The Official Graphics Card and PC gaming Thread

My friend with the single 6970 I had intended to buy is interested in one as well. It seems to be in a prime place right now. Just waiting for the 6850s to sell and I'll be getting one. Maybe next week, maybe in a month or two. Will be looking out for good deals in the meantime.

A GTX760 is more than twice as fast as a single 6850, so easily beats them in Crossfire. It seems to sit somewhere between a 7950 and 7970. It's definitely faster than a 7950 in Nvidia games. I deserve some trouble-free gaming after all this headache. Nvidia looks able to give me just that.

Just an update from our conversation on the other thread:

My NorthBridge is staying quite cool when gaming. The highest I've seen it is 52*C after several hours of War Thunder and Max Payne 3. I have obtained a 50mm slim profile CPU fan and will be attaching it to the Northbridge heatsink for some extra cooling when I go to install the exhaust duct. The duct was assembled today and currently has paint drying. Will probably just drive screws between the fins of the Northbridge heatsink to attach the fan. Mocking it up on the 790 board shows that it holds securely, and the fins are easy to straighten out.

Crossfire does work nicely in Max Payne 3 and I can play it maxed averaging 50-60 with 4xAA. Really well optimized game. Have not had any symptoms related to running out of video memory so far. Quite smooth and stable.

The 1090T is so far behaving surprisingly well at 4GHz. No weird behavior, no crashing, no overheating at all. CPU usually runs about 50-52 playing a game that uses it properly. Most games have it running in the mid 40s. I'm happy about that result. My cooling upgrades have certainly made a difference. With only the two 1600RPM Scythe fans, I was not able to do this. I have literally forced a boost in the wattage dissipation ability of the Hyper 212 Evo. These settings used to have runaway heat.

So far I have replaced my Push/Pull CPU fans, added an intake fan in the drive bay, and replaced the motherboard chipset heat sinks with a one piece heatpipe cooler and some Arctic Ceramique spread on every VRM plus the Northbridge with a toothpick. Sometime soon, I might also be getting some higher CFM case fans for exhaust and side intake.

 

http://support.amd.com/us/kbarticles/Pages/AMDCatalyst13-8WINBetaDriver.aspx

Now if only I knew someone with HD7 series cards to test this out...

 

To test what out? I can use that driver as well, so you presumably can. Specific feature?

 

Crossfire Frame Pacing is the many-months-late fix for the microstutter on HD7 series cards that is supposed to almost entirely eradicate it.


Video testing with the preview from a few months back:
http://techreport.com/review/24703/amd-radeon-hd-7990-graphics-card-reviewed/8

 

I can also enable Frame Pacing.

 

But it's primarily aimed at the HD7 series, and at DirectX11. It's not so much of a problem on earlier cards like ours.

 

I have to believe it makes some sort of difference for me. My cards have always been finicky in Crossfire... Your cards maybe not so much?

 

It might do, but this is going to affect perceptible microstutter, not just poor scaling in general. I also wonder how effective it is with lower VRAM amounts. Maybe less, but maybe more? <shrugs>
Play the two Crysis 3 videos from that techreport article alongside each other - you don't realise how bad microstutter is until you slow it down.

 

im not going to lie the GTX760 as far as the GPU is concerned is dame near about taxed, so far my highest OC on the GPU Clock has been a mere 100MHz increase, i haven't been able to get past it. it seems atleast to me that the card throttles back when it draws to much power...throwing any voltage tweak out the window.

just something i thought you might want to consider.

 

Microstutter is something the 6850s do suffer from. So far, I'm seeing some noticeable improvements in games I play. Maybe a placebo effect, but I don't think so. Battlefield 3 is particularly smooth. My framerates are better and my minimums are MUCH better. Though some of that may be my overclocking adventures

Got the duct and Northbridge fan in place. Nice improvements across the board. Hit 61*C on the Northbridge after about 4 hours of Prime 95, 56*C on the CPU

After about 3 hours of Far Cry 3 the CPU was showing 47*C and the Northbridge was at 48*C. I'm willing to call that a success

DXR88, I'll cross that bridge when I come to it. I'm certainly going to try it regardless.

 

Finally playing through Bioshock Infinite - feeling the video memory limitation pretty bad, the frame rate is good (50-80 consistently) except for when moving to a new area, when the VRAM is maxed out at 2GB per GPU. Looking at this chart and extrapolating, it looks like you need about 2.3GB for 2560x1600. Will try fiddling with the texture cache size and see if that improves things any.

 

Just got Skyrim installed for my final phase of tweaking and ran into a couple of hitches.

With Shadows set to Ultra, you get shadows on distant objects, and with it on High, you only get shadows out to about a hundred yards. Obviously, this looks terrible on wide open scenes and Ultra seems the only way to go. Problem is, Ultra shadows also doubles their resolution from 2048 to 4096, which pushes over my video memory limit and causes HORRIFIC stuttering the likes of which I've never seen. Setting everything to ultra in the game settings, then manually setting the shadow resolution to the quality of High shadows in the ini, seems to have solved the problem. Locked at 60FPS no matter what I do, versus dipping to single digits due to hitching when simply turning on the spot.

I set the ini as Read-Only, so the only variable being changed was their resolution, and not their distance and level of complexity, which turning them down to High in the menu normally does. After making this change, the graphics options show that shadows are set to high, but I get all the great effects as if it were turned to Ultra, with MUCH better performance.

A simple example of what I've accomplished:

High settings
Shadow Resolution = 2048
Shadow Distance = 5
Shadow Complexity = 5

Ultra Settings
Shadow Resolution = 4096
Shadow Distance = 10
Shadow Complexity = 10

Custom Settings
Shadow Resolution = 2048
Shadow Distance = 10
Shadow Complexity = 10

As you can see, it's basically a "middle of the road" setting.

Other than that setting, my PC can handle the game with everything outright maxed barring AA. The game is a video memory hog, and to use AA and texture packs, I'll need a 2GB card. Bonus that Nvidia has a slight performance bias in the game and much fewer issues. Yet another reason to upgrade to that GTX760... I certainly wouldn't need this little mod to get it running properly, and could concentrate on texture mods.

As of currently, even the lightweight texture mods made for <1GB of video RAM still push me over the limit. Skyrim already has fantastic textures, so I'd much rather focus on other aspects of the graphics until such a time when 1.5GB of video memory usage is the least of my worries.

I can already runs tons of mods combined with no noticeable effect on performance. The opening sequence is a great benchmark to see if my video memory is being overtaxed. It has lots of characters on-screen in the middle of a town with a dragon and lots of fire, destruction, and action. As intensive as Skyrim gets. As long as I don't get the horrible stutters within that sequence, I can pretty safely say the rest of the game will be fine. I just have to be careful that the selected mods don't use more video memory, as I am at the limit with the stock game. The performance difference is readily apparent. Goes from silky smooth 50-60, to constant stuttering and dips into the teens, 20s, and 30s.

 

this is the reason i went with the 4gb card over the 2gb models. skyrim is currently feasting on 3.8gb of vram for all my mods. with a new fallout on the way, Ive got to prepare for all that modding goodness

 

Yay another Skyrim fan! Skyrim is graphically incredible in its stock form. I'm concentrating much more on functionality mods right now. Better horses, companions, cloaks, backpacks, weather and its various effects, etc.

Am particularly fond of the Winter is Coming cloaks mod with the 360 Walk and Run mod to enable a flowing cloak effect and get rid of the cloaks clipping with feet. Quite pleasing to the eye Also impressed with Wet and Cold, which adds snow buildup on your clothes and armor, as well as steam from your breath, water dripping from your character in rain, and blinding effects from blizzards and rain. To top it all off I'm using the Sabre Gear Craft-able Backpacks which add to your carry weight and look awesome.

I'm much less interested in changing the mechanics of the game world and more into enhancing what is already there. Improving graphics, small additions that enhance realism and gameplay, etc. If you've hung around this thread long enough, you'll know that I am a VERY avid Gamebryo modder and have even made a few of my own

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Fallout 3 was a particularly flawed game. I hated the weapons balance as it had zero realism and didn't line up at all with Fallout lore. I spent hundreds of hours finely tweaking, re-skinning, and adjusting the weapons, improving realism but preserving the RPG-like balance. That was quite a feat. All my friends agree that Jeff's Custom Fallout 3 is now the only way to play it. My efforts were confirmed to not be in vain when New Vegas managed to do exactly what I had done earlier The only mods New Vegas really needed were an unofficial patch, a texture pack, and some iron sights fixes. The game is otherwise quite satisfactory compared to Fallout 3 which was a disjointed mess.
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I'm certainly excited to be able to crank the game much higher. Full resolution shadows, AA, and one or two texture packs would be the big things on my list. I'm currently using the opportunity to finalize all of my other changes while enjoying the stock graphics with some memory-friendly enhancements. Basically every single graphical enhancement that doesn't decrease performance or look silly/unnatural/too far astray from the original artistic vision.

 

I'll just leave this here:

http://wccftech.com/rumor-amd-pheno...res-6-ghz-core-clock-am4-socket-compatbility/

 

"Intel Fanboys" make me laugh. Their explanations for fake. "It's AMD, so it MUST be fake". Sounds like the age old Ford Chevy debate. Intel is better, because they're Intel. What an unintelligent comment! Not suggesting I buy into this so called Phenom IV. Though it would be very cool

 

FRAME PACING
Wow, Sam, that frame pacing sounds great! I wonder if the RadeonPro guy did some contracting for AMD. Thanks also for the link to the earlier prototype testing with good graphs and videos.

Yes, Jeff, DXR's thoughts about the advantages of "more memory" sounds good to me, especially for a modder par excellence like you, and I'll bet after fighting with the 1 GB ceiling for so long, you'll be inclined to look closely at maybe even "overdoing" it with 4 GB like he got. I have to say that I have seen many games take advantage of the 3 GB on my 7950s and I'm sure glad I have that much.

COMPANY OF HEROES 2
Well, despite its rampant anti-communism in my face, it's a great game. I know the Russian commies aren't in power anymore, and Stalin is out of favor, to put it mildly, but you have to hand it to the murderous basta*rd, he built up the industrial might of the country in a very short time and defeated the arch-evil Nazi Wermacht machine almost single-handedly. Yes, we all, Brits and Americans (and Aussies and even New Zealanders) helped out and distracted Hitler, bombed the hell out of his cities, and got rid of the Japanese and Italian threats, but the Russians could have won that war by themselves. Stalin was not a racist, but if you didn't go along with the socialist program, you were of course purged, meaning murdered.

I'm not particularly happy about that, but I'll take it over racism. Anyway, it's a great game.

"I do this for Stalin - willingly!" "No I did not take your biscuit." "Stop that subversive talk right now or I will report you!" "We should all talk about the revolution, Stalin is a genius." "This war is costing everything." Many many soldier comments while you are setting up your defenses and preparing for the exciting battles, add a lot of color and character to the game, just like to the first one.


DISHONORED
If there is anybody out there who hasn't yet played Dishonored - and I can't believe a Brit like Sam hasn't played it yet (or am I wrong?) I was doing a lot of reading about Viktor Antonov, and the time they spent in pre-production (3 years) on that game.

He left Valve after fleshing out City 17 in Half Life 2 - apparently he was the guy who lived for half the year in Paris, the other half in Seattle. He left when no major IP appeared in the works after HL2 - not being particularly tied to Valve - but looking for HL2-like major artistic projects to work on. He brought in his replacement, Moby Franke, who fleshed out Team Fortress 2, but who recently was let go in the 20-person Valve purge, for having a negative attitude (more of "when are we going to do something creative around this joint?" - lol - there apparently were many who wondered if the episode thing was a mistake, and that instead of episodes, HL3 should have been in the works by now.)

DLC: Knife of Dunwall
But with that preamble, I have to get back to my point - being that Dishonored cannot be spoken about more highly, in my opinion, as an artistic, hugely original endeavor (even borrowing heavily from HL2 as it did) which puts the player in the middle of a great work of art, of story, of character development, of human emotion - plus some shooting of course.

So, even with that said, I wasn't going to play the DLC, Knife of Dunwall (featuring the main villain who took out the queen no less) but I was wrong. It was great, especially once you got through the whaling factory, which was interesting, but not so great in my opinion. Best of all, in one segment, you went back to the flooded district, and that map is one of my favorite. So much so that after playing the DLC, I went back to that flooded district mission in the main game and defeated the Daud gang again. I don't usually go back to a game unless at least a year or so has passed, but Dishonored is so great, it can be re-visited sooner than that.


DLC: Tyranny of King Washington
Speaking of DLC, I also have been playing the Assassins Creed 3 Tyranny of King Washington, which initially I said "No, I'm not going to play a game with George as a villain." LOL But I was wrong again - it is actually great. You get these animal powers, and once you learn to work them right (wait for the recharge) you can kill massive amounts of pesky blue-coats (no more red-coats) with great flourish and satisfaction.

I finally learned how to work the flying assassination - you have to get the wings to show up over a blue-coat's head, and then trigger the attack and just watch the terrific flight down and feel the satisfying crunch as Conner's (he now identifies himself with his true native Indian name and I don't know how to spell it or pronounce it - Rata-hu-ON-kin or something like that) blades come out of each wrist and he takes down two blue coats if they are near each other. And the new bear power - do you feel like a bada**? Try walking around with the ability to stomp and send up to a dozen enemies flying - literally flying - in all directions. If you hold off doing it again, until recharge (about 3 secs) you have full power back.

If you make the mistake of doing it too many times in quick succession (about 4) you drop below first health level and then you've got a full 60 second recharge to contend with. Of course, you should always hit the wolf assassin key which is good for 3 quick kills when your ghost wolf pack shows up - about a two minute recharge on that.

Walking around, trying these powers on a heavily blue-coat populated New York, I have been killed plenty of times, by not managing my recharge well enough, but as you get a little better, it becomes quite a kick. They also give you double two-barrel pistols, so you can shoot 4 times in quick succession, and you can carry up to 36 bullets!!

I was going to finish out the final chapter 3 of the DLC last night, but once I learned how to do the flying assassination the proper way, and manage the bear power better, I spent my allotted time on the side missions.

The 3rd power is invisibility - the wolf power - again it drains you heavily, but recharges very quickly, unless you get shot while you are low on health. So when you get into the side mission of helping the rebels, including women with swords, defeat the blue-coats, you can't use bear, or you'll kill a bunch of civilians, and the game may warn you that the next civilian you kill will cause loss of sync (death.)

You can use wolf pack one time, but there may still be 5 more blue coats to kill. You can use bird, but that takes time to fly up, target another, fly down, and meanwhile the blue coats are winning. You can try to fight everybody, but the blue coats with swords are very hard to beat. So you can go invisible, while they swing at the air knowing you are there somewhere, get behind them in a couple seconds, and then kill them, then drop to invisible again for the next pesky swordsman.

Each power is a trip and has its good uses.

Sorry about no screens - I did take some last night thinking about this post - but I didn't bring them over to this computer. Next time.

DLC: Clash in the Clouds
The final DLC - Bioshock Infinite - Clash in the Clouds. How about fighting two of those "monkeys"? The handymen.

Wow - hard.

Hand cannon, crows, and run like hell in between crows. Maximize hand cannon and sniper rifle killing power, and then trigger the patriots if any are around through the "tears" - rips in the fabric that the girl can open for you.

It is a pretty good set of 4 maps, fighting about a dozen waves of attackers per map - quite hair-raising and I have gone back to it several times now, playing as usual way beyond my fatigue level and wondering why the map is so much harder than it was the night before. LOL

But the DLC that everybody is waiting for takes you and the girl back to Rapture at the bottom of the ocean - out next Spring. That will probably be a big seller.

DLC: Far Cry 3 on neon steroids
The DLC I didn't try yet, but I might, or maybe not, is the Far Cry 3 take on Team Fortress 2, plus dinosaurs - a cartoony shooter, that some people love. Very retro - very flashy, neon lighting all over. Maybe it's worth giving a whirl, lol.


Titan Fall
Somehow that reminds me - Respawn as we all know is coming out with Titan Fall, which runs on the Source engine. I once emailed Gabe Newell suggesting that he initiate talks with the Infinity Ward guys when their unhappiness with Activision became well known. I guess because of my email he sold them his engine. Lol. Just like Carmack at Id sold him his back in 1996.

So Valve doesn't do smash hit triple A IPs anymore, and not even episodes, but they have a good source engine that we'll see when we don the mech suits and fell some titans. Does anybody remember the 1998 game with huge mechs that you climbed into and did battle through? It wasn't bad.

So here we go - science fiction. Outer space. As much as I liked Jeff's screen shots, if it wasn't Respawn doing it, I wouldn't bother. But because it IS Respawn, I'm all in - I'm sure it will be great. I hope Zampella can carry on for his partner who cashed out - somehow I always thought Vince was the main guy and I hope I was right.

Rich

 

Not onto Dishonored yet. I now own it, but having not long ago finished the standard campaign of Borderlands 2, Bioshock Infinite is the currently active 'to do'.

 

Haha Rich, DXR, you're both thinking like true PC gamers. Of course I've given lots of thought to the 4GB card. It's not significantly more expensive, and as you say, I've been having an epic duel with my memory limit for quite some time. It's really becoming a pain. 4GB would be immense in comparison.

It's a damn shame I didn't get 2GB HD6850s as the cards still have more than enough raw processing power for most of what I'm trying to do. It's just that pesky memory limit causing terrible performance issues in those especially resource intensive games like Skyrim, War Thunder, Metro Last Light, Crysis 3, and a few others. Not to mention Crossfire isn't so well supported for the HD6800s, which is becoming an issue with some titles as well. In particular, Skyrim is very inconsistent with Crossfire and War Thunder doesn't use it at all.

I'm confident that a GTX760, which is about 2.5x of one of my cards, will solve a LOT of my problems. Performance-wise, that would be perfect scaling for me 100% of the time plus a little bit extra performance on the side and double the memory. In a very worst case scenario, it'll be miles faster than these 6850s ever were. Also, while a cheap gimmick and a market bullying scheme, PhysX. Gotta have PhysX in Metro Last Light. It's awesome

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On another note, glad to see you're enjoying so many new games Rich! The only one there I know a significant amount about is Far Cry 3 Blood Dragon. It's a standalone game with no relation to Far Cry 3 other than it uses the same engine and some of the same assets. It's a cartoony sci-fi adventure, very funny and well made.

Do you mean MechWarrior 4? What do you mean it wasn't bad? It was incredible! lol

I have many hours in MechWarrior 4 and even currently have it installed as well as the MW4: Mercenaries stand-alone expansion. The main game is a linear story and the expansion is an open-ended story where you have a huge selection of equipment and mechs. You have to lead a mercenary team of continuously improving AI pilots through about 50 missions with lots of action and variety. It's not a particularly advanced simulator and the graphics are very old school lol, but it still has quite a learning curve and you can use some very advanced techniques to play it. Plus it still has some of the coolest mechs ever

 

Hey guys just an update. I finally gave the new Tomb Raider a purchase and have been really enjoying it. It's a complete reboot of the series from the ground up, so having played the last 6 or 7 games isn't integral at all to understanding the story.

The graphics are stunning! I'd heard lots about how good it looked, but I also heard lots about how good Crysis 3 looked and it was mediocre quality. This is a whole different ballpark. Indescribable graphics. Very visually cluttered but with a high degree of fidelity. I had to continue watching until gameplay started just to convince myself it wasn't a pre-rendered FMV. Just incredible! Textures, models, shadows, lighting, art direction, animation; everything is absolutely breathtaking. Crysis/Warhead is finally losing its grip on top place in the graphics realm. Only too sad Crysis 2 and 3 weren't the ones to take the crown. Instead we have sleeper hits like The Witcher 2 and now Tomb Raider to carry the torch.

Performance-wise the game is a bit problematic. It doesn't scale very well visually. Turning everything to Ultra flogs my video memory and causes slowdown and hitching like mad. Simply turning everything down a notch to High smooths it out considerably and I was able to maintain a comfortable 50-70FPS throughout the intro sequence. The actual graphical quality doesn't really take a noticeable dive until you start turning everything to Medium or Low. Granted, there are definite differences that my eyes easily pick up, but everything is generally there and you don't outright sacrifice entire visual effects like other games might do. You would be very hard pressed to notice an overall difference in quality from Ultra to High settings without comparison shots for everything.

General overtaxing of my 1GB of video memory aside, it does have two somewhat problematic settings. They are Tessellation and TressFX.

Tessellation is something most of us are already familiar with. It's used as a technique to smooth angular models and add detail to objects in a scene. In Tomb Raider, the general effect of Tessellation is very slight while the performance impact is large. It's also a non-standard form of tessellation so has some graphical glitches as well as widespread reports of crashing and artifacting issues on Nvidia hardware. If you have the graphical performance to turn this setting on and don't have any of the mentioned glitching, there is no real reason to disable it. However if you are in the same boat I am, trying to squeeze a few extra FPS, this setting should be the first to go. The largest impact it has is some minor smoothing on character models and adding more depth to things like ropes and vines. I have a hard time spotting the differences in practice, and so far haven't seen anything truly worth the performance impact as I go through the game.

TressFX is interesting. It's basically AMD's in-house implementation of GPU Compute/PhysX, except nowhere near as spectacular. The entire setting is devoted to one thing: Lara's hair. Turning TressFX on means it has individual strands that are all acted upon by physics and movement within the game. It can look great in some scenes, but it blows all over the place wildly elsewhere and generally looks un-natural. Nvidia cards also take a large performance hit by having this setting on. This is definitely down to individual preference, and I'm on the fence about having it on or not. When I switch to Nvidia, it doesn't sound like it will be much of an option. I have so far elected to play with it off.

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Tomb Raider is so far a very engaging game. I find it to be miles better than the other recent Tomb Raider games, and refreshing to play. I don't have a large backlog of mediocre PS1 games to finish just to understand the story, and the archaic gameplay elements aren't being carried over for the umpteenth time. The actual quality of the game is generally top-notch.


Overall the game is fairly well optimised if a bit inconsistent. This is another title I will be needing an upgrade to max, though it really isn't too far outside of this rig's capabilities. It's mostly a matter of video memory and maintaining a solid 60FPS. The only settings that make my performance really dive are texture quality and shadow resolution. It's otherwise cranked quite high on my rig and running smoothly. Obviously AA is a no-go but that's really not a matter of graphical horsepower. That ugly memory limit is finally rearing its head.