The Official Graphics Card and PC gaming Thread

new nvidia drivers?

 

Very likely. Meanwhile here's a summary of hardwareheaven's recent test. I think the F1 2010 result is bugged, but the rest of them are true.

RPI = Required performance Index (where HD4870/GTX260-216=100, HD5870=180, GTX580=230)
Enforced = required to get adequate performance, or adequate benefit
Enforced absolute = required for the game to play (or to receive any benefit) at all.


Minimum 60fps (4xAA unless specified)

AvP:
23": RPI-AMD470, RPI-NV510
3x23": RPI-AMD925, RPI-NV1290 (1.5GB enforced)

Bulletstorm (8x):
23" RPI-AMD260, RPI-NV290
3x23": RPI-AMD640 RPI-NV??? (2GB enforced absolute)

Crysis 2 Demo:
23": RPI-AMD270, RPI-NV240. (Single GPU enforced absolute)
3x23": RPI-AMD540, RPI-NV635 (single GPU enforced)

Dead Space 2 (AA unsupported):
23": RPI-AMD150, RPI-NV100 (Single GPU enforced absolute AMD, Single GPU enforced nvidia)
3x23": RPI-AMD300, RPI-NV330 (Single GPU enforced absolute AMD)

Dragon Age 2 (8x):
23": RPI-AMD330, RPI-NV810
3x23": RPI-AMD720, RPI-NV1590 (1.5GB enforced)

F1 2010 (8x):
23": RPI-AMD280, RPI-NV280 (Single GPU enforced)
3x23": RPI-AMD470, RPI-NV540 (Single GPU enforced)

Civilization V (8x):
23": RPI-AMD195, RPI-NV140
3x23": RPI-AMD515, RPI-NV475 (1.25GB enforced absolute)

HAWX 2 (8x):
23": RPI-AMD235, RPI-NV110
3x23": RPI-AMD470, RPI-NV240

Total War:Shogun 2 (AA unused, too demanding):
23": RPI-AMD515, RPI-NV495 (Single GPU enforced absolute)


A higher number means a higher required demand, thus the game requires more hardware to run the same, i.e. is running worse.

 

http://www.hexus.net/content/item.php?item=29430&page=12

LOL 1920 is now a CPU bottleneck, albeit for COD.

hurry up next gen consoles! or just BF3.


and i find this card hilariously bad. yes its the fastest in the world (if for a couple weeks) but power consumption/noise is megalols. and the price!

why not just go for dual 6950s, and unlock them.

 

Power consumption's about the same as the 4870X2 and 5970 before it.
Noise is still better than the GTX480.
Performance/dollar is still better than the GTX580, despite being a dual card.

Two HD6950s/6970s are still a much better buy, but for what this card does, it's priced exactly right.

1920x1200 has been a CPU bottleneck in several games for ages. Even 2560's a CPU bottleneck in COD.

 

hexus report otherwise with noise

 

I will disregard any test using a £30 decibel meter, they're completely arbitrary. I only accept subjective tests for noise. Hexus' tests are really quite poor these days in general.

 

duplicate - reply function froze

 

I went up to Santa Maria (north of Santa Barbara about an hour) to visit one of my brothers for a week, so I am just now catching up with Jeff's comments about Stalker, which I had unfairly characterized as "freaks, but not in a tunnel" lol.

Jeff: "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 "

Ok, doesn't sound too bad. But what is gun porn? Hahaha (Seriously, I don't know.)

Amazing that there are these mods that fix up games like Stalker. Good tip, Jeff.

Well, now that Japan is "boiling over" I should play the game pretty soon to get practiced up for what is really going to happen everywhere

- Hope not! -

I heard from a former college classmate, Norio Okaido, in Japan. The quake was measured at about 5 in Tokyo, down from the 9 offshore. But the tidal waves kept rolling in on Japan's Pacific Coast. Although the villagers had 100 years of experience to get ready, they weren't prepared for 4-story high giant waves moving into craggy coves, taking out complete towns all the way up to 5-6 miles inland. He said - worst in Japan's history going back to 9th century when similar accounts were recorded - a 1000 year event!

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Yeah, for sure, I quite agree - epic gameplay. I remember the moonlit night raid episode about taking out the radio tower. Actually maybe it was the same episode you mentioned about shooting the officer - except I don't think I ever shot him. He went up to the radio station, and I went around and almost got killed by the sniper at the bunker on the left. After calling in the artillery strike to take down the tower, the new objective was to get back to the beach extraction point. On the way back, there were indeed LOTS of scary foot patrols that we had to thread our way in-between.

Quite intense.

In thinking back on it, the no-music ambiance of the game at night is awesome - occasional birds, some wind noises, occasional attack helicopters passing overhead, quiet rustling grass sounds as your squad beats a consistent slow jog back toward safety. Or if you're really scared, you can sprint for about 100 yards, and then your heavy breathing factors in, before you get totally winded and must slow down.

Diving for cover was a favorite tactic for me on the suspenseful escape.

One time that sticks in my mind, as we moved away from an enemy patrol behind us, I just happened to glance to my right and saw another 4-man squad maybe 30 yards away rapidly closing in on our position, as they moved briskly toward us along a road only 20 feet ahead that we were just about to cross. Holy sh*t! I went prone, my heart pounding - my squad echoing my move. The chinese hadn't seen us and quickly passed by.

Whew! Very close call! Are we going to get out of this? Where is the damn ocean?

When the helicopters buzzed around, rather than taking cover under the trees, I stayed well away from the trees, out in the open grass, relying on prone to stay hidden. I actually was afraid of the trees, of what might have been waiting within the trees. I always dropped down and "played dead" when I thought the choppers were moving in a way that would somewhat cross our position and allow them to see us.

Lying down in that grass at night, I would imagine that we were nearly invisible. But weren't they using infra-red? I would guess they were, but we never got spotted. They were never directly overhead - I had stopped well before we got that close to their flight path.

I think those 'copters go down without too much trouble, and I wouldn't mind playing the game again sometime, and having my squad unload on them. But not on that particular mission.

The game is filled with suspense. You really feel like you're out there in the night air. You really feel like being sighted could result in the death of your whole squad. If you were a Seal on that type of clandestine mission in real life, I bet the game is fairly accurate. They promise that this summer's sequel will be the closest ever to stepping into the boots of a marine.

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Haha. Okay, Kevin, if that's the way it is, go deliver more pizzas when you aren't doing your UPS stuff, and save up a $1000. LOL But Jeff pretty much nailed it when he said:

That is an excellent summary.

Look, Kevin, as you probably recall, I sprang for the 30" when I still had the p4, even before I upgraded the cpu from 3.2 to 3.8 ghz, doubling the L2 cache to 2mb, and before I doubled my ram to 2 gigs so BF2 wouldn't pause for 4 seconds loading more of a map.

It was arguably stooopid for me to get such a big monitor, but two years of listening to Sam and reading between the lines convinced me, and I just figured that eventually I would increase my rig power, which didn't happen for almost two more years.

Still, it was awesome!

The reason it was so awesome, is something that Jeff didn't mention, which is the "M" factor, for IMMERSION. (Actually I see it starts with an "I" but it feels like an "M.")

Last week my peripheral vision just barely caught somebody through the trailer window to my left advancing along the side of the house. I glanced around in the COD4 multiplayer crossfire map - the town where the tank led the attack on the opfor in the single player campaign - and I didn't see anybody. So I dismissed the thought from my mind. Then, sure enough, my trailer door opened, and I leaned back and forced myself to undergo the dimensional state shift, removing my headphones, and fielding the question with "No I don't know where a PennySaver is." (For you Brits - that's a coupon booklet that comes each week in the mail - an advertising circular.)

My point is that I had looked around the COD4 map for the person outside the trailer.

30" GAMING IMMERSION!!

The "M" factor, lol. Which brings me to a question for Sam regarding this following chart that he posted a couple weeks back:

Sam, correct me if I am wrong, but for 30" gaming, doesn't this relative performance chart understate the performance gain with 4XAA, that you get from the new 6900 family 2 gig cards, due to their deep architecture? I distinctly recall you explaining that they had a fermi type ability to handle massive AA without much difficulty, that was particularly important for 30" gaming.

If that is the case, would you mind restating the chart, Sam, just for 30" gaming with 4XAA, if the numbers truly are significantly different?


Red_Maw, depending on Sam's answer, this may exactly illustrate Jeff's point. For 30" gaming one has to go beyond the surface numbers, and be highly aware of gpu improvements, like fermi, or like the deep architecture of the 6900 2 gig cards, which enables them to somewhat effortlessly produce high-quality, smooth jaggy-free 4XAA (or maybe even 8XAA) graphics at full native 2560x1600.

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Haha. Tell us how you really feel, Sam!

Well, I have to chime in, having run a 30" for 2 years now, most of the time on weak equipment, and in my opinion, I would have to say that it "ain't that bad" - depending on the game.

For example, Left 4 Dead looks great at 1920x1200 on the 30" and now with the 9450 and the 8800, I thought it would look ever so much better at 2560x1600 - but not really.

Yes, a little more detailed for sure, obviously, but the game already looked VERY good. Maybe it's just L4D. When I recently found the game crashing about once each two hours, and I couldn't get back to my team, I got ticked off at the 8800, and I dropped back to 1920x1200 full screen, thinking that might help since it had never crashed before, and I noticed that it was still very fine-looking indeed.

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Kevin, don't doubt it - the answer is Yes! I bought this samsung 24" 1920x1200 hdtv/monitor for the family person up in LA about 18 months ago, which was about $400 from Costco. It accepts two hdmi inputs, vga, etc. It has an hd tuner, and it will run regular 1920x1080 with a narrow band of 60 pixels above and below the picture, or run off a computer on the full 1920x1200. This particular one is not available any longer, at newegg, but amazon has two refurbished for only $235 each.

When I am up in LA, each and every time the TV is on, I am AMAZED at the definition - think of it - full 1920x1080 (or 1920x1200 from a PC) on a 24" screen - VERY HIGH DEF! I am not sure how to describe it, but it's almost like looking at a photograph. Well, I guess it's like looking at Jeff's monitor. Very very nice. So you can run it off your pc, as a 1920x1200 monitor, or invoke the tuner and run it off the little air antenna that I put in for them, sitting up on top of the bookcase, about $50 from radio shack, with the powered boost - it picks up the free on-air HD signals VERY nicely. (Maybe even outside Portland where you are.)

Rich

 

Gun porn basically means they have lots of realistic weapons and all the ammo is realistic too. There are about 8 different calibers of ammo in the game for roughly 30 different types of guns. And there are 2 or more varieties of each caliber. Full Metal Jacket, Armor Piercing, Low Velocity Sniper, Hollow Point, etc. Each variety of ammo has realistic advantages and disadvantages. Example, newer AKs use 5.54mm ammunition. NATO rifles use 5.56mm ammunition. The 5.54 is similar to the NATO round but cheaper and easier to find. The NATO round is slightly more accurate and more powerful but more rare to find in the game. Also likewise the the guns are more or less reliable according to how they actually are in real life scenarios. So your AK will almost never jam, but your worn out AR15 will jam all the time. The advantage of course being that when fully repaired, the AR15 is more accurate, more controllable, more power at range, slightly better armor piercing etc.

The "Complete" mods fix a bunch of small bugs and majorly upgrade the graphics to the newest stuff the engine supports. They also make some mechanics more streamlined such as repairing weapons, trading, etc. As well, they also change all the guns to their real life names as the original games use made-up names for licensing reasons. That particular mod is the difference between a buggy, ugly mess and a very polished game. They are so essential to the experience, that the Stalker Wiki refers to the game as though the "Complete Mod" were installed by default. It really makes a wild difference. I went from completely uninterested to absolutely enthralled from one single mod.

 

I will likely purchase SOMETHING beyond my 24" Samsung one day. Saving money is my only problem at the moment. What I need to do, is accept any and all offers to help people in the electronics department. What I mean by that is, Generally I can copy any thing/process I see or read. That's how I've gotten good at photoshop. Youtube vids and simply playing around. I even dabbled with my brothers Wii. The outcome is a wii that can play his backup games. Being he has a 4 and 6yr old, this is very beneficial to him. They've gotten a hold of the discs a few times. The outcome was not pretty. I sure wish I had a Mentor to help me in other areas. Finding a good programming tutorial is not easy to say the least. And a student is only as good as their teacher if you ask me

 

I'm strongly considering selling my GTX 260 on ebay. What I intend to use for a replacement is my 8600Gt. Highly outdated I know. But it can handle my day to day processes. Problem is, the fan on it quit a while back. Finding a cheap(less than 15$) replacement is difficult to say the least. I'm considering mickey mousing any fan I have on hand. Thoughts on this venture? The card itself should be fine, because the case it came out of was very well cooled, and never any gaming. It generally averaged 46 - 50C idle. I've noticed that some models don't even have a fan. They have a very large heat sink. So perhaps these cards simply don't get very hot. Even newegg wants 30+$ for a similar replacement

 

The TDP of the 8600GT (47W) is less than that of some chipsets. A large chipset heatsink should do fine, especially with a fan attached.

 

It already has the LARGE stock heatsink. I'm gonna see if I can adapt a fan to that heat sink.

 

40mm fan with cable ties should work.

 

so sam, not going the dual 6990s way?

 

I just so happen to have one

 

Two 6970s are plenty enough for me at the moment thank you

 

n00b

 

My PC hasn't seen the likes of a demand for ages, it's the final two months of my degree, and I'm juggling revision and coursework with booking a holiday. Frankly my HD4830 could have handled everything my PC's done in the last month. Once Saturday 28th May arrives (day after my last exam), that all changes. I have a LONG list of games I want to work through.

Amusingly, the final fragsoc physics (biggest of the 3 each term) LAN is the day after my final exam