The Official Graphics Card and PC gaming Thread

GTA4 is an unusual case though, it's very demanding on the CPU, and it's also very nvidia-biased, so even an outdated card like the GTX260 can keep up with modern high-end Radeons.

 

Cmon Sam the GTX260 isn't that outdated

 

Three years is a long time in the technology industry. Not saying it isn't still useful, but it's getting on a bit now!

 

Oh agreed but the GTX260 is far from slow.

 

Never said it was, point is a card of its age in GTA4 can still hold its own with a high end card of today from AMD.

 

Also agreed. My point though was that not only the Nvidia bias, but the card's initial high performance is helping it keep up. Anything that can handle Crysis adequately is beefy in my book. I still consider it a touch above the 4870 given the bias.

Also tbf I would have definitely purchased a GTX275 if they weren't so disproportionately expensive at the time.

The 8800GTS just passed its 2 year anniversary today btw(on the invoice). Not only does it still game well, it's been folding constantly for just under a year of uptime now. Say all you want, G92 was one of the best designs Nvidia ever came out with.

 

'handle crysis adequately' - how long is a piece of string? My X1900 handled it 'adequately' at 800x600, my HD3870 handled it 'adequately' at high res without shadows enabled, where do you draw the line?


In other news, I ran a few comparisons of recent games from GameGPU site. Because of biasing issues, and the increased complexity, this only considers radeons, but since people are roughly familiar with what the equivalents are for geforces now, they shouldn't really be necessary.



notes:
MQ, HQ, VHQ, UQ: Medium/High/Very High/Ultra Quality
EF3: Eyefinity, 3 displays
A30: Average 30fps
M30: Minimum 30fps
CF/TCF/QCF: Crossfire/tri/quad
Q2F: Quad crossfire with two cards
AUS: Antilles unlock switch (880mhz vs 830mhz on HD6990)
OC+: Overclocked beyond AUS setting
N/A: Not possible on currently available hardware

/!\: Denotes game did not have fully-functioning crossfire support when tested.

 

I consider adequately to be all Very High settings at 1920 x 1200 and managing an average of 36FPS without any of the tweaks, which I easily made one do. And it was faster at the game than my single 4870. I daresay that's fairly adequate power for gaming, considering Crysis still runs way worse than the majority of new games coming out.

Also F3AR and Crysis 2 were decent. Really liked the Dx11 and texture upgrades for Crysis 2. F3AR was disappointing though. FEAR 1 was exquisite, FEAR 2 had consolitis, and F3AR is just a big flop. Also IMO FEAR 1 was graphically superior to the other two. Maybe not technically, but art direction and use of the graphics engine's capabilities goes a lot further than pretty shaders.

 

Wait - seriously Jeff, you don't mean the one that starts out with soldiers in a truck pretending to be Germans, do you? And then later when you rescue the British captain you have to dodge the searchlights?

Wait - you said you have to play the original and then get to the expansion, so it can't be that one. I'm sure I own United Offensive - I think I bought every version of those older games - I'll have to check it out a little more closely.

By the way guys, for Red River and the $5 DLC, don't be a dummy like me if you buy the Valley of Death expansion. I did read that it included 8 new maps, for Last Stand, etc. But I actually thought it also included a new campaign and I couldn't figure out where the campaign was - customer service sent me a note "unfortunately Rich, no new campaign." Duhhh

Hey, getting caught up to Sam's new graph, has anybody started playing Crysis 2? I now have the money to upgrade the 8800GTX paired with my quad stock 9450, to a 6970 (that's the one, right, 2 gigs memory, at about $330?) but the games I play, like BC2, are running okay on the 8800GTX. And I have the feeling that even a 6970 with my 9450 quad, wouldn't handle Crysis, let alone Crysis 2.

Speaking of Battlefield, is anybody playing the beta of BC3 yet?

Rich

 

Nope Rich that's Medal of Honor: Allied Assault which I also have all the expansions for.

Well you didn't necessarily have to beat CoD1 beforehand but it follows in chronological order somewhat. CoD1 focused on Stalingrad and the Normandy landings while United Offensive was about Kursk and the Battle of the Bulge which both took place after the events in the first game. Remember, this is the expansion for Call of Duty 1, not Medal of Honor. Medal of Honor is a much older game tech-wise.

Rich we're telling you the 9450 is just fine. Just overclock the thing. It's basically guaranteed to 3.4GHz problem free.

 

I included CPU limitations on that graph for a reason - a Q9550 guarantees a minimum of 45fps in Crysis 2, so a Q9450 will only be marginally below that, and with a small overclock, will reach over 50. In Crysis 1, the CPU limit will always be above 60. The Q9450 is still quite a powerful CPU.

 

NPB

 

LOL I've started playing Fallout 3. It's on Gamebryo Engine so you guys know what that means, MODS!!! It has guns too so I'm being even more anal retentive than Oblivion! lol Modding is fun, especially when the game is so open to it. So far every single weapon has been replaced, tweaked, or retextured. I'm trying to keep the original balance intact while making some of the beginner/intermediate weapons more useful.

Fortunately the graphics and performance are quite reasonable compared to Oblivion so I can spend less time fixing the game and more time tailoring it to my tastes. Just a basic overall high res texture pack and some dozen or so high res re-textures for certain things. Just to spruce it up a little. I'd say currently my versions of Oblivion and Fallout 3 have been upgraded to a similar graphical standard.

 

Started to play Mafia 2. The game is downright pretty and a joy to play. Runs great. The lighting, models, and textures in particular are very good, but the game is low on heavy fireworks, so I manage an average of say 60-70 at maxed settings. Excellent game.

Also has a lot of really well done weapons. The game is set directly after World War II right after your character returns from fighting in Italy. There are K98s, M1 Garands, both versions of the Thompson SMG, Remington 870s, MP40s the list goes on. My personal favorites are the 357 Magnum and Colt M1911 with an extended magazine. A lot of detail and historical accuracy packed into the game. Cars even run out of gas and unlike other sandbox GTA clones you are expected to keep your cars nice and follow traffic.

Mafia 2 is one of the highest quality games I've played in years.

 

Mafia & Mafia 2 are underrated, they are both great games.

 

Well, as usual I'm about a week behind, adding in two more days of blackout - did you guys hear about it? It affected all of Southern California even into Mexico and parts of Arizona, lol. Thankfully it wasn't a full 48 hours - more like 3 hours one day and 5 hours the next. The big bright shopping center with the supermarket that stays open until 1 am, just around the corner, was totally blacked out at 9 at night when my brother and I came back from the movies waiting for power to come back on. I got out of my car in the middle of the parking lot and just looked around - a scene from a video game (but I didn't stay long in case the police were to drive by and decide I was a looter, lol.)

Wow, that is crazy. Thanks for the info. I'm really glad that you are up on all the war shooters going back to the beginning of the COD series. It is very possible that I do not have United Offensive, although the title sounds so familiar.

I'm going to have to pull all 10 of the little boxes out of the cabinet to get to the big gaming box to see where United Offensive is, if I even have it. (Yeah, see below - I found it!)

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Just for the fun of it - does your fps shooter involvement go all the way back to the W98 Microsoft game - Outwars?

It was a pretty cool game and probably led MS to develop Halo. Outwars was a space game with the marines fighting "bugs" who had their own weapons. The marines used jet packs, and they also used hang gliders. This was before WASD when everybody just used the arrow keys for movement.

Did any of you guys ever play Outwars? I think that game started shooters for me!

It was one of the games that was demoed on the W98 install CD, along with Monster Truck Madness, and both of those were also LAN games that could be played with several players.

I had 3 old computers on a LAN, each with a 3dfx graphics card, or maybe an old nvidia, and at least a 200mhz cpu, with at least 64MB of Ram I think, running Monster Truck Madness with the special steering wheel and accelerator and brake gaming console. We used to run those trucks around and crash into each other and try to push each other off the high platform for extra points in the Arena game.

For Outwars, we used the hang gliders and flew around shooting each other - hahaha.

Does anybody else remember those two games? Did anybody else have the old gaming console with steering wheel and foot assembly for Monster Truck Madness?

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Okay, I pulled all the boxes out.

And yes! I found United Offensive! You start with a group of guys out on patrol in the snow, suddenly to be attacked by Nazis coming in from all directions - like Jeff said, the Battle of the Bulge.

By the way, I picked up about $150 in some new equipment finally - a Saitek lighted keyboard - I think a couple of you guys have that, maybe Jeff and Shaff, and I was leaning toward the Habu mouse, but I finally picked up a SteelSeries mouse pad for about $30 from Newegg - the one that is a hard plastic with 10,000 ridges per square inch - and a newegg reviewer said the pad was perfectly matched to the ikari laser mouse, so I got that one new off ebay, for about $50, because newegg was out.

Anyway, I was able to get Call of Duty One, and United Offensive, which have a max resolution of 2048x1440 (I think) to play in a window on the 2560x1600 screen, so the image is not stretched. At first the nvidia 8800 gtx didn't want to cooperate, but finally it started working okay - maybe I wasn't quite doing things right - putting it in a window finally made it work. I also loaded Call of Duty 2 on the gaming rig, and it is fine with display at 2560x1600.

But what I wanted to mention, is that I have two quick dpi settings on the Ikari mouse, like all of you guys have on the Habu and the other good mice you guys have.

So when I started up United Offensive, which as Jeff mentions jumps into the Battle of the Bulge and the surprise Nazi counter-attack as the Allies were closing in on the Fatherland, I found that when I was in the jeep manning the 50 caliber, and we were fleeing from nazis pouring out of every snowbound slope, the slower 800 dpi setting was WAY more stable than leaving it on the faster 1600 setting. I didn't have any trouble mowing down all the Germans, whereas the jumping of the jeep was causing me major problems at the higher dpi, and I remember thinking back a couple of years how difficult it was to fire accurately with the gun bouncing all over the place. So right away, I am really glad I got the new mouse, if only for that.

Anyway, the whole subject of United Offensive, versus Allied Attack, caused me to do some more research on Infinity Ward, which has now regenerated itself as Respawn Entertainment, back with EA, which they left when they teamed up with Activision and made the first Call of Duty.

Infinity Ward, originally 2015, did their first work on the first Medal of Honor, which Steve Spielberg produced. That is the game I was thinking about - the truck convoy pretending to be Nazis - Medal of Honor Allied Assault, the first Medal of Honor to run on Windows (and I guess the third medal of honor - but the first two were console games.) So that was the first game that had a major Infinity Ward influence, but the constraints of EA at that time - everything had to be American, you had to have a soldier being a heroic single person, infiltrating etc. rather than part of a larger attack force - were stifling the creativity of infinity Ward.

If you guys follow this link, you will see some videos that I have never seen before, by Machinima.com.



The videos start with the whole development of Infinity Ward in leaving EA and going to activision and starting the COD franchise. The videos finish with MW2 on the way. But then the videos move into Valve, and how Gabe Newell and his partner started, developing Half Life. A few more videos move into the mods, Counter Strike, Day of Defeat, and Team Fortress, and finish up on Half Life 2, and the two episodes. I should mention that some of the people at Valve question the wisdom of the episode idea - whether or not that plan was the best thing that could have happened with the Half Life series.

Anyway, I STRONGLY recommend this series of machinima.com YouTube videos - check it out, you'll be glad you did!

Quote:
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Hey, getting caught up to Sam's new graph, has anybody started playing Crysis 2? I now have the money to upgrade the 8800GTX paired with my quad stock 9450, to a 6970 (that's the one, right, 2 gigs memory, at about $330?) but the games I play, like BC2, are running okay on the 8800GTX. And I have the feeling that even a 6970 with my 9450 quad, wouldn't handle Crysis, let alone Crysis 2.
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Rich we're telling you the 9450 is just fine. Just overclock the thing. It's basically guaranteed to 3.4GHz problem free.

That quote is from Jeff again. I feel a lot better about overclocking the 9450 now that I have installed a side intake fan. Sam gave me some guidance about a year ago on how to do it. I can save custom bios settings on the motherboard.

So do I correctly read you, Jeff, that with a 6970, 2 gigs, running my 4 gigs 9450, overclocked to 3.4, on Windows 7 to take advantage of all 6 gigs, I might be able to get some kind of decent frames out of Crysis? I own Crysis, Warhead, but not yet Crysis 2. Is anybody playing Crysis 2, and is it any good? Edit: I almost missed it - I see Sam mentioning about 45 to 50 fps with an overclocked 9450 on Crysis 2 - okay, that sounds good - and I previously had saved Jeff's comments on the DX11 2 gig patch crytek released for Crysis 2 - another good thing.

(I also notice that between Jeff and DXR, you guys like Mafia - maybe I'll check it out - but other than Jeff mentioning how the DX11 enhancement really cleaned up the looks of Crysis 2, I haven't noticed anybody really talking about the gameplay - and Sam hasn't even tried it - which tells me that you guys who played it were not that impressed. Am I right?.)

Rich

 

Crysis 2 was a step backward in both graphics and story. it did however have better simplified controls.

i wish we could go back to the day when consoles followed there own strict code. now its all about how we can port this over to PC with as little effort as possible.

 

I was under the impression that Plasma burn in was an isolated problem. Isolated to strictly plasma screens. Today, I witnessed a ~6 yr old Dell 17" LCD monitor, with what appeared to be some form of burn in. My brother had an image set for his desktop background. The stark white pixels apparently caused a form of burn in. Or perhaps they're merely stuck pixels? Because I thought dead pixels were black. Is there some way to Unstick the pixels? LOL! Please don't suggest Tapping pencils into the pixels. I couldn't bare it Jeff LOL!

 

LOL Omega that's the best solution I've found so far. It's not nearly enough of a tap to damage the screen and any pencil lines can be wiped off. It worked beautifully for the one stuck pixel on my ASUS 1080p monitor and the offending pixel has worked fine for well over 6 months now. You just place the dull tip of a pencil on the pixel, and flick it, but not hard. The shock usually corrects the pixel and you can do it multiple times with no damage. The trick is to NOT USE A SHARP PENCIL. The tip will likely break and it can damage your screen as well, broken tip or not.

 

Well, according to Wiki, Flashy videos, or simply rubbing the screen gently could help. I've advised my brother to try both. He has also decided to change the background as well The stark white is apparently offensive to the old monitor.