The Official Graphics Card and PC gaming Thread

Check this out! LOL! Sam... I'm jealous! I'll be waiting quite a time Perhaps next year, will be the rewarding year, I've desperately been waiting for.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cer8I4cX-vs

Unbelievable. Even if I sold my ride, I wouldn't have half of the funds

 

Lol, not sure if I'd fool for that in life. I'd like to think not because the way TVs emit light obviously differs greatly from it being an actual window, but still - entertaining

As for the Dell display, not cheap, but after the enterprise discount (they're a fair bit more to the end user) it works out about 10-15% more than the new retail price would have been for the first 30" 2560x1600 monitors, factored for inflation. Of course, if the display upgrade necessitates new graphics cards, that will make the operation considerably more expensive, as the only thing I have that's from the HD7 series or newer at this point is an HD7770. I should hopefully not need to worry about component/composite stuff any more as that's now all plugged into the Pioneer receiver with an HDMI out.

 

Yeah, not sure I'd fall for it myself. Certainly an amusing prank though LOL!

 

Haha that brightened up my day. Good find and relevant too

I wish you the best of luck Sam. You've been mentioning a new monitor for years now

 

This just in: Microsoft is spying on Xbox One users and censoring their private communications... Like everyone said they would from the beginning...

http://forums.xbox.com/xbox_forums/xbox_support/xbox_one_support/f/4274/t/1628408.aspx?PageIndex=3

 

You sound surprised

 

Yeah, my brother sent me that video the other day. I figured it relevant, to the topic at hand LOL!

I realize such a display is very costly, when figuring for High FPS at that resolution. Frankly, I don't mind that Well, I kind of do LOL! Bleeding edge always costs Somehow... I will find a way to get that display. I must have it!

 

I'm under no impression I'll be playing games at high detail at its native resolution, but that doesn't stop me playing them either at lower detail or simply at the resolution I play them at now. Realistically, a lot of the games I play regularly are 'undemanding' enough that I imagine they'll play fine at 4K anyway, and the biggest benefit to having 4K is really the desktop space, not the multimedia/games usage. Generally though, because the R9 290 series cards are "a bit naff" I'd ideally like to avoid having to buy them and wait for the next variants which will hopefully be designed a bit better.

 

We've discussed the possibility of gaming at that resolution many times. I can see a fair few titles being playable. Source games, Grid, CoD.

 

Grid would run at that resolution?

 

Grid is memory hungry in certain situations, but just about anything in the past 5 or so years can run it from a pure performance standpoint. My 512MB 9600GT and a Phenom I-based Kuma dual core at 3.2GHz could lock it at 60 at 1920 x 1200 w/ 8xAA... I'd imagine a pair of 6970s and a 4GHz i5 can manage it in some capacity at 4k... Grid 2 is a different story.

 

Yeah I was running GRiD on my HD3870 at 2560x1600, but 512MB VRAM was barely passible there. That means from a performance standpoint anything HD6870 upwards could handle 4K performance-wise but you'd probably need 1.5GB video memory to have AA on.

 

Order with Dell has now been placed for the UP3214Q. Should be delivered within the next 10 days or so, subject to when the batch arrives. I'd initially said I wouldn't buy one unless they were less than £2000, turns out I've still stuck to that (just!). Commercial price gave me a 30.5% discount off the retail, which is pretty nice for an order that expensive (Works out pre-tax being the equivalent of about $2700 instead of $3900, including the 5 year warranty and delivery - UK prices are slightly higher than the US).

Now of course, this leaves me in no position to buy new graphics cards to run it should I need them. If the HD6970s aren't capable of driving it at 3840, I think I'll leave the 3008WFP alongside for the first month, and run the HD7770 in the LAN PC to it for the time being, since as discussed I'll most value the desktop real-estate. If necessary I can swap the DP cable easier than DVI, and just use the HD6970s at 2560x1600 still. As far as I'm aware that's still supported (which apparently is not the case on the Asus units, news to me)

 

Wow, quite a purchase! I luckily usually don't have a need for screen real estate. Dual monitors handles the majority of it well. My main focus is still, after all, gaming. The 2407 keeps everything affordable at still very nice quality. I'd like to leave my savings account in place

If I had to pick a monitor now it would probably be a 27" at 2560 x 1600. Along with a 990 board and a second 4GB GTX760. An expensive upgrade

 

2560x1440, alas the 27s are 16:9

 

I look forward to your review Sam

 

As do I look forward to reviewing it. Going to make an unpleasant month while I pay the first chunk of it off though, heavily discounted though it may be, it's still more than I paid for my 3007WFP and 3008WFP combined, though admittedly it is retail new item with a 5 year warranty rather than second hand and refurbished 12-month respectively as before.

If it does come to upgrading the GPUs, that will clearly have to wait a month or so while I recoup some of the expense of the display. On the one hand I hope some non-reference R9 290 cards come out by then, but on the other hand, I've expressed my disdain for non-reference cards several times over. Nonetheless, the XFX HD4830 and MSI HD7770 have both turned out well so far, but in crossfire, I'm not sure. The GTX780Ti is still pretty horrendously expensive for what it is, and they're not as good at handling tiling still by the looks of things.

I found a few promising graphs on this though, I could be tempted to just get the one 290 to start with.

 

Wow, Sam, that monitor will be something else. I quite agree in general, on waiting for the next die shrink for family 8000 (or 9000?) but your graphs show a 290 doing pretty well on those two titles.




That's amazing that you sprung so soon - you were first talking mid next year, then you backed off, and here it's still 2013. Awesome.

Kevin, that link with the joke about the meteor - that was great! I think I would have been faked out. You go in there focusing on the interview, and you just peripherally accept that you're looking out the window. I assume this was done in a high-rise building, like in Sao Paolo perhaps. Coming to the interview, riding up all those floors, you have already waved disbelief, because the screen is not what you're there for. So anything that occurs - you automatically think it's happening in real life. That was an outstanding trick.

By the way, on that page, I accidentally hit the top video link, which I thought was the same, but I got a different prank - they had a very interesting situation with a lady getting mad in a New York coffee house when a guy bumped her, causing her to spill coffee on her laptop, and she angrily gestured him away, whereupon he was telekinetically slammed back against the the wall and pushed halfway up toward the ceiling.




Everybody in the coffee house is gasping and transfixed - some take to the exit. In disbelief, she drops her arms and the guy falls to the floor, and then, in increasing anxiety and rage, she waves her hands and all the close-by empty tables jumped out of her way, at which point people began to panic.





It was so brilliant - the patrons were totally aghast - there were hidden cameras everywhere capturing all the shocked reactions. They had rigged the place with pulleys and other gimmicks as a come-on for the remake of that classic movie, Carrie. Take a look. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VlOxlSOr3_M&list=RDCer8I4cX-vs


This past month or so, I have been busy playing lots of stuff, including Ghosts and BF4. There are very few people on the BF4 servers - but I did have a chance to encounter some smaller versions of the big maps - like the small Golmud Railroad map - it's the version that includes just the little town, with no vehicles.

But in the last few days, I haven't found anybody on the small map servers. And BF4 loves to mix very dark shadows with black uniforms. Talk about camouflage.

In logging into Origin, I noticed Medal of Honor which I bought a year ago, and so, getting tired of not being able to tell black from black, I re-visited that recently, and played enough to level up from corporal to full sergeant, unlocking a bunch of good stuff.

I got much better assault rifles, and most interestingly, a repeating sniper rifle that stays scoped in and allows you to fire as fast as you can pull the trigger. It reminds me of the Persian sniper rifle in the BF2 demo that I still play occasionally.

I have never been a sniper guy, but I began dominating with that new unlocked weapon. For example, 11 kills, 4 deaths in my last outing. And with that rifle, you get a pistol that sprays full auto like a P90, so you can run around safely until you find a good sniping spot. The auto pistol is solely a close-in weapon of course, but with about 30 rounds it will take down anybody except a demolition guy in full body armor.

The repeating sniper rifle is definitely not a one-shot kill unless it's a head shot, but it packs the power of an AK round, with minimal recoil - you really don't have to set up the available tripod. It will fire as fast as you can hit the button, so you can take out one of those demolition heavies with 8-10 shots in a little over a second.

Hey Jeff, what's going on with Arma 3? Anything new? Have you tried any new shooters, besides holding off the zombie hordes? (I have been reading that book, World War Z, every time I visit the animator who did Left 4 Dead - I'm about 80% through the book. It was written by Mel Brook's son, and it's quite a good read.)

Speaking about Arma, I recently let Steam finish a new Arma 3 update the other day, and I have been thinking about going back to it - I have done only the single-player infantry trial in that small campaign about rescuing the trapped soldiers in the little town. But I think I'll go back for the other trials. Having enjoyed the Ghost underwater combat (not to mention the awesome space walk combat) I think I'd like to see how Arma 3 handles scuba.


And finally, ddp - do you concede defeat? Not only have we run in and out of Canada anytime we were in the mood, too many times to count, but now, in modern times, we are currently considering giving you guys a huge break and rigging a pipeline down to our gulf refineries, so you can get rid of some of that sand-filled crap you try to pass off as oil. I guess you have to unload it on somebody, and we continue feeling guilty about all those historic invasions and rapes and pillaging - back in the good old 1800's.

Rich

 

The timing is all down to price. I conceded that post-release it'd be a fair while before the price of the UP3214Q dropped by any substantial amount, so it became a question of when I could 'afford it'. It's still not something I can truly afford but getting an £850 discount (a similar amount in fact to what my 3008WFP cost me) made it somewhat bearable. I just have to have a frugal couple of months

The inevitable graphics upgrade that follows will be the painful bit, as any further hardware outlays during the 'paying off' period will be difficult to achieve. At this stage I'm contemplating use of a single R9 290, but really don't want to waste what is left in the HD6970s.

 

Ha ha, excellent video Rich!