The Official Graphics Card and PC gaming Thread

Right, 1920 x 1200 is a high resolution, but 2560 x 1600 is a monster resolution. I might very well be tempted to get a 2560 x 1600 monitor, but it would never replace my 24". It would mean spending idiotic amounts of money upgrading everything to the top end. And I just can't justify it, though I could probably go broke for months and just barely do it

I'm more than satisfied with my monitor. It perfectly fills my field of vision, and delivers adequate image quality for these sensitive eyes, though my ears are even more sensitive...

5850s would be my best choice it seems. They have the best price/performance as of yet, and they seem made for 1920 res in Crossfire. I'm pretty certain I'm getting 5850s.

Maybe if it was $20 extra but no definitely not $60.

 

Link doesn't work, but paying an extra $60 for a toxic edition card is unnecessary.

 

It was supposed to be these two in comparison:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814102889&cm_re=5850-_-14-102-889-_-Product
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814102886

The toxic edition is out of stock so I don't really have much of a choice anymore lol.

 

Yeah, the normal card is fine.

 

For those interested I just got Bad Company 2. Add my char "Estuansis" and we can get online

 

Sorry double but I heard from a few sources that the Cat 10.2s have a rendering issue with Bad Company 2. The Cat 10.3s are supposed to have a small fix for this and the 10.4 should have some small performance tweaks.

Currently installing 10.3 to see if there's a difference. But I suppose the release of 10.4 is what I'm really looking for. They have the Linux 10.4 betas out but no Win 7 64 drivers AFAIK. We'll see what happens. I don't have any apparent problems but there are a few spots that could use a boost.

Also tweaking some of the settings. Seems HSAO has an extremely subtle visual effect with a significant performance drop. Turning this off, I can see the difference just barely. Very subtle differences in the lightness/darkness of shadows in proximity to the object casting it. In actual game-play I actually forgot I turned it off. so it must not make that big a difference. I remember the effect of HSAO/SSAO/HBAO(whatever you wanna call it) being much more significant in games like Crysis and Far Cry 2.

 

im still getting the texture idiocy with this game on 10.3 hopefully 10.4 saves this. what i find annoying is that i get abotu 50-60 FPS whether im at 1280x1024 or 1920x1200 so id assume i have a CPU bottleneck? my GPU usage never goes over 80% on each GPU, normally 60-70%

 

I recently bought BC2 too, and am liking it. Thoroughly enjoyed the multiplayer I played, though the server-side part does seem quite buggy. Performance is reasonable if I leave both AA and HBAO disabled, that's about as high as I can get it without nasty lag.
I believe I'm still running 10.2 at the moment, will check.
50-60fps is almost certainly a CPU bottleneck, from what I've heard.

 

Shaff, You're unhappy with 50-60? LOL! Well, I suppose if you're running multiple GPu's, seeing a ceiling of 50-60 would be distressing eh.

 

no, not unhappy, jsut annoyed that i am gettign poor scaling. but not satisfied. online FPS, i need more than that ideally.

 

If you see 59 or lower at all, the game isn't perfectly smooth. Different games handle drops in fps differently, but when you play a multiplayer FPS, you really don't want even the slightest bit of lag. Occasional drops to 55 can often go unnoticed, but the frame rate regularly being in the 50s isn't that nice overall.

To be fair, at 1920x1200, even with 100% scaling two HD4870s would only achieve a minimum frame rate of 54 at 1920x1200, with an average of about 120. This should mean you very rarely drop below 60, but would see the very occasional spike during a big explosion. This is only in DirectX9, however, excludes AA, and assumes 100% scaling.
I am unsure exactly what the performance impact of DirectX10 is. Suffice to say that with 8xAA enabled in DirectX10, the same pair of 4870s with 100% scaling is going to manage a minimum frame rate of 22 and an average of 50. That's going to be pretty annoying throughout.

 

Is there a way to enable an fps display in Bad Company 2 or do I need to use FRAPS? I'm curious to see what FPS I'm getting with my current gpu before the 5850 arrives. With luck the lag I'm experiencing is just bad fps and not my connection, although I do get a lot of disconnects from the servers.

 

Just use fraps, I've not seen any other way yet.

 

To be honest, battlefield is a processor whore. Basically any dual core is going to struggle. Even a tri-core Athlon II outperforms the i3 in BC2. I'm sort of surprised you haven't pushed your CPU higher. Going from stock 3.0 to 3.7 on my chip yields good improvements all around for BC2. Seeing as the Q6600 and 940BE are clock-for-clock equals, you should see a good boost even at 3.4GHz.

Don't forget that's subjective as well. I am also sensitive to low framerates but not quite like that. It depends on the game and engine, but 45-ish is my threshold before it gets laggy for me. Averaging in the high 50s is fine for me as long as the drops into the 40s aren't too often, I mean yes, I can DEFINITELY tell when it's below 60. Fortunately, with my tweaking, I can run max, no HBAO, with 2xAA(any higher and it DIVES) and average 60-ish with drops into the low 50s, sometimes the high 40s if it gets really intense.

You say it like it's a bad thing. FRAPS works flawlessly with everything, uses under 3MB of RAM(the 32 bit exe uses only 768k, the extra 64 bit process uses ~2megs), runs passively, and incurs literally ZERO performance penalty(unless recording obviously).

"I've not seen any other way yet."

Do we need another way? LOL

Oh yeah guys got my first 5850 on the way and the second in a few weeks. Pretty soon I'll be running 2 crossfire rigs XD

 

It's not bad, I just didn't have it at the time.

According fraps I'm getting low 20's to possible high 10's during a normal fight (didn't take the time to notice). I knew it was low but didn't realize it was that low lol. I think the 5850 will help with my aiming problems XD

 

I run FRAPS religiously. Games actually don't feel right anymore without the FPS counter

 

top right corner for me but i do prefer inbuilt FPS monitors liek the cod4 one. it shows minimum frames aswell which is nice.

 

It's true, there's no reason not to use Fraps for frame rate. However, valve games that use Net_graph are superior as they display both frame rate and also ping (and server rate/choke/loss), such games that use this system beat fraps, obviously.
I use fraps in the top left corner normally, but I find once every few days it moves by itself :S

 

thats one thing that annoys me about BC2. lack of seeing your ping ingame. and no lagometer.

 

You can see your ping, just bring up the scores page briefly. It's just not there constantly. The ping figures, however, are usually wrong, which is annoying to say the least!