The Official Graphics Card and PC gaming Thread

8800GTS 125 shipped(used)

http://www.overclock.net/sale/376682-evga-8800gts-512-g92-price-drop.html

 

I think the 4850 might be overkill for casual gaming. The 8800GT is much cheaper and performs well enough for any game at 1680 res or better.

 

8800GT brand new.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814133232
Less than 125 dollars... same performance, lower price!

 

Not the same!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! lol. But very close in some games. The GTS 512 has more SPs.

I would get either the 8800GT like sam and I linked to. Or, if it's still there when you go to buy, that GTS for $125 is a bargain.

I got mine for $209 only a few months ago and it will probably stay with me for a while. I don't plan on any heavy gaming with my secondary build, but it's nice to know I can when I want.

 

It's no big deal though really... You could overclock the 8800GT and get it way over the 8800GTS...

 

It's big enough of a deal where I chose the GTS over the GT for a similar price difference. The GTS can be OC'd too and again outperform the 8800GT.

It just depends on the price of the card when you go to buy. They're both great, but keep in mind the GTS can be quite a bit faster in high resolutions with AA and AF. Thus my choosing it over the GT.

No consequence really. Just stating my view...

 

True, but if you wanted AA at decent resolutions you'd probably be serious enough to take the HD4850 over either... Anyway, I'm just a bit of a fusspot on taking used GPUs. I know I bought two myself, but hey, they were 70% of retail price, not 90....

 

Depending on how much you really want to spend, the GTS 512 for $125 would IMO be the best bang for your buck. The 4850 is not that much faster than the 8800GTS to where it's a big jump in performance. In some games it makes a difference to get the 4850, but not many. Crysis might be the main exception.

 

You guys are forgetting the most important difference(at least in my eyes), the COOLER! That's worth paying for.

P.S. I'm only back in this thread, because this is MY THREAD. WOOT!

 

That's a fairly good point actually, the cooler on the 8800GTS G92 beats the 8800GT and HD4850 ones hands down.

 

Shaff, if you think that COD5, Americans versus Japanese, is going to be interesting, you should pick up Medal of Honor, Pacific Assault sometime - probably for $5 on ebay. Having played all of them - all the Medal of Honor, all the COD, all the Brothers in Arms, in my opinion, Pacific Assault is one of the very very best. Your name in the game is Tommy. Your team is constantly yelling "Wow, Tommy smoked that guy" and "Tommy get down!!" and stuff like that. They do talk about some of the other guys too - but you really have the feeling you're part of a squad. I found it EXCELLENT and it was also very highly rated. Graphics-wise it is good - made about the same time as COD2 I think.

Dudes, don't worry about Left 4 Dead being a console game. As a family member of Miles, the main animator (who is now doing the re-modeling of the 4 main characters to end up with "not-so-hardened types") I can tell you that it is a total PC game - and if they're porting to X-box, it is for marketing and to expand sales. They are paying particular attention to graphics, and ambience, and it will be fully detailed, I have no doubt, at 2560x1600.


Boozer, that argument about not being able to tell the difference between 1920x1200, and 1024x768 is the same thing Ray used to say - with his 20,000+ 3dmark6 score. He used to run at - what was it sam - 800x600 or some such ungodly resolution. All that means is: You aren't looking closely at the picture! I remember when Half Life 2 first came out, and I ran it on my ATI9800 at 1600x1200, suffering through fps probably in the teens - for the CRISPNESS of the image! But I have a Sony monitor. Maybe Sam is right, maybe your monitor is no good if you can't really tell the difference! Ray is up to 1920x1200 now, at least, with his new monitor.

You do have a point Boozer, about consoles being "funner" - since you're playing on the TV, everybody can watch. I had a friend who used to come over and play Halo with his xbox, while I was on my PC. Sometimes I used to watch. I thought the graphics were "OK" on the Halo - kind of trick waterfalls, and interesting little machines you could fly on - but really - we were still just watching a TV - at what - 350 scan lines (it wasn't HD.) It's not as much a close in, intensive, personal experience. And it's not the same level of graphic excitement that estuansis talks about with crysis, for example.

When Sam says - playing at HD on a 60" screen might change some of that - maybe. You'll be at 1080 on 60", versus your 2560x1600 on 30". It will be sharp, but about half as sharp as what you're getting on your Dell. Still, everybody can sit back and watch.

At the Valve headquarters in Seattle, they have a big-screen plasma TV monitor in the conference room running off a PC. I saw Half Life 2 played on that monitor. They run scenes and take criticism and comments from the guys sitting around the table, as they fine-tune a game. It looked pretty good up there on the screen. But you're sitting way back - from 8 to 20 feet away - and you're not going to get the highly detailed experience that sam or estuansis get sitting 18-24" away from their LCD monitors.

Hey estuansis, I am going to be getting back to Battlefield 2 as soon as I get my 2gig sticks. Do you like Battlefield Vietnam better?

Wow, that POM crysis shot on your 2 Sept post was awesome! So estuansis, you're saying that POM gives the rocks their 3d pop? Yeah, the effect is striking! (BTW what is the TOD lighting mod?? - where do you get it and what does it add?)

I just googled POM, and I see it's a DX9 feature. Here's a short video similar to estuansis' picture above - just f**king amazing!! POM video DX9 crysis
-Rich

 

Also because I had a CRT(a very good one at that). When you run a LCD at non-native res it looks crappy. CRTs look the same. Only difference is jaggies, which I don't notice because I'm usually too much into the game to notice the graphics all that much lol!

I should be building a new computer soon. I'm just waiting till the end of october.

 

Sadly, 230x180 screenies will give any old scabby graphics good justice. You need to expand them out to big resolutions to really see how well they stand up... :
If you've not played Crysis Rich, oneof the things I'll say is that due to the motion blur (which works well, both as a graphical enhancement and at making lower frame rates more playable) screenshots will never look anywhere near as good as the real gameplay. When you play Crysis on high for real in full motion, it looks stunning.

 

You guys are talking about non-native resolutions. I'm kind of ignorant about that subject. When you buy a monitor - do they tell you which of the resolutions they support are NATIVE, versus non-native? Like Sam, your 30" Dell, native is 2560x1600. Is the 1920x1200 you scale down to occasionally also a native resolution?

 

The native resolution for a monitor is the resolution it was built to support, a monitor will only ever have one native resolution. For LCDs it's the highest resolution, as that maps the pixels 1:1 perfectly without interpolation or extrapolation being required (resulting in a fuzzy/blurry picture). With CRTs it's the most accurate resolution. A 19" CRT that can go as high as 2048x1536 will often have a native resolution of 1280x1024 (like mine did) or 1600x1200, as due to the higher refresh rate at that resolution, the image quality is better. Refresh rate is not a problem that affects LCDs as they do not blink on refresh.

 

Ok, so your dell has 2560x1600 as its native resolution - one to one pixel map. How well does it scale down to 1920 x 1200?

And by the way, regarding playing crysis - I have played the demo. It was nice - I enjoyed the gameplay and I went back a few times and played against the soldiers not using any of the suit features just to see if I could - the AI is good.

But the graphics that you guys are experiencing is beyond what my x850xtpe provides - also no shader 3.0 (Does POM need shader 3?) I wonder even if my 3850 agp will be that much better - my monitor is 1600x1200. I could scale back to 1280 x 1020 or something like that I suppose. What kinds of settings do you think I'll be able to support on a 3850 agp (p4 3.2). Will I be able to support POM? I could overclock the cpu a bit - I'm going to be installing faster memory.

My real question is: should I even bother to try to play crysis on my current rig - or just wait for the new one?

 

Sorry to say, but Crysis will run like crap with a Pentium 4. You will be sorely disappointed in the performance and the framerate will drop to unplayable during any heavy physics(which there is a lot of). The minimum system to fully enjoy Crysis at a decent res(1280+) with high settings would be something like this:

2.2GHz+ Core 2 Duo/2.6GHz+ AMD X2(dual core is pretty much required)
2GB of RAM(1GB has the same FPS but terrible stuttering)
8800GT/HD4850

The 3850 will do high with medium shaders at 1280, but high shaders is a bit of a stretch. The 8800GT would feel MUCH smoother and one can be had for dirt cheap. Build a new system. An entire system, decent monitor, speakers and all can be built for <$1000 and run Crysis very well. So, if you have all the peripherals, you can build a wicked fast PC for <$800

The TOD lighting mod changes the lighting during different times of the day to be more natural. Like light refracting through the atmosphere. Sunsets are bathed in red, and the lighting slowly changes in hue as it get brighter and the sun gets higher in the sky. It changes the lighting in any outdoor level to be more natural and bring out the beauty of the original scenery. Everything kind of has a more natural and warm feel to it. I some parts, the lighting can be pretty close to the original. But in other parts, it dramatically changes the look of the game.

http://planetcrysis.gamespy.com/View.php?view=UserFiles.Detail&id=21

It comes with CubanDoomSword's Custom Crysis Config(CCC). The installer installs the TOD mod and places a custom config file in the Crysis directory depending on what performance level you select. The CCC and TOD mods can be installed separately or together through the installer.

The configs are good as well. They make medium settings look like high. High performance looks like Very High. And Very High looks like one step above very high.... like Ultra High or something. Even the Low Settings config looks way better than stock Crysis Low Settings.

The TOD mod and the CCC are meant to compliment eachother and they do quite nicely. The CCC is good enough on its own, but the TOD mod is needed to make it really shine. Both the TOD and CCC improve performance. This means it looks AND runs better. It bumped me from 35 to 40FPS in 1680 x 1050 with the GTS 512MB.

Yes... yes I do...

BF2 is sweet and the shooting is much better, but the maps and vehicles in BFV are just about perfect, IMO. Call me a jungle combat junkie, if you will, lol

Plus, the single player is still fun because you can have 64 bots instead of 16 or whatever the cap is on BF2. I play as much single as multi because it's fun to mow the bots down

 

My 3.2Ghz dual core gave me 25 frames max, my Quad? 45. Crysis is a CPU-eater.

 

OMG, the quad works? I didn't think Crysis took advantage of Quads... This is good news for me. The Q6600 will be here tomorrow

 

crysis loves MHz and cache by the looks of things, that we found. no game really takes advantage of quad cores just yet, just the extra cache.