The Official Graphics Card and PC gaming Thread

The next tick will be Broadwell, a die-shrink of Haswell, so only efficiency improvements, no real performance difference - same as the last three

 

Video compression artifacting (not a high enough bitrate) in action:

 

This is what I prefer. Any resolution under 480P, is obviously not worth my time

480P (mpeg-2/DVD) 3,000Kb/s, H264 .5 - 1.5mbps
720P 4,000 - 5,000Kb/s
1080P 7,000Kb/s minimum. (I've seen impressive results under 7,000)

 

Some rather contrasting new titles here...

 

Shadow Warrior? Never heard of it (thank god.)

Wait, you said you're not one of the states, but you're an American? Oh, I get it, like Puerto Rico. So when do you guys think you'll become a state? Are you willing to give up pledging allegiance to the Queen? I wouldn't ask Sam to do that, but he's not an American.

Well, die-shrink is good, right? - thinner traces = less heat = easier to overclock?


Sam, speaking of Americans, when are you going to start playing Dishonoured which is basically set in London? (I corrupted the spelling just for you - don't adjust it ddp, that's how they misspell it over there.) Or have you started already? I have the feeling that it will play well on the 6970s. I think I'm going to post some shots of one of the DLCs to that game on the builder thread for everybody to enjoy - some scary shots of the Brigmore Manor witches!! Killer DLC!

No nudity Kevin, sorry to say. But the girls are kind of hot anyway.

I still haven't gotten back to Lara Croft, where there IS nudity, but I don't have time to enjoy it as I'm slugging it out with a fiendish several-hundred-year old GIANT Buddha monster, who is kicking my butt. Someday I'll go back, about the time that Sam starts on Dishonoured, meaning 2015.

Rich

 

I'm just never gonna hear the end of that LOL!

 

Well I don't know about "never" - just not for 5 or 10 more years.

 

Sam, those charts make me relatively happy. Minimum 60FPS is still in crazy territory for most gamers. Average seems to be just within my grasp though. Perfect

 

Just a heads up, Rome 2 Total War is a major disappointment in many areas. They've made the UI worse after years of refining the current one. The graphics are inconsistent and at times laughable. Nowhere near close to previews of the running game. Performance is horrendous, even though it looks worse than Shogun II and Empire, both of which were impressive. Rome 2 is due for a texture patch or pack. The textures seem like they aren't fully loading in, they are so low res and muddy.

The unit AI is extremely glitchy and often ignores commands or runs in the opposite direction of what you click. Sometimes just wandering around the battlefield after being given an attack order. Ships randomly plow up onto land and spin in circles. Campaign AI's will build huge armies then send a single unit to attack you at a time, basically wasting resources for nothing. Campaign AI is also very passive, and hardly ever makes aggressive pushes on you. The diplomacy is also inconsistent as factions will do things seemingly on a whim, regardless of your efforts at building relations. Units charge at eachother then start slow dancing with fighting animations without actually fighting, etc etc etc. The list goes on.

------------------------------------------------

I won't give it a review yet due to one single fact. Empire was equally as glitchy, and improved drastically with patches. Went from unplayable buggy, to one of my most played games ever. Shogun was great on release, but still needed some patching for stability and performance. The Total War games seem to work a lot better on smaller, concentrated maps.

The mod community will also be heavily involved in making this game great. DarthMod comes to mind. The DarthMod developer simply takes each Total War title and adds a layer of polish and a few stylish flourishes here and there, while straightening out some of the more glaring historical inaccuracies. They also fix up the campaign and battle AI, and make them handle many situations much better and be more aggressive, to make for a challenging opponent. It also alters the diplomacy so everything makes sense, and working to build relations with other countries will yield benefits later on. DarthMod is to Total War as Complete Mod is to Stalker. A giant enhancement package that doesn't alter, only improves. Fixes what the developers' lack of time caused. DarthMod Empire is my preferred strategy title of the last few months. Empire is very good but flawed even after patches. DarthMod makes it incredible. I love playing as the British and conquering India

 

Predictions were accurate for the R9 290X - it's about 40% better than the HD7970GE or R9 280X, which renders it slightly better than a Titan, for about 65% of the price. That price is of course still 230% of the cost of an HD7970GE or R9 280X, so 'better' value it is. 'good value', hmm, not so sure

 

Hmmmm. Take us over? Not before we elect Hillary, please.

So how many Canucks are there? About 30 million, right? And we have about 300 million? So you've got one-tenth the population and one-thirtieth the debt? I always knew you guys were a bunch of savers and "no thanks I'll pay cash" types. That clinches it, you can't become a state. You're not cut from the good old American cloth of living paycheck to paycheck mortgaged to the hilt. You probably don't even have 10 credit cards! What's in YOUR wallet - green stuff, not good old plastic. Borrrring!!

Wow, Jeff, your gaming diversity is astonishing. And that modding community you are tapped into is unbelievable as well.

Hey guys, back to a title that you, Jeff, convinced me to try after I bad-mouthed it "Oh you mean those freaks in the subway tunnel!" Hahahaha. That's what I said about Metro 2033. I was totally not interested, and so very wrong about it!

Actually I was right - freaks in a subway tunnel - and they're headed my way. Holy Sh*t!


In fact I was telling somebody today about how Stalin, no matter what you think about him otherwise, almost single-handedly defeated Hitler. Then I added how Russians love video games - I just read that Steam has had great success in adding millions of users in Russia, after they were told they would encounter nothing but piracy. Anyway, then I was talking about Metro - about Artyom - and how some great games are coming out of Russia.

Oh no it's the freaks again - f**ing mutants - they've killed everybody!


So, over the last few days I have played the 6 new DLC missions for Metro: Last Light, and let me tell you they are worth the money. Two of the 6 not quite as much, but the other four are totally excellent. And over the last two days I beat the one that takes you back to the Moscow Library of the first Metro 2033, and you get to have new fun with the Librarian again - including the more aggressive types in the basement, just like before. But this time you have claymores - I don't know if they were in the first game but I know that I didn't use them - but this time Yes, to great effect!

OMG - those mutants are f*ing scary! But I'm close to the fire, so they keep back.

Kevin, it's not all mutants and scary stuff, there's the strip bar, with nudity!

Finally, a break from the bloodshed! Nobody gunning for me here.


Yeah, Kevin, but no lapdances. At least none for me.

These commissars are having fun. This is the censored shot - just imagine!


Here it is Kev - the private peep show!

They even have a fake rip-off "peep" show that your buddy tells you to stay away from, not like this great one!


But in the Library DLC, one of the amazing, incredible touches, was that the weaponeer of the library relic-finding group, has a little pet on his shoulder, or most of the time sleeping noisily in a little cage, which looks very much like an iguana.

Right there on his shoulder!



But last night seeing it again, it occurred to me that it is a baby mutant. I love reptiles! I had an iguana, and a true chameleon, among others.

Here's a little bit more of a closeup!




The little thing moves around very nicely - and makes the loudest weirdest noises when it sleeps in the open-top cage. A few times coming back to base to save game and restock, it was neither in the cage or on his shoulder - I looked all around for it - but it reappeared later sleeping again. That "iguana/mutant" pet is a very nice touch indeed and I probably have a dozen screenshots just of that in order to capture a good one.


What do you guys think - is it an iguana, or a cute, tiny baby killer mutant?


Speaking of screenies, I'm still planning to post those witches screenshots also from the Dishonoured (misspelled for Sam) DLC.

Yeah, but that's still not good enough for 4k, right?

VIDEO PROBLEM
Hey guys, I have a small problem. Often when I turn on the gaming rig, the video card does not engage, meaning that the Dell screen light stays red, rather than turning blue when it is getting a signal. It didn't happen tonight, but I stand there and watch the keyboard activate, by which time the screen should already have kicked in. If not I hit the reboot button. What I am forced to do is reboot, and then sort of wiggle the dvi connection which I now leave loose for that reason. What is going on? Is it my cable, connection on the card, or what? I have another very high-end cable that I could try? Has anybody else had this problem?

Rich

 

I like the look of those mutants! These are screenshots of metro 2033?

 

Omega, Metro Last Light I do, however, find nudity in games distasteful more often than not. Nothing but shock value. Can draw away from the game's other qualities. I prefer my nudity separated from my hobbies if you know what I mean...

 

Thanks Jeff. It looks like I should probably play 2033 if I want to stick with the story line though

 

Yes, you should. Metro Last Light picks up directly where 2033 left off.

 

Ha ha, I believe I agree with that statement! Though I imagine Rich may find that unbelievable I suppose it does add a touch of realism though. Provided it's done right I like to write, so I can understand what they're trying to achieve here.

 

Had another look into the R9 290X. Unfortunately, it's got contemporary AMD written all over it - i.e. all the bits we don't like, and but at least a little of what we do.

Out of the box, the GPU of the R9 290X is an absolute monster for power/heat - the levels for which Fermi was originally mocked at release of the GTX480. The GTX480s very often ran at 95ºC which caused them issues. The R9 290X is engineered to run continuously at 95ºC regardless of load.

Now of course with most graphics cards, the temperatures don't get that high, simply because there isn't the heat there to cause that temperature in the first place - fan speeds is nowt to do with it. The 290X is very much a brute-force approach - maximum power, maximum heat, get as much out of the architecture as possible (with the same cooler as the HD7970 and HD6970 of previous generations, which were built for lower TDPs). This therefore means 95ºC is not only a regular sight, it's a problem.

By default, the R9 290X comes with two fan modes, normal and uber.
In normal mode, to keep at 95ºC the fan needs run at 45% or around 2500rpm, about the highest you typically see a modern geforce run in a well ventilated case. This provides about 88-90% of the card's maximum performance.

In uber mode ("high" if you like), the maximum fan speed the card can apply is 55%, or around 3500rpm, this is the sort of level you get if a system is in need of a clean or isn't well laid out and is overheating slightly, so you raise the fan speed to maintain stability. At this speed, you get 90-95% performance, depending on the title.

To unlock the full performance of the card - this is at stock clocks remember [we're preventing an underclock below stock clocks to gain this performance], you need to whack the fan to 100%, or 6000rpm (Probably not the full 100, but either way, VERY loud). Only then do you get the full increase over and above the existing cards.

To me, this is to GPUs what the 220W Piledriver CPUs are to CPUs. An engineering catastrophe, simply sold 'because it's the best we can do'. Unlike the CPUs, it does at least offer a fairly welcome performance boost, but given the price increase, you'd have to think long and hard whether it's worth melting your PCIe slot for.

In time, hopefully third-party companies will produce versions of the card that have a cooler appropriate to the task, but we are most definitely looking at a full 300W TDP card here. 'Power efficiency' this ain't.

Incidently, there is inexplicably a current 20% markup on this card for the UK market, which makes it the same price as the GTX780 at present. It's still marginally faster, but given the GTX780 makes about 20dB less noise, and runs at its full speed without requiring manual fan speed adjustments, it's without question a better engineered product.

Considering this is the culmination of two whole years of development I'm sorely disappointed. The performance is there, the execution is hopeless. It has long been the case that reference cards are more reliable than non-reference cards, certainly for AMD's case, but here, even if the card survives 95ºC week in week out, it's pretty likely to compromise the reliability of the rest of your PC.

Effectively, think a couple of year old HD4870X2, but minus the crossfire problem. Lots of heat, earsplitting noise, and fan speed and temperature balance that really don't make much sense and you have to sort of 'live with'.

Still, let's not be too negative, what we have here, in the US at least, is a card priced at 60% of the price of a GTX Titan, that is marginally faster at 2560x1600, and a full 10% at 3840x2160 (25% in Far Cry 3), and can run Crysis 3 at 3840x2160 (on medium of course) at 40fps average. That ain't bad for a single card.

In Battlefield 3, it can even handle 3840x2160 'Ultra' at 40fps average, if you turn the AA off. Personally I'm not sure I'd want multiplayer Battlefield with FPS that low, but the AA off I could probably live with at 150dpi. Impressive stuff for a single card.


Card in action at 88%, 90-95%, and 100% performance respectively:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QQhqOKKAq7o

 

Don't worry Kev, I'm pretty sure that 2033 also has some nudie bars. And I think you're right - it adds to the realism. Soldiers and nudie bars go together, lol.

Both games are great with a capital G! Both give you a bit of the Russian way of looking at things. Russians have a rich cultural history including great literature and music - Russian composers were known for impressive melodies - consider Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker Suite.

You definitely are not cut from good old American cloth - you knocked more than 30% = $12,000 off your revolving debt in just 3 years? How would all these banks stay in business if everybody were like you?

Besides, that $32 trillion in debt is funny money - we go into debt to buy their oil, then we sell them our T-bills, so basically we're buying the oil on credit. LOL And then we wage war on any of them who "step out of line." It works out pretty well. We learned it from the Brits. Also - how are we going to develop all these weapon systems over at the Pentagon if we don't know whether or not they actually work in the field - on real people!!

Jeff is thinking about going into the military. If so he needs some war to go to. And Canada has to have the US in a war every so often, so they can send guys over there to get field experience, like in Afghanistan. The free world likes these little small wars. That way - we see a Hitler, we defeat him ahead of time before anybody gets too big of a head.

It's a great system, and we'll probably elect a woman president in 3 years, thereby catching up to Britain, but remaining well ahead of Canada who has never had a woman in a position beyond chief dog catcher.

Great review Sam. Sounds like the card from hell - and you, better than anybody, know what it means to live with a hot-box, actually a pair of them, requiring you to buy only the 3rd AC unit sold in all of London for that particular year.

I guess the only real hope we have for a solid 4k card is when they get a die reduction, thereby knocking off a great deal of trace resistance, thereby reducing power consumption and heat output. Am I right?


MY COMPUTER WORKS - SORT OF
Hey, that weird graphic card not activating problem, went away when I changed Bios from Resume from Loss of Power = Turn on, my normal setting, to Turn off.

I happened to notice that the problem had gone away, but I had to hit the power button each time I turned on the rig. Sure enough, I had inadvertently changed that power setting. Sounds like a glitchy Asus p5e motherboard. But hey, I don't mind hitting that power switch if it solves my problem - no more loosening up the graphics card connector.

Why on earth would that setting cause that problem? (I know "like all things Asus ....")



MORE FUN WITH A NEW GAME THAT JUST CAME OUT - BIOSHOCK 2
I am having more fun with the DLC I just picked up for Bioshock 2, proving that almost every game Jeff plays is a great choice for me - even the ones he didn't like!

That reminds me - I had wanted to do a full review of that game. I have soooo many screenshots. I loved virtually everything about the game - the simplification of the hacks - the better "video camera splicer research" - the "this is what the drugged out little sisters see when they go through the alleys of leaky beat-up Rapture."

The Bioshock 2 experience is so good, I'll undoubtedly one day go back and replay Bioshock, and do much better, and enjoy it much more this time. Plus - oh I almost forget - spear gun! The guns in total are so much better in Bioshock 2 - they aren't your standard WWII guns, but rivet gun is basically a Beretta, which also takes magnum rounds, and .... back to spear gun - I almost never get tired of tossing a splicer 10 feet and pinning him/her to a wall - there is a real thrill in it. And the AI is great - the spider splicers remind me of people I have known from New York City - that same kind of crazy laugh, and same kind of crazy howl of pain and frustration! Unforgettable and terribly funny!! That's all for now - a full review with 20 screenshots is what the game deserves!

But - one last thought. Bees.

I completed the Protector Trials last night - finishing A+ on 3rd trail of each of the 6 maps, and then perfect score on each bonus round - the idea is that it consists of the part of the game where you have to protect the little sister as she harvests adam from an "angel" - and each trial for each map, gives you very limited weapons and plasmas.

I found out that bees seem to be the most powerful plasma ever - and they are so good that one time on the bonus rounds, when I have all plasmas and all weapons, I totally forgot to activate the two bots at the beginning, and I dominated just as well with solid bees. Unlike the bots, bees can be attacking ten targets at the same time depending on how many swarms you have released - I don't actually know how long a swarm lasts but I release them every 5 to 10 seconds, then I stand close to the Circus vending machine to buy more eve. Your eve runs out for every swarm you release, but you get money for every splicer you kill. (I also love to buy the little mini-turrets that come with the new Bioshock 2 hacking weapon. They don't let you buy too many before the Ammo Bandito machine runs out of them, but those little guys pour out some potent lead, especially two or three of them together! Add a swarm of bees to directed fire from three mini-turrets, even the big ape guy with the British accent dies really fast, lol!)

Rich