Novatech GeForce 9800GT SLI 1GB. Is it worth the updgrade? Will it still run on my 500w psu? and will it run newish games, will it for instance run crysis on meium settings?

 

which PSU? what's your whole system?

what resolution monitor do you use?

 

Sorry probably should have gave more info, i have a EZCool atx-500 super silent psu, my system is fairly up to scratch i think, i have a pentinum d dual core 3.00 ghz cpu, 4gb ram, foxconn 945g7ma-8ks2h notherboard.

 

okay well how much do you have to spend? becuase the first thing you will need to upgrade is that god aweful PSU. about £40 for that. and for £80 a 4850 is MUCH more powerfull, id go with that.

http://www.novatech.co.uk/novatech/prods/Components/Graphics-ATI/ATIHD4850Series/11132-35-20R.html

 

Hmmm do you think, i am looking at the specs now and the differences don't look that great, i only have like £100 to spare so i would rather not have to get a new psu, it seems to be running pretty well, why is it so awful? I could probably stretch to this it has 5 star reviews and looks pretty good what do you think?