The Official Graphics Card and PC gaming Thread

Very well, thanks for the input. I'm probably gonna go with that dual fan XFX. I love the looks of it, and it appears to be an overclocked version. Much like my BFG 260. I hope they're not sold out when the time comes :S

 

Nice report. Like Kevin, I may have to pick up one of these - but I may let the price drop a bit.

LOL How do you have time to get out there on the fire range with the AK?

RMA problems - count me in on that one too. I picked up an Ikari laser. I think I'll go back to newegg and read all the reviews. The first one was triggering the middle mouse button on rapid mouse movement, meaning in Left 4 Dead all of a sudden I'd be holding a molotov cocktail, where my uzi should have been = Dead Rich!

They sent me a replacement - I paid the $8.41 shipping back of the old one. But the new one is doing a double left click, instead of single. Almost impossible to go through my MW2 or MW3 custom loadout - it clicks right past the option. For the time being I keep a V220 logitech laptop wireless mouse next to me and turned on for that type of stuff, but it is getting irritating, so I am trying to RMA back this replacement, hopefully 3rd time is the charm. But I feel just like you, Kevin, what new problem will they send me this time? I am very disappointed with SteelSeries, but I like the mouse pad. I have super respect for Logitech - maybe I'll just eventually pick up one of their higher-end gaming mice.

Oh no, Sam is an AfterDawn phone man, lol. Are you using a touchscreen, or Qwerty keyboard?

Thanks for the link Kevin. I was going to ask Sam about 2 gigs of vram - but I see I was wrong - 3 gigs!!! Holy moly! Good thing I got my w7 64 bit cranked up (increased memory to 8 gigs also, but running NOTHING under w7 yet.)

Hmmm - what quality setting? I can often live with 25fps.

Silky smooth - sounds good Jeff. What kind of fps will I pull on BF3 with a 7970 (I actually tried running it on my 8800gtx, with fps in the teens, but just to sort of check out the maps - and I did play through the single player, which had a few good parts once you got about an hour into the game.)

That sounds like something to think about.

Ditto for me. I guess that's where I'll be heading too.

Rich

Edit: Hey guys - look at this:

Here's a guru 3d article that appeared shortly after the one mentioned by Jeff, on 7970 crossfire, showing the 25 fps that Jeff took note of, doubled to 50 in crossfire - quality is on max. Sam, correct me if I am wrong, but I recall, a few months ago, that you were not expecting that we would be able to max Metro in 30" gaming with the 7000 family. Are you a bit surprised that "the boys" leaped ahead this far with 3 gigs vram and 4 billion transistors? They are showing 400 watts pulled at full load, and they are recommending a 750 watt psu, which I have in the Toughpower.

If I follow everybody's recommendations and do not overclock the graphics cards, that should leave room still for overclocking the 9450 to the 3.6 you guys think I should be able to get out of it.

 

This is in fact Metro 2033 The Last Refuge, and no mention is given about whether they use Depth of field or not. Also remember this is average frame rate not minimum, as Guru3D are still stuck in 2003 and refuse to test minimum frame rates.

As for the phone I've recently changed it, so it's now a lot easier to type with (From an HTC HD2 to an HTC Sensation XL)

 

Metro can bring it to its knees. Remarkable. I could spend 2,000USD, and a few months later, they'd release a highly demanding game >_>

 

It looks like the original metro 2033 was worse to me...

 

Hi everyone hows you all doing been a while since i been on here eh? lol,

anyways got a couple of questions for you guys,

my little bro has a GTX 460 1GB, and Amd Athalon 62 x 2 5000+ , its seems to be a big bottle neck on the card, would he be better off if i was to swap his card for my 8800GTX, and put his card in with my quad core intel q9950?


cheers nav

 

Ha most of the time my guns collect dust. Especially in winter it's just too cold to have any fun. We actually went and shot today, but didn't bother to reload any magazines as our fingers were too numb by that point lol.

As far as I'm aware this test was run with max settings. The framerate seems to indicate that as well.

Well my cards are so far off performance wise from any similar card I really couldn't give you an accurate guess. I'd imagine if your 8800GTX managed the teens, a 7970 would do pretty well for you.

Been gaming problem-free on a Logitech MX518 for years now. Has outlasted my considerably more expensive Microsoft/Razer Habu.

Quite simply yes it would help. I ran an OC'd 5000+ at 3.2GHz and it was still a fairly large bottleneck for a 9600GT and later an even worse bottleneck for the 9800GTX+ AMP!. In comparison the GTX460 is roughly twice as fast, so that 5000+ is probably cutting it to half performance or worse. The 8800GTX wouldn't bottleneck nearly as badly.

 

Yeah, go ahead Nav and steal from your kid bro - he won't know. LOL

Hey, I am playing through MW2 again, campaign, and it's been about 2 years so it feels fresh. This time in sneaking around in the snow at the Russian base, I decided to kill more soldiers rather than be as stealthy as the first time.

So Soap is up high with a thermal scope overlooking, and I am in the base. I thought he'd start to get mad at me, but he just said "good kill." So I continued my maniacal ways.



And then the second time the truck came by, I decided to lob a grenade at it. It exploded and caught on fire.

This time Soap didn't radio "Good kill." He actually seemed mildly irritated as he asked me, "Do you think they'll notice a burning wreckage in the middle of the road?"

HAHAHAHAHA

I actually stopped playing and laughed for a while. That's my new MW2 highpoint. I think it is so great that Infinity Ward programmed that in there for idiots like me!

In another later segment, we had to infiltrate the Rio slum - the favela - looking for this key guy Rojas, who designed the bullets used by Markovich. "Watch out for civilians." So I immediately shot one of the bystanders in the head.

My bullet killed the guy, of course, and the game restarted "Killing civilians will not be permitted."



This game has integrity - BF3 just did nothing at all since the bullets didn't have any effect at all when they didn't want them to have effect. That's the difference between polishing up the game, and not. I wonder what happened to Dice quality - BF:BC2 had a very nice single player.

That's the difference between Dice doing a weak job, versus Infinity Ward doing their normal great job. I certainly hope EA doesn't drag their quality down at Respawn. I wish Valve would align with Respawn - I wrote a note to Gabe about it - he's undoubtedly thought about it. That would be cool, no? Valve plus Infinity Ward.

Hey that reminds me - the Guru 3d chart on Metro, which Sam pointed out did not concern itself with minimums, only average fps, was in regard to a new version of Metro 2033 that is out - not the first one? Is that what you guys are saying? Nice!

Sam - how do you feel crossfire 7970s will handle crysis for 30" gaming?



Would you expect minimums of at least 30 fps? What about the ice near the end of the game when you say the fps falls down to 1/3rd or 1/4th the earlier fps. Are you planning to trade in your 6000 stuff and move over to the 7970s?

Thanks - very good to know and goes into my paperport mouse folder. I now have bought about 7 or 8 Logitech V220 cordless laptop 1000 dpi mice.



I picked them up for 3 laptop users, for my main business machine after the cord from my prior mouse kept getting stuck under the scanner, gave one away, plus a few spares. You can get manufacturer-refurbished for $10 all day long in choice of colors on ebay, which includes shipping. (I guess the new replacement has a tiny profile transmitter that might not have to be unplugged when you throw the laptop in the carry bag - less tendency of the thing to get bent over and broken since it sticks out so little - and higher 2.4 ghz frequency vs 124 Mhz of v220. But the way I look at it, you can't argue with V220 quality so I picked up the extras.)

Guess what - visiting Miles, the animator, I happened to have my laptop with me, and he was having major frustration with his wired usb mouse. It was dropping the usb signal all the time. I told him about the giant 50+MB of logitech mouse driver, which I think is designed to keep up the usb handshaking so you don't have that problem. I pulled my red V220 out of the laptop bag, and we downloaded the windows 7 drivers. At first we had a bit of a problem, but then we grabbed a tool they had to help us verify that the mouse was being seen through the usb port. I really have to hand it to Logitech, they do a good job.

I'm on my blue V220 right now. And up north in LA, Miles is undoubtedly sitting there on his i7 Antec Sonata rig,



with his 30" Dell, doing his professional Valve modeling and animation work with the red V220 laptop mouse that I gave him a few mos ago - he wrote me that he loves it!

LOL

Rich

 

My HD6970s aren't going anywhere soon. Improvement as the 7 series is, It's not enough to make me want an upgrade.
Crysis, hmm, dunno I'll do some numbers when I get back from work.

 

LOL my one true love <3 Crysis. Am a fan of quality game design and Crysis was quality from the ground up. Such a shame it came along at a bad time for gaining recognition. CoD4 and similar stole its thunder, not to mention the still very hefty requirements. It did still spark oe of the biggest hardware upgrade waves in PC gaming history though. Right up there next to Doom 3, Half Life 2, Far Cry. It's been much less of an obstacle since the move to 8GB of RAM though

Likewise untill some truly amazing game comes out or I decide to upgrade my monitor these 6850s are probably overkill. They are adequate for even the newest games. Kind of a shame, as I have a friend offering matched XFX 6970 Black Editions. He would consider a trade of my cards plus cash... wonder if he'd take my 4870s too, currently have those wall-mounted in a covered case, call me a nostalgic weirdo I long for the magical times of yesteryear when my X800GTO was a great card. Some of the best times of my life Only glad I was able to preserve my X850XT as a working unit. If it ever dies I will be scouring eBay for one. That is one hardcore piece of hardware.

 

Crysis (DX10 Very High)
Requirement index: 260/490 (NoAA), 280/540 (2xAA), 355/670 (4xAA)

HD7970 Performance in Crysis: PR360 (Well above average)
HD7970 Crossfire performance in Crysis: PR680 (89% scaling)

Estimated Minimum fps attainable at 1920x1080: 61fps @ 4xAA with Crossfire, 44fps @ NoAA with single card
Estimated Minimum fps attainable at 2560x1600: 32fps @ 4xAA with Crossfire, 44fps @ NoAA with crossfire, 24fps @ No AA with single card

Estimated average fps attainable at 1920x1080: 61fps @ 4xAA with single card
Estimated average fps attainable at 2560x1600: 42fps @ NoAA with single card, 59fps @ 4xAA with crossfire

By far the closest we've yet seen to maxing out Crysis, with an average of 60fps at max detail (AA included) pretty much accomplished at 2560x1600 using two GPUs. Minimum frame rates are still a long way off, and this doesn't consider the worst instances of the game such as the penultimate boss. Nonetheless, this does not detract from the impressive performance demonstrated here.
Given enough work to do, the HD7970s are absolute speed demons, showing a 98% gain over the previous generation's 'first release flagship', the HD5870.
Consider that the difference between the HD4870 and HD5870 was only 80%...

Still, this is a rare case, and the HD7970 does not often perform anywhere near these sorts of levels. Still, good to know that when the going gets tough, the cards are capable (c.f. geforces where the opposite is usually true)


Note: Scaling information was derived from Crysis 2, as original Crysis benchmarks are very rarely run on modern hardware

 

I feel though that Crysis 2 was a drop in quality and design from Crysis 1 and Warhead. It has inconsistent performance and is a bad benchmark because of this. It's also a poorly done console port and not a pure PC game like the previous titles. Not to detract from your testing of course, but I don't think it's a good game to use for comparisons. It also shows no graphical improvement at all, and is actually worse in several areas even with the official texture pack and Dx11 effects cranked. Crysis 1 was simply a much better game as it had more to live up to. Crytek should have done similarly with Crysis 2. It's simply nowhere near as good, which is saying a lot because it's very good.

Still waiting for a proper Crossfire profile for Skyrim as well. Scaling is inconsistent at times and AMD is due any time for an application profiles update. Am currently depending on the internal scaling for 12.1 which is partial at best. Am exploring a CPU bottleneck but apparently this is a Crossfire issue from further research.

Sam you might get into Skyrim. Certainly much prettier than Oblivion. Wouldn't hurt to wait for a simple texture pack though as it suffers from consolitis a bit. Otherwise it's not nearly as flawed or inconsistent as Oblivion was(and believe me it was). Luckily it WAS developed for the PC platform and ported, but it had to be dumbed down to make the porting simpler. Bethesda themselves have discussed releasing a DX10/11 update and a texture pack with the first major DLC. I have already implemented and written a few mods myself as well.

 

Graphics wasn't really the main reason why I didn't get into Oblivion, but even so, Skyrim doesn't impress me. You may be right and I might get into it if I played it a bit, but there's so much else on my to-do list at the moment!

With regard to that benchmark, the actual figure for how demanding the game is, is taken from Crysis 1. Where Crysis 2 was used is the gain in performance from HD6 to HD7, and the crossfire scaling in the title. Perhaps Crysis 1 might fare substantially worse in both areas, but finding a reliable benchmark of that title with new hardware now is almost impossible.

 

Jeff I looked at your post one more time:

I would have to say, that is how you know when somebody is a dedicated gun enthusiast - they go out FOR FUN and shoot in sub-zero temperatures!!






In the interest of fairness, I have to come back to my SteelSeries Ikari and report that customer service has been great, and now that the mouse has apparently "burned in" it is no longer exhibiting the annoying double left click symptoms from before - nor the triggering of the middle mouse button by rapid mouse movement - which was the reason I RMA'd the first mouse. My replacement Ikari is now working fine - it seems to have settled down and all the problems went away.

I told the SteelSeries rep that he should perhaps recommend that other customers just use the mouse for another week or two to see if the symptoms disappear. Why do you guys think the mouse "burns in" like this?

Well, I have good news for you.

My X850XTPE (platinum edition!) is sitting carefully preserved after I had to pull it out of my former business tower about two months ago. I'll gladly send it to you whenever you like!




(My new tower is the Dell that the animator for Left 4 Dead used while animating that game. Beyond having a better case, I decided that my business tower also needed some enhanced reliability in regard to the disks, so I installed a Raid 1 mirror with a matched set of 250 gig WD drives. By the way, while they are the same exact model - they aren't the same age - one is new - the other's SMART data shows it to have 13000 hours - so they for sure shouldn't fail at the same time.)

I recently gained new respect for solid well-built cases that resist flexing. Because expansion cards are secured to the back panel, while the expansion card slot is on the motherboard which is mounted on a side panel, I have now realized that a case that flexes may cause your expansion cards to move in their slots causing contact problems.

My old tower case was not high quality, as I now realize, and flexed too much in being worked on, and moved around, laid on its side, etc. Because of the flexing, and because of the massive weight of the x850xtpe, the card had begun to loosen up, or un-snug in the aging agp port of that not-rigid-enough case, and I would get sudden blackouts.


WOW LOOK AT THIS:

THAT WAS A GREAT REPORT! THANKS SAM!

So, perhaps other than the last chapter when the fps might plummet, it appears that we have finally found our 30" gaming crysis machine with crossfire 7970s.




I assume I'd have to OC my 9450 to 3.6 for my cpu to not be a bottleneck, or would that not be a problem? My P5E has two full 16x slots, although I realize that the 8x slots seem to drive most cards just fine. I have to pick up another 6pin/8pin power coupling for the toughpower 750 - I inherited it without the extra plugins - but I already know where to order that from.

So a couple of power cables, and $1000, and I guess I'm in business on all 3 crysis games, plus Far Cry 2 which I stopped playing when I had to turn AA off. Not to mention the new Metro, maybe the old, and BF3.

Here's another question: If I wait 6 months - what kind of pricing do you think we'll see on the 7970s by this summer?

And Jeff, speaking of BF3 - have you started to get into it yet?


MODERN WARFARE II
Forgive me for some more posting on this old game. But I discovered a lot of extra content that I didn't know was there two years ago!

Before I get to that, I want to mention that in finishing the campaign, I continued my antics of killing lots of guys with silenced sniper rifle per my last post, and I stumbled across some additional unknown dialog.

We're going in after the bad General Shepherd, as I recall, and once again we're in the snow. I hang back while Captain Price, the Scottish guy (is he Scottish Sam, or Irish, or Welsh?) proceeds forward toward the road. When the second patrol comes and sees the pile of bodies I had just left, I am already at the furthest point back, unloading with the silenced sniper rifle. These guys are very deadly shots as they run toward me, from the red appearing on my screen, (the game discourages you from playing like this and tries to kill you) but I stay under cover and pick them all off and now the second patrol is also dead.

Captain Price doesn't really sound all that pleased. With typical British restraint, he slowly enunciates a question "Do you know the meaning of the word 'stealth?'"

I hit the Escape key to pause the game while I laughed my arse off!

Just like I said last time, how great it is that they program stuff in there for when they get a real idiot who wants to kill everything. I never heard any of this dialog two years ago - back then I followed orders.


MW2 - HERE IS ANOTHER SINGLE PLAYER GAME THAT KEVIN WILL LOVE
Kevin, if you don't own Modern Warfare 2, it's been reduced to only $29 on steam. Probably $10 on ebay. I know you're not big on multiplayers, but don't worry about that - this one has amazing content for the solo player and it also has some coop stuff that you can do on a LAN if you have a friend come over.

After the campaign, I have been exploring some of the special ops on Modern Warfare 2. You just choose Solo Play. It's got a huge amount more solo play time than the single player campaign - maybe 10-20 times more content if you get serious and go for veteran ranking.

I just started it as a lark, but I got hooked. On the alpha challenges, I have all five ops with 3 stars except for the first one, the pit - running the obstacle course with the terrorist popups - I can do it in 42 secs, but I need 35 secs for 3 stars. I don't know how anybody could ever run it that fast, lol.

The other ops were really challenging at 3 stars. The favela in Brazil particularly so - the 2nd set of dogs includes one living practically next door to the guy you just shot, so my throat was being regularly torn out before I even heard any barking at all.





I finally realized that every 10 kills is one set of dogs. So when I got down to 31 enemies left and I got to this one corner where the "local" dog had always killed me, I knew that when I turned the corner there were going to be several guys I had to shoot on that side street, prompting the dog to come. So just short of the corner, hoping the enemies would stay where they were, I turned my back on the corner and laid out two claymores to cover the broad alley. The dog had always come from my right, while I was shooting to my left. He spilled out of one of those locked doorways - if I knew which one I would put a claymore right in front of it.

Then I turned the corner and there were 3 guys to shoot with the AK - within a couple seconds of shooting, I heard the claymores knock the dog over, wheeled around to my right, and fortunately I still had a few rounds left in the clip to finish him. I then had plenty of time to reload or switch to mini-uzi before the two dogs from the back fence arrived. Very Hairy!!

Then that same round - veteran 3-star hardness - at 21 enemies left, dog attack coming with just one more kill, I was on the other side near a little house on the right side of the map.




I dove into the house, killing a gang member who was in the front room, and of course I heard the distant barking. I frantically pushed way back in a corner of the back bedroom wondering if I was far enough back to have time to drop them as they charged. I didn't think of switching to mini-uzi - AK has more power of course.

I had found prior - that if you can't get far enough back - depending on the room layout - they can come in and turn very fast, and possibly grab your throat before you can get enough rounds in them, which seems to be at least 2 rounds to knock them down - which is why I carried around the mini-uzi with me for its super fast fire rate. But the mini-uzi was untested for dogs, and maybe it would take 5 rounds to stop a charge.

All of these thoughts were racing through my head as the barking got closer, and I remained positioned with AK. Then I thought I might barely have time to plant a claymore. But in my nervousness I hit the 4 key instead of the 5 key, and launched a flash bang.

Fortunately the flash-bang killed the first dog, and then the second dog remained in a different bedroom, growling. I tried to recover my nerves from the near-death, readied my AK, and waited a bit. More growling.






I'm telling you, this was getting a little tense. I was counting on this for the damn 3 stars, and I didn't want to have to battle through another 30 enemies and 2 dog attacks to get back to where I was now.

The bastard was in the house, around the corner to my right, just steadily growling. He must have come in a different door, or maybe the flash bang caused him to stop for a second.

I could have hit the Esc button and gone and eaten lunch - I was playing solo after all, but I forgot about that, lol.

So I didn't exactly know what to do. I was afraid to try to plant a claymore - with my luck he'd charge and get me at that moment. Plus, while the room was not very deep, I thought it was just barely deep enough to work. I readied my AK and collected my nerves. I figured that the way the corner was set up it would take him at least 1/4 second to turn to charge into the room - and maybe another 1/2 second to reach me - given my reaction time I was pretty sure I could get at least two rounds in him which should knock him down. I always include a few extra rounds to ensure the kill, after having a "dead" dog revive unexpectedly.

So I just moved slightly toward the lamp and back, and that worked - he charged and I unloaded AK on him and goodbye doggy.

Whew!!

I got my 3 stars, and never went back to that challenge. Maybe later. The other one I never went back to was the sniper-fi - holding out on the rooftop near the russian submarine, if you remember the campaign from two years ago. You have a few different rifles, and you can call in Predator drones fairly often, and you can lay out claymores - you have 10 total to get through 5 rounds of enemies. And they may toss grenades up there - pretty much nowhere to run unless you want to leave the roof which you can do. So when I finally got my 3 stars, I didn't go back. Same with stealth in the snow and dog patrols - 3 stars, I'm done.

But in the second set of challenges, there is one I have played several times after beating the 3 stars, to see if I could beat it again.

On the bravo challenges, which unlock after you make some progress on the 5 alpha challenges, there are three that don't require two players. The first is called Body Count, and I now can get 3 stars fairly regularly.






The way I like to start that now is particularly adrenaline pumping. At first I used to use the thermal rifle to kill a few when they popped the big smoke bomb. The voice coming in from the commander with the aerial view advises "Switch to thermal." But then I became more aggressive with the AK grenadier, and now I run at full speed, charging through the smoke past the crashed airplane, circling the front of the bank, attempting to launch a grenade at the troop truck that is pulling in on the far side where the ATMs are.

When you get a hit, it's like a lucky pull on a one-armed bandit at Las Vegas. You kill about 8 soldiers in the truck as the thing explodes and catches fire, and you get rapid kill bonuses. Amid the explosion and loud Russian yells, there is a big clanging as your kill points roll up Cling Cling Cling Cling Cling !

Like Dirty Harry I walk along (the grenade launcher won't re-arm if you run) continuing to lob rounds at the soldiers pouring out the front of the bank. "1,000 points good kill!" "2,000 points double kill!" I can usually reduce the required 30,000 down to 19,000, or even 15,000, if I don't hang around the bank too long getting greedy. On 3 stars they are much tougher and more aggressive about flanking, and they are much better shots. One on one is virtually death, and you have to take a good 5 seconds to let the all-red clear up before you have recovered enough to safely take another bullet.

So for the last half of the 30,000, I now know some ways to put some distance between me and the attackers, including going back to the original alley that you run into fleeing the residential area, where there is only one direction they can come at you from, if you can get there without being killed by the two patrolling BTR's.



And I just now realized, in posting this, that if I wanted to go inside the bank, and try to hang out there racking up kills without getting murdered, you can grab, as your second weapon, a shotgun with a heartbeat sensor.

So THAT'S what that is for!

I'm going to take a break for a month and try to sell some houses, followed by a week of gaming. I might have to try that heartbeat shotgun in March!

Rich

 

Neither Rich, Captain Price is English

 

Performance relations
HD6970/HD7950/HD7970

Batman Arkham City: 210/315/375
Battlefield 3: 210/240/285
Skyrim: 210/245/285
Deus Ex HR: 210/295/345
Dragon Age 2: 210/220/265

Averages: 210/263/311
Net 25% / 48% vs. HD6970
Net 14% / 35% vs. GTX580

Results include some (but not total) bias compensation - previous biasing factors VOID for HD7 series

On an approximate basis, treat cooler performance, power consumption and heat output as identical to that of the HD6970.
Note that the HD7970 sacrifices the low-function (DVI-D single link) DVI port of the HD6 series, to allow a full-length vent slot, whilst retaining the same twin-MiniDP and HDMI configuration.


Treat crossfire scaling as c. 90% as a general case,
thus PR index of HD7970 crossfire is variant between 540 and 710, with an average of 590 (including Dragon Age 2) or 610 (excluding) - DA2 is omitted from some tests due to an early performance bug.

 

Oh :O

Well, then, I guess I was right when I talked about him saying, with typical British restraint "Do you know the meaning of the word 'stealth.'"

But I have to confess I wondered if he might be Scottish. I guess I was probably thinking of COD2 and the North African Morroco campaign - remember that? - where you drive up in a jeep caravan and you have to sink those boats - that chapter was also the game demo. Now that was a Scottish regiment, right?

LOL

So would you say I would have to OC my 9450 to avoid a terrible bottleneck with crossfire 7970s?

(And I went back to some notes about what you said a year or so ago about Windows 7, and I might have to ask you more about your flash drive at some future point, and/or if I should at least try to install Crysis on the other - XP - disk rather than on the disk with Windows 7.)

Rich

Edit: (Sam, I didn't see your post - it was the beginning of the next page - I always forget to look)

Forgive me for being a dunce, but I don't understand the above information.

You start with three cards

HD6970/HD7950/HD7970

so I guess you are comparing each game relative to those three cards.

Battlefield 3: 210/240/285

I know the last card is the most powerful, and so on BF3 I see the third number as the highest, at 285. But what does that mean? Are you talking 24" gaming, 30" gaming, or what.

I'm sorry Sam, I think you had explained this when you first put together your new graphic card comparison system, but I was a little confused right at the beginning also. Please take a few words and clarify if you might.

 

What you're hearing rich is a cockney accent. Very much English, but very distinctive.

As for the performance indicators, it's comparative. The figures are comparative performance levels, and as such they apply at any resolution and almost any game. They are not frame rate figures.

 

Cockney. Got it. Also I wondered about the moustache - I'm probably remembering wrong, but it seems that type of moustache is somewhat scottish - or actually, maybe the Scots tend toward long sideburns. So the COD2 Moroccan chapter - those were Scots, weren't they?

Ok, that's helpful. But could you elaborate a bit. For example, taking just the first two lines:

HD6970/HD7950/HD7970
Batman Arkham City: 210/315/375

What is that telling me?

Let me try to guess, and then you can tell me how I have it wrong. I know that the three cards on the top line are in order of power of card, and it seems that the relative power of each card corresponds with the 210/315/and 375 numbers. (Well, no, actually I believe we have discussed that the 7970 is twice as powerful as a 5870, but not a 6970. So I might be wrong about that.)

But anyway, are you saying that a 6970 will play Batman at a 210 level, and a 7970 at a 375 level?

If so, then we would take this chart, and apply it to another chart, saying, for example, that for Batman at 24" gaming, you need a power of 250 to max it with AA. Am I on the right track?

Rich

 

That's correct. The performance improvement from the HD7970 versus a HD6970 is (375/210).
The reason for using the odd figure of 210 is that is where the HD6970 stacks up on a unified system I have been employing since 2009, which used the much older HD4870 as a baseline (100).

Your other assumption is correct, the HD7970 is often close to double the performance of an HD5870, but never reaches double that of an HD6970.