The Official Graphics Card and PC gaming Thread

nvm its wireless didn't see that, the above post only works on wired controllers

 

Correct, the wireless controllers cannot send data through the play and charge cable. That does not happen for the 360 console, nor does it happen on PC. You need the wireless dongle to use a wireless 360 pad with a PC.

 

I decided to just give him this. Does the xbox simply recognize the wireless controllers, or does it also need the dongle. Anyhow, I just decided to give him this:

WIndows 7 automatically recognizes it, and installs appropriate drivers I no longer use it, so no big deal.

 

The actual xbox has effectively the same hardware as the PC dongle built inside it.

 

That answers my question. Thanks

 

Pics from HardOCP.

The HD6990 reference evaluation boards are with reviewers awaiting the NDA lift release date, which has not been disclosed.

The card features a dual 8-pin power supply [only seen previously on non-reference giants like the 4GB HD5970 and MARS295] allowing up to 375W of power.
This allows two full-speed HD6970 GPUs to reside on one card. This is going to be a seriously fast dual GPU, possibly eclipsing the HD5970 by a full 50%.
Seemingly, to avoid being one-upped by nvidia using an enormous amount of power on their card to get dual-fermi performance up, AMD have gone with the biggest solution they can provide. Anything from nvidia that competes with this is likely to be a water-block only affair, with three 8-pin connectors. I can't see them bothering with that. The GTX590 is in hot water. It's worth bearing in mind the GTX590 is only getting 1.5GB per GPU versus the 6990's 2GB per GPU.

The 6990 has 5 outputs (4 Displayport + 1 DVI-I) allowing 5x1 eyefinity setups.
On the performance scale (HD4870=100, HD5870=180, GTX580=230, HD5970=280) the HD6990 is likely to score 400.

 

Wow, what is that thing going to cost?

I've been gone forever - blame it on Jeff and BFBC2. (I didn't know you were a big Oblivion fan - never heard of it - more RPG right? Obviously you should be in the game building business.)

Anyway - back to BFBC2. I got totally sucked into Vietnam! Man!! It threw my whole business schedule off, and I am just in the first phase of getting back to work. I have so much I could post, but I'll just start with something tiny for now.

Vietnam - like the guy says in Black Ops, "You're in 'Nam baby!"

What a ride. When I'm playing a GI - "where are those sneaky little gook basta*ds?" "Got one" a soldier says. When I'm playing a Cong - "take that you imperialistic white-uniformed American pr*ck" - but my buddies don't say anything I can understand, since they talk in genuine Vietnamese!

On any map you're playing, they switch sides automatically - you're a GI one minute - you're a Cong the next. So you don't start shooting the wrong guy - you have to look down at your left arm - if it's wrapped in swathes of leather, you're Cong baby. If not, you're a GI Joe.

And all of this stuff really happened, not like the made up Russian vs America battles in the other maps. (I have about 60 hours of Vietnam, and about 2 hours of the other so far.) I can't stop humming the main theme song of the Vietnam maps - the war protest song by Credence Clearwater - Fortunate One - talking about the red white and blue, and the guys who go off to serve as cannon fodder for a war that somebody figured out that we needed to be in. "No no no no no, I'm no senator's son, no ...... It's not me it's not me it's not me - I ain't no fortunate one."

Hahahahaha.

Rich

 

Probably $650-$800. Potentially less depending on what the competitor (GTX590) is like.

 

Finally bit the bullet and started playing the Stalker series on Steam. There was a great deal going so I bought all 3 games. Using the "Complete" mod it's actually quite enjoyable. Basically, the games look mediocre and the weapons are all named wrong. Complete fixes that mostly. Having gotten into the rhythm of gameplay, it's turning out to be a great series.

Finding myself fonder and fonder of these basement games made by foreign developers. Even though their programming and design are kind of unpolished, they always seem to make a great game.

 

Ok, $650-800, for the 6990. You didn't have 6970 on your performance comparison. Let me ask you about 15 questions in a row, lol. Speaking strictly in regard to 30" gaming - where is the 6970, and then, where is the 6990? Is it two full blown 6970s? Yes, right? Assume it gets 16 lanes of pci-e, no other card plugged in, and the cpu is not the bottleneck, is it going to scale 185-190% more powerful than the 6970? And if the other choice were crossfire 6970s, would that crossfire choice make more sense?

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For a second, Jeff, I thought you said "fodder" as in cannon fodder - I've got BFBC2 Vietnam and Credence Clearwater on the brain.

I looked closer and see that you like Stalker. Well, okay, what is the series about? It's not another "freaks in a subway tunnel" is it? LOL

Isn't it some kind of radiation thing? Maybe I should hit google. Oh, yeah, I was right - Stalker, that Chernobyl thing. Freaks, but not in a subway tunnel.

Well, if you like it, maybe I shouldn't pre-judge.

I did finish Dragon Rising and it was a helluva game. It was quite a challenge to capture the sniper rifle without getting wiped out by fresh Chinese troups with their 50 round high-powered fully-automatic Scar. I picked one up later - very powerful. And good range too. No wonder they were wiping us out.

I ended up leaving all my squad behind, within sight as I raced down the hill having stabbed the sniper in the back. One time I stopped and hit the M key for map, and two red dots were closing in behind me. Yikes!

I read the comments below the new OF game trailer, and a lot of guys were upset with the Dragon Rising game, and didn't plan to buy the new one coming out in the summer. I attempted to add some fairer comments, and then the bulletin board didn't log me in correctly, and my comments were gone. One more bug, kind of like the game. That steamed me, so I just left all the negatives and moved on.

But I will definitely buy the new game.

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Wow, I finally took Sam's great advice on how to use the bios to dual boot with sata drives. I found out a bunch of stuff about how sata is different from my former IDE way of doing things. On Ide, or P-ATA, if memory serves me, you HAD TO boot off ide 1, master. No ifs ands or buts about it.

But Sata does not constrain you like that. Which opens the door to Sam's bios method.

With Sata, your system does not care which sata cable any particular hard drive is connected to. (If you have some ide hard drives also, that may cause complications, I don't know - my system does have ide connections, but I am using ONLY sata hard drives.)

I discovered that each sata cable is uniquely identified by its physical connector location on the motherboard. So you have Sata 1, Sata 2, through Sata 6 in the case of my rig. Finding some articles on google that backed up Sam's way of doing it, one guy said - "Disconnect your other hard drives, so you don't get any cross-contamination, and boot the new O/S off the optical."

With that method, I installed XP fresh on the sata 2 drive, and now after years of XP on D (dual boot with windows 98 on the C drive) my XP is now on C. The XP disk manager sees C as disk 1 (sata 2) and D as disk 0 (sata 1.) XP doesn't care that C is not the first physical drive location. For me, that was a revelation. Sata means flexibility!

So then I unplugged that drive, plugged back in Sata 1, and installed Windows 7. Windows 7 also sees itself on drive C, and it sees the xp drive as drive D. All operating systems are on drive C, just as Sam described! It's actually too easy - Sam was holding out on us as usual!

I set up the bios to default boot to the XP drive. That was indeed absurdly simple, just a few key strokes as Sam had mentioned. But it's even easier now - I don't have to go into the bios ever again.

The default boot is XP. But when I want windows 7 I wait for the bios splash screen, with the little instruction to "Hit Del for bios." Then I hit F8.

I wait a few seconds, and lo and behold, a little boot order menu appears, showing all my hard drives. I hit the down arrow to select the drive with the name that starts with ST, a seagate drive, rather than the name that starts with WD, the Western Digital drive that XP is on. Voila, Windows 7 loads, and that's how simple it is! Life is good. If I become a big Windows 7 freak, after buying a 2gig graphics card, which will give me a total of 6 gigs of ram and vram, then I'll go into the bios, hit a few keys to set the default boot for that Windows 7 ST drive, and I'll only use the F8 trick once in a while for XP.

Here is the best part. Totally gone is all the interdependency between disks, and the "cross contamination" of having part of your boot process on another drive. Each operating system, and all of its boot information, is on that drive. I can move drives around, change cables - no worries!

The other way has caused problems. But nothing like the recent problem I had when I installed Vista, dual boot, in order to play Medal of Honor single player, which wouldn't save the games properly on xp. I completed the single player, then I uninstalled Vista, because it was not letting me load into XP. But uninstalling it did not fix the problem. Believe it or not, remnants of the Vista boot loader remained.

I enjoyed this kind of fun:

How about trying to load xp, and having it blue screen when you log into your user account - but not a BSOD - just the Vista bootloader blue screen, meaning it's Vista time, except that THERE IS NO VISTA!

Ho hum, back to bios, over and over again. Yeah. Fun.

Not every time, just on the day that the Vista ghost decided to drop by. How about walking away from the computer in disgust, and coming back in 10 minutes to see if the XP welcome screen had finally stabilized?

Sometimes I would try to immediately hit the guest login, to see if the desktop would load far enough to block Vista's attempt at world domination (--> from the grave - I had uninstalled it!)

Sometimes that worked. Sometimes it didn't. No amount of booting off the xp optical, running fixboot in Recovery Console, or any other remedy, seemed to solve the problem. No wonder I was ready for Sam's method of boot order in the bios.

I wiped both drives and started over. And now, my friends, the problem is gone forever.

With Sata drives - SCREW the "usual" type of dual boot. Just install each operating system on its own drive. Select boot order in the bios. It's too easy! And if your motherboard has a little shortcut boot order key, like mine with F8, you never have to go into the bios again, after initially setting your default boot order.

Just remember this important tip: Install each operating system with only that one sata drive plugged in, booting off the new O/S optical, to ensure zero cross-contamination! You don't want the ghost of Vista hanging around!

Rich

 

PI = Performance Index. Relative score, as % to HD4870

8800GTX - PI65, 150W, 768MB
HD6850 - PI150, 127W, 1GB
HD6870 - PI170, 151W, 1GB
HD6950 - PI190, 170W, 2GB
HD6970 - PI210, 210W, 2GB
GTX580 - PI230, 290W, 1.5GB
HD5970 - PI280, 290W, 1GB per GPU
HD6850 Crossfire - PI290, 250W, 1GB per GPU
4GB HD5970 - PI310, 350W, 2GB per GPU
HD6870 Crossfire - PI330, 300W, 1GB per GPU
HD6950 Crossfire - PI370, 340W, 2GB per GPU
HD6990 - PI375, 350W, 2GB per GPU
HD6990OC - PI400, 380W, 2GB per GPU
HD6970 Crossfire - PI410, 420W, 2GB per GPU

 

10% doesn't seem like much gain, to go crossfire against the 6990. And that's an OC'd card taboot! And quite the wattage beasts too

 

Because the 6990 already is two 6970s!

 

Well...this isn't my area of expertise

 

Actually it's farking awesome you would probably really like it Rich. It has lots of good adventuring, wide open spaces and awesome gun porn

Stalker is sort of like an RPG but with tactical combat gear and gun customization right down to what caliber your Desert Eagle is chambered for. The story is long and epic and the gameplay world is huge. I never paid it much attention before, but now I've started it I can't stop playing.

I am using a mod called the "Complete Mod". A total update mod put together by a team of professional modders and artists. It basically updates the graphics and interface to be more streamlined and it brings all 3 games up to the same standard, removing a lot of the bugs and clunkiness. Basically vendors will now buy un-repaired guns, all guns are named correctly, the graphics are prettier, everything gets new textures, etc. The mod comes with a simple installer and there's a version for each of the 3 games. They are just somewhat unpolished and the Complete mod makes them sing.

If a crappy looking game can be easily modded to look better, you bet your ass I'll mod it. Stock graphics are overrated when everything can be brought to a higher standard for free.

I thought Dragon Rising was a great game if a little unbalanced. But if you are slow and tactical you'll see that they set up a lot of cool semi-scripted events for you to stumble upon. One favorite in particular is when you are inserted into enemy territory and are tasked with taking out a jeep carrying a high ranking officer. You literally sneak through 4 or 5 miles of wide open forest checking for enemies the whole way and following the jeep to a stopping point. Then you set up on top of a hill at extreme long range and take him out with one well placed sniper round. After you take the guy out, the whole mountain explodes with patrols and helicopters searching for you. So it's a mad scramble under the tree cover to make it back to the extraction point. Talk about epic gameplay.

I really enjoyed Dragon Rising, I just wish it had some sort of targeting system to give you the positions of enemy troops. You'll get shot at from like half a mile away, and not be able to see them because they're not within the range of your radar. I know that's not very realistic, but multiplayer is a hassle when you have no clue where the enemy is... not that I played much of the multi anyway.

 

Hey sam and rich,

It's about time for me to get a new main monitor as mine's starting to get old and I've been thinking about stepping up and getting a U2711. I know you guys have those crazy 30" monitors with super high res (2560x1600) so I've been wondering if you have trouble reading text on them? Some reviews have mentioned that text on monitors whose pixel pitch is as small as those is too small to read for most people. Unfortunately something like this can't be tested before purchase so I'm having difficulty in deciding between something like a U2410 and the U2711.

TIA

redmaw

 

The U2410 is the direct descendant of my 2407WFP. Unless you have a huge budget, I would say definitely get the 24" screen. Dell seem to use better than average panels in their monitors, and the image quality follows accordingly. My main monitor is 4 years old and still going strong. The size is perfect for movies/gaming and text is just fine.

1920 x 1200 in 24" is a fairly high pixel pitch, but not as high as the 2560 x 1600 monitors. Not only are they bigger and just plain higher resolution, the actual image quality is better still. So this really comes down to a matter of budget. Also if you play any games at all, 2560 x 1600 is proportionately one of the most demanding resolutions you can run. Games that are routine to run on a rig such as mine suddenly become hardcore demanding.

 

Yeah I don't plan on being able to game at that res at all.

While I'm asking questions, anyone know why the U2311H is so much less than the U2410?

Edit: also any info on the revisions would be nice, spied a U2410 for 380 so I'm looking to see why it's so cheap now lol.

 

Because it's 1920 x 1080 resolution and not 1920 x 1200. 1080p panels are cheaper and will likely not have near the image quality as 1920 x 1200. Just one look at Newegg and you will find several even cheaper than the Dell. They have a lower pixel pitch. Remember they're not a wider screen either, they're a wider aspect ratio on a smaller resolution. It has an effect on image quality.

As far as finding the U2410 cheap the technology has matured and become cheaper naturally. My 2407WFP was $600 when I got it and AFAIK has most of the same parts as other 1920 x 1200 monitors even today.

 

lol I didn't even think of checking the resolutions, just assumed they were all 1920x1200, stupid me >_>