The Official Graphics Card and PC gaming Thread

Arcadey and dumbed down. Sounds like they were trying to push a sale. Businesses businesses LOL!

I love racing games, but they need to have complexity, and good to excellent graphics. Gran turismo sure would be nice on the PC platform I generally don't buy consoles. The Wii was simply... necessary LOL!

 

Well, Kevin, good to see you're not still fixated on Angry Birds, lol.

Hey, that game that you charted, Sam, ghost recon. Is that any good? I installed the vegas, and then I decided not to play it. The textures were just too bland after all the great COD titles. I played one about 7 years ago - the one where they went into Mexico City - advanced war fighter I think. I liked it at the time, but never quite finished it.

This HD7950 HIS iceQ is a work of art - and very thick - 2 1/2 slots. So I can't crossfire with two of those, and I ordered a normal thin 2 slot power color today to start crossfire, and see how crysis runs on ultra.

And along the way I became fixated on Spec Ops - I thought it was cr*p at first, but now I think it's actually pretty good. I'm on my third time through the game, now on fubar, which means - UNBELIEVABLY FRICKIN HARD!!!!!!!!!! No room for mistakes!!! LOL

The game runs the card at 70%, and I think I'm getting 30 fps steady. It uses about 700MB of vram - so no real texture hog - it's a nice enough looking game but I'll soon be back to Max Payne 3 and I'll try to observe how taxing that game is. I played 3 chapters, but got sidetracked by spec ops.

Oh, and I now have a 20,000 3dmark6 point rig (19,960 to be exact.) That's up from the 13,500 on the 8800GTX, with the Q9450 at 2.66 (but now at 3.334.) Let's see if it picks up on the crossfire and bumps the score. But I guess I should get the new 3dmark - 11 is it?

Happy 4th.

Rich

 

Very nice scores Rich, but I don't put much stock in 3DMark scores. My 8800GTS still scores an even 20,000 as well and it's a fraction of the speed of a 7950... It puts way too much stock in number of cores, clock speeds, and branding.

Example:

X2 5000+ @ 3.2GHz
4GB RAM
Zotac 9800GTX+ AMP!

3DMark score - 16,000.

Core 2 Quad Q6600 @ 3.7GHz
4GB RAM
MSI 8800GTS(MUCH slower than the 9800GTX+ AMP!)

3DMark Score - 20,000

Even thought the 9800GTX+ and 8800GTS share the same basic design, they are not the same cards like the 8800GTS/9800GTX(note, without the "+"). The 9800GTX+ AMP! is die-shrunk and heavily overclocked vs the stock standard 9800GTX. Basically it has much more power than the 8800GTS, but scores lower due to CPU. This isn't the best example because the Q6600 is miles faster, but it shows that 3DMark takes very little stock in actual gaming capability.

When I was using a single 4870(way back when...) the Q6600 rig scored about 12,500. The 4870 is more powerful than either card...

EDIT: Not to say you shouldn't use 3DMark as a basis for reading increases or decreases in processing power, just remember that it's very biased.

 

Things are looking pretty bleak for the 3008WFP, still no sign of any parts replacements available, even from the US. Have referred the company charged with repairing it to the official refurbishment company to see if they can track down any bits. If that fails, it'll be time to save up for a U2711 or U3011. I don't really want either though :/

 

You have my condolences

 

Sam what is wrong with your monitor?

Knock on wood, my monitor is holding up perfectly. Of course I never take it to Lans. It sits in one place, with a protective towel unless I am gaming.

Wow, Jeff, there you go busting my bubble again about 3dmark6. It's just that about 4 years ago or so, 20000 was fast - Sam had the fastest in the group at 7,000, and mine was 2,200, then jumped to 5000 with the 3850, then 6,000 with a newer cpu at 4 ghz, up from 3.2. Sam was the first to hit 20,000 with his 4870x2 machines as I recall, and later hit 26,000.

I will say this - I hit the 19,960, before overclocking the graphics card. I said to myself, "now let's overclock and watch what happens." The card was running at about 950 - yes an overclock compared to 800, but that low stock clock is a joke. So I bumped the gpu to about 1050, 10% faster, and also bumped memory clocks. I ran 3dmark6, and my numbers were the same or a bit lower. Then later on, I think I got MSI afterburner working, with the in-game OSD, and I noticed that my gpu load was at about 50%. In other words, the benchmark was not stressing my gpu, so it didn't even take notice of the extra 10% power. I thought - "that's bogus."

So in that case, are any of the 3dmark benches any good? You talked about 11 with the world war II theme, do you like that one?

Anyway, I will run it again with the 7950s in crossfire, and the cpu as overclocked as I can get it now, at 3.334, and see what scores I get, just for old times' sake, lol.

By the way, guys, I see that FRS is advertising like mad here at After Dawn. About 3 years ago I got a try-it pack for just the shipping, for about $4.00. It was pretty good. About a year ago I bought some of the concentrated drinks, and began diluting them. Now, together with one cup of coffee in the morning, FRS is all that I drink - not water - not coke by any stretch of the imagination - not juice, just this stuff which even diluted way down (they say dilute 3 to one, then I dilute that again about 4 to 1) tastes pretty good. I think I generally have more energy than before.

Rich

 

3DMark 11 must be seen to be believed, the graphics are awesome. But as a comparison test it suffers just like the rest of Futuremark's benchmarks. No 3DMark ever made has ever produced reliable or unbiased results.

Currently the most valid benchmark that sees any sort of regular use is Unigine Heaven. Very good scaling, good Crossfire scaling, high loads, accurate results. Heaven is really your best bet for comparing to other rigs on a level playing field. It is also very heavily GPU focused so is a great tool for gauging video card OCing.

http://www.techpowerup.com/downloads/2111/Unigine_Heaven_DX11_Benchmark_3.0.html

The generally accepted bench settings usually are:

API: DirectX 11
Tessellation: Normal(NOT Extreme)
Shaders: High
Anisotropy: 16x
Anti-Aliasing: 4x (AA and AF to "off" in the control panel)
Resolution: 1920 x 1080

Run the benchmark three times and record the highest results.

My results with these settings are as follows:

Average: 65FPS
Minimum: 22FPS
Maximum: 136FPS
Score: 1636

 

Yep, 3dmark06 is almost entirely CPU limited - apart from the CPU test, the graphics benchmarks are single-threaded so their frame rate is limited by the performance of one of your CPU cores. Except for the third test, they're all CPU-bound on anything beyond about an HD4850. You will need a faster CPU to really increase your 3dmark at all.
Rich - Afterdawn, like almost all websites, uses targeted advertising - you only see ads for FRS because you've looked at it on other webpages. I will only see adverts targeted at pages I have visited, and so have never seen an advert for it.

After nvidia bought their way into skewing 3dmark testing with PhysX, that sealed the fate that 3dmark would be permanently biased, and not just the 2001/2003/2005/2006 versions. It can't be trusted really other than a very general intra-brand comparison.

As for the monitor, the PSU has failed, but since nobody keeps any spares, even internationally, it will likely have to be sold off for a minimal value as spares/repair and replaced outright. What with, I have yet to decide. Still currently using its stand-in, a 23" U2312HM.

 

Sam, would be curious to see what you score in Heaven at those settings.

BTW personally do not see ads at all. Using ScriptBlock, AdBlock Plus, and FlashBlock.

 

Better yet just send the monitor to DDP to fix.

Sorry to hear that Sam. The PSU failed on the monitor? Never heard of that, but personally had a mac cinema monitor color board go bad where it lost one color. I used to box that up and carry it to work with me - my brother says that ruined it and he blames me - it belonged to him - but I was very careful with it.

So does that mean that for monitors we should try to take advantage of any pre-paid long warranty plans from Dell? IE - buy their long warranty if they offer it? Or would you consider that a total fluke? Or would you blame it on moving the monitor around and taking it to Lan events?

I got my 30" entirely due to your influence Sam, and I am grateful because I love it - Kevin will too when he finally plunks his money - bags money down.

That is crazy. So you're saying that all of these FRS ads I'm seeing are only for me, and you guys don't see a single ad? Hahahaha.

That is just too funny. Well I guess that in order to support After Dawn, I should click on the ads the next time I want to take advantage of the 40% off and stock up again. I assume After Dawn would then get some commission out of it. FRS also writes me, so usually I do it that way, but just as easy to click an ad while on the forum.

Jeff, really appreciate the Unigine Heaven link. I have heard of it. I'm downloading it now, just another 4 minutes. So I'll be able to measure my improved performance from crossfire that way - great idea.

But if I decided to spring for 3dmark11 - would I at least be able to compare my own personal performance gains from crossfire? Or should I just not bother?

Rich

 

Would personally just download the free version and leave it at that. Rather expensive for a piece of software that has very limited usefulness.

 

PSU failures on monitors are pretty common - one of our clients at work has among others, a dozen or so 5 year old Viewsonic VA1903 monitors, and in the past 2 months four of them have suffered PSU failures.
I don't blame the failure on moving the display around, the PSU has always made a bit of noise on standby since new, and it had been sitting in one place undisturbed for the past 11 months prior to the incident.
I bought the display refurbished, so it only had a 12 month warranty anyway, and it's outlasted the 36 month manufacturer standard warranty, albeit not by a huge amount.
I'm toying with what I'll get to replace it.

 

Recently had the same happen with my HDTV though was lucky enough to have an already dead set with replacement parts available. 20 minutes of poking around and switching parts and away I went...

 

Wow, I'm sorry to hear that Sam. I'm going to knock on wood a bunch of times that I escape that hassle at least for a few more years.

Jeff, I didn't know there was a free version, but for $19.95 I am downloading 3dmark11 right now. The 3dGuru article on overclocking the 7950 mentioned just running one session of 3dmark11 after a new set of overclock settings, to test the settings, so I went to the 3dmark web site. For $20 I don't mind - I was thinking it might be $50.

Oh - by the way I ran one bench of the Unigine Heaven test. I had rolled back settings to 9450 stock at 2.66, and mild 900 on 7950 core (800 standard which is just a joke) and 1350 on memory. I am reading the article, but here is what I got on one card, the power color.





I am thinking about taking off the cooler on the power color and applying some ram coolers. That isn't necessary or possible on the HIS IceQ, since they have a metal plate covering the top of all the ram, connected to a heat pipe. Like I said, the HIS is a work of art.

I have some ram coolers that are low profile at 9mm, little fingers pointing up,



but then I found some that I had bought years ago, even lower profile at 8mm, little channels.

There isn't much room, and I think only the 8mm will fit, so I might have to order more of that. The other, in the picture, I was thinking of shortening using a hack saw. Right now I am running furmark at 2560x1440, and the card has the fan at 100%, but the core clock on the card is only 648 - it is not being stressed - however the frames are only 21 fps. Looks like temps are stable at 72 degrees C. The trailer is at 86 degrees.



So I am pretty happy about 72 degrees, but again, I noticed some twinkling on the menu of Max Payne after hours of hard play, and that concerned me a bit - I also read that on some of the sapphire reviews, that guys had seen some twinkling. I don't know if you would call that an artifact - well yes you probably would. Plus at one point in the game I actually lost the edge of the model - which hasn't happened to me in years, dating back to the ATI 9800. It was only that one time, and that is when I think I rolled back gpu core clock to 900, from about 950, and increased fan speed to 100%. It has been entirely stable since, except for the little bit of twinkling in one part of the menu.

Here's my OSD. The gpu stuff comes from Afterburner, the cpu stuff comes from riva tuner.



I just downloaded Trixx and am reading about it. I keep having to uninstall MSI Afterburner, and re-install it - only takes a few minutes and no reboot is needed. It has a glitch where it will wrongly display the gpu information as huge text strings - I went to the bug reporting and reported it. The solution for me is to uninstall, not save any settings, reinstall, and do not reboot when the program says "Oh, we should reboot to correctly read your hardware settings."

Rich

 

Hey, sorry about the double post - this 3dmark11 $20 investment may already be paying off - 3dmark11 crashed at the end of the second thing - the prehistoric statues unfolding. I didn't see the error code reported on the forums - but the closest error code - the comments were "try another video card and see if you get the same problem."

So I am running it again, and if it crashes I'll reduce settings and try again, but also I will use the extreme settings on the HIS card. If that card runs it okay, I will RMA back this Power Color and exchange for sapphire.

EDIT: well what do you know - it ran - but no score since I had it running in a window - extreme settings. Okay, I'll let it run full screen now and see if I get a score out of it.

Rich

 

Never bother with RAM coolers unless you're forced into using them by virtue of an aftermarket cooler.
Typically if I see 3dmark crash it's more often a CPU problem than GPU, though that's obviously not always the case. Typically GPU problems usually result in the PC locking up during the benchmark.

If anything I'd say powercolor are a better brand than Sapphire. Sapphire used to be held in high esteem because of the reference designs they produced, but in the non-reference environment where their manufacturing quality actually matters, they stink. I'd place them at the very bottom of the quality table, probably lower even than Asus who are probably the next rung up. Powercolor are scarcely any better of course as they use components of horrific quality but they tend not to screw up designs too badly, whereas Sapphire and certainly Asus are notorious for making poor design decisions.

I haven't so many criticisms of HIS but they are known for poor warranty support (but then, so is every brand, depending on who you ask - XFX support in europe is supposed to be dire when in the US it's held in fairly high regard), and likewise MSI and Gigabyte get a bad rap but I haven't seen many major traumas with their cards. Personal experience however, coupled with a few things I've read tells me that Sapphire do not test their cards after manufacture. The ones that do test, even if they fail, they box them up and sell them regardless. At least Asus don't do that, even if their cards do only last a matter of weeks.

 

Just an interesting update. AMD released Cat 12.6 and the 12.7 beta a few weeks ago, and I've been poking around the patch notes trying to find out what's up. Apparently these will be the start of much more thorough and performance-focused updates, not to mention some LONG overdue updates to Crossfire scaling. Skyrim and Battlefield 3 in particular took a healthy boost from 12.7. Maybe 5-10%.

They have also made some steps in single card performance, even in a few older games. I would prefer to see this as a sign of AMD realizing their "release and forget" driver releases are not working. They have long needed to do some more hardware specific optimization, particularly with the HD7000 and HD6000 mid-range. My 6850s in particular were a major target for these updates and the benefits are clear.

This reminds me heavily of Nvidia's wonderful driver updates that boosted performance considerably on my 8800GTX, 8800GTS, 9600GT and 9800GTX+. Some games received true 40-50% boosts when their performance was already considered quite good. Lost Planet being a great example that got a repeatable, measurable boost of some 35%.

 

Sounds wonderful!

Sam, I am not understanding you - are you saying don't bother unless the aftermarket cooler insists I put them on? But why not - aren't they helpful?

Interesting. Yes, I read several newegg reviews about sapphires arriving DOA. That caused me to not buy sapphire.

In that case I'll probably just stick with what I have.

Here is the first 3dmark11 score, overclocked 9450 at 3.334, not much overclocked power color 7950 at only 900, and 1350 memory.

Here are the specs, followed by the results:









I ran the Unigine again, since I now have the 9450 in the overclocked setting.

Jeff, I have no idea what you mean here:

On the front page, I set AA to 4x. I have no idea where a control panel is, OTHER than the front page. Anyway, I am completely baffled by the sentence. Please clarify, lol.

So I think I am following your instructions

Here is the new Unigine, at the overclocked 9450 3.334 ghz. Score is up slightly, fps is up slightly. Now I can start the 7950 overclocking!!



Rich

 

LOL the Catalyst Control Center. Sorry if there was a misunderstanding.

That's pretty impressive with one card. I am more interested to see what you get with Crossfire now.

I hope you can take your time and find a proper 24/7 clock for your CPU though. You're not going to stop having problems until you get that sorted. Your current 3.34GHz clockspeed is about right.

Likewise with your video cards. No need to push for top clocks. Find what works. My cards are actually quite stable at 920/1175, but I keep them at 900/1150(up from 775/1000) for the extra cushion of stability. At these clocks they outpace a pair of 6870s.

Also don't worry too terribly about temps. My cards idle at 40-55 depending on the room temperature(that's Wisconsin for you) and they load from 75-80.

I would personally avoid FurMark altogether. It's developed a reputation as a card-cooker...