The Official Graphics Card and PC gaming Thread

I have about four purchased upgrade copies of Win8 to my name, back when they were cheap. Microsoft seem to have no record of that, however, and furthermore the emails for proof of purchase are nowhere to be found in my inboxes.

The Win7 install at the moment is unactivated so it doesn't have any cracks associated with it yet, but I don't really know how long I intend to use it - it does not play full-screen video in any application [yet to determine whether that's the O/S or graphics card at fault] nor does it support my monitor properly.

 

Reinstalling Windows 8 seems to have fixed all those odd issues. Perhaps there is something going for this OS after all!

Liking my 3840x2160 all ultra Battlefield 4!

 

Sam, certainly not a bad purchase. Even if the hardware has a few downsides, the performance is where it needs to be on those cards. I've found myself impressed with the numbers they put up in some cases. Glad it seems to have solved some of your performance woes! I intend to invest in an Intel Haswell rig or newer quite soon, as well as a new SSD and either a second video card, or a newer one! The GTX960 is literally around the corner. If previous generations are anything to go by, it should match or beat a GTX 780. My 760 stomps a 680 easily. Very satisfying performance from Nvidia so far...

Windows 7 for me for the foreseeable future. Have tried to like Windows 8, then had to grab one of the Microsoft-supplied flash drives from my friend's work to get Windows 7 back on. It is well and truly terrible. I simply do not like how it is designed, period. Windows 9 doesn't look like it will be any different sadly.

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Haven't posted at all lately. Working 6 - 7 days a week for 8 - 10 1/2 hours a night. Usually 9 1/2. Very exhausting. Making tons of delicious fried foods that I can buy wholesale with an employee discount though. At least 4 different kinds of onion rings, 2 different brands of Jalapeno Poppers with cheddar or cream cheese, french toast sticks, 2 different types of mozzarella sticks, and these awesome little spicy bread things filled with cheese. Every single one delicious as hell! All brand-name stuff.

Union and benefits too. Pretty crap ACA general health care with a $3000 deductible, but awesome vision and really decent dental. One more month till I'm done with probation and get a nice raise. Already made a night of machine operator pay! The hours are crazy but TONS of overtime and those paychecks

 

Well, it's a toss up I suppose. I have to work overtime without pay but of course living in the UK healthcare is free anyway, to some degree

I do find myself wondering if I should have tried a GTX970 as after an initial couple of days' gouge they're similarly priced now, and AMD drivers are still laughably bad at 2160p. Still though, performance for pound I'm satisfied

 

I may consider the 980 in february. I wish I had the money now! LOL! But by february, I suspect the price will drop at least a little

 

Just purchased a 128GB Samsung 840 Pro for $90 s+h included. This is a nice deal for such a good SSD! Normally around $130.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820147192

Ample capacity as an OS drive for my uses. Much better quality than the Generic Toshiba OEM drive that I'm currently using. Should be drastically faster. Basically one of the best SSDs available. Certainly the best reputation. Have a friend with several 840 EVO 256GBs and they all impress. The 840 Pro should be even better. Much longer lifespan at the very least. I only need enough capacity for my OS and whatever few programs I use. Rarely run into space problems on 64GB, though they do sometimes occur. A screaming deal on a good 128GB drive seems to be just what the doctor ordered.

Should be here at the end of the week. By my next paycheck I will be looking at a Gigabyte Z97X-UD5H, and either a new 4690K or a slightly used 4770K for free from a friend computer gods willing.
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UPDATE: Two Western Digital WD20EZRX 2TB drives ordered as well for $84.95 a piece. Don't seem any worse than any other WD Green drives as all I need is simple storage and enough speed to stream 1080p. A marginal task for most decent 1TB+ HDDs nowadays. Could easily replace the 4 1TB drives in my file box but I'm going for maximum effect here. The two 500GB 7200.12 Seagate Barracudas in my main rig are ancient. Some 6 or 7 years old and only ever used for working storage anymore. They will be retired in favor of the new drives.

 

And the 840 Pro has arrived. Quite a sweet looking little unit. Installing tonight or tomorrow morning. Lol will probably tape it to the back of the drive cages just like the Toshiba.

 

I really need to reinstall my SSD back in my tower. The Velociraptor is agreeable, but no substitute!

 

Wow you guys have been picking up some great hardware, and Jeff, where are you working? I get hungry just reading your product list. Is it retail - or wholesale? Congrats on the big paychecks (and nobody trying to get you to gyp customers like before.)

Kevin I thought you were closer to Portand than that. By the way, where are you from Klamath Falls - that's probably still East, right?

DDP, you typed 60F but you left out the minus sign - that was -60F right? You talked about summer moving into spring and then a quick Fall - I assume you meant just normal ice, leading to frigid bone-chilling blizzards. You're just north of Kevin? - well, you're just north of everything, aren't you? - isn't Canada basically a hop and a skip from the North Pole?

Brrrr! Cold weather - hate to think about it. We're back to another heat wave.

Sam, you went for the R290 - great! That was a heckuva buy.

Did you say Warhead at 2160p - does the game support that resolution? And Battlefield 4 at ultra! Why don't you favor us with a screenshot at full resolution - maybe one of Warhead. (If you have to use photobucket - just use the Direct method and add "~original" to the end of the file name as you helped me discover.) I know I'd have to scroll all over to see the whole picture, but still that would be quite interesting.

Speaking of Crysis, and screenshots, here's one of that new title, Crysis 3 that just came out .... a few years ago. At $20 on Origin, it is definitely worth it!

In this first screen, since I am "cloaked" meaning invisible - (ddp do you guys play video games in your igloos? - if so then you know that crysis is a game with a suit that makes you invisible) then you see Chinatown, a lot of water, and cross-hairs in the middle of the screen.


Here I am with a bow and arrow in New York, Chinatown.



But when Psycho first gave me the bow and arrow, I didn't see any cross-hairs. And there were no iron sights either.

I went back to options - I was sure I had checked off "show crosshairs." Yes it was checked off.

I played for hours, mostly not using the bow and arrow, wondering if it was a bug, or how a game could possibly not give you crosshairs for a bow and arrow, until finally I got more frustrated and checked again, and then I read the fine print.

Enable cross-hairs didn't activate on any difficulty level above veteran.

I don't know - maybe I AM stupid enough to believe that it could ever be sunny in Canada - but how are you going to shoot a crossbow without any iron sights, nor cross-hairs. So I dropped difficulty down to Veteran. One of the main points of the game is the bow - right? (There are two levels of difficulty above Veteran, but that is the stupidest thing I have ever seen - taking your bow and arrow crosshairs away! What complete morons. What planet are the Yerli brothers from? No wonder they put aliens in their games!)

I love bow and arrows. Far Cry 3 was all over bow and arrows. They are so much fun! And once I had it figured out, the Crysis 3 bow is actually a lot of fun. Once you figure it out.

Here's what I mean - it's not just the missing crosshairs - there's another crazy thing about the bow and arrow. I didn't know this for the first 8-10 hours of gameplay - you have to not just hit the mouse, but you have to hold the mouse, and pull back the bow. I didn't know that - because it DOES shoot with just a mouse click, like a crossbow. There is a little animation of a quick bow pull-back. But of course it is rather weak - good only for short range, or from high - out to about 20-40 yards.

I played for a couple of days, until I noticed a hint that mentioned the power of the bow depended also on how far back it was pulled.

Yeah that's it - I'm stupid. They had a big drawn out tutorial, all super science fiction crap on a virtual environment, but not one thing in the many-part tutorial about the star weapon of the game, the special bow. It's special because you can shoot it and remain cloaked. The tutorial was filled with a bunch of stuff, but missing the most important thing of all.

What jerks!

Cevat Yerli has gone downhill in a big way - I hope he learned his lesson from the just 2 million units sold on all platforms, nearly 1/2 million PC, and about 800,000 apiece on xbox and ps3, as of middle of last month.

I think the main problem with this game, was a lack of play-testing. It could have been a great game with better pacing, better story, not so much Prophet the self-righteous fool - a lot of the dialog sucked.

And the AI taunts trivialized the game - they were just childish. "Hey bumhole, show yourself. That special suit isn't going to protect you forever."

[Haha - I just noticed - AfterDawn edited a**hole and turned it into bumhole - haha]

If I had written it, it would have been stuff like - "Psycho, give yourself up - the skinning lab will turn you human again - we're trying to help you, not hurt you." You know, higher level deceitful stuff like the Nazis - truly evil - not just cheap childish taunts like the worst crap writing on the planet.

So when you read the bad reviews, and see the lowish 78 metacritic rating - keep in mind that if you downplay your expectations, the game can actually be a lot of fun, and it gets better and better as you go along.

Some of the weapons come from the aliens themselves, like this first one that took out the pesky sentry guns.



When I talk about pacing - the game starts out with several set pieces, including a TERRIBLE rainy night ship setting, ala COD4. They thought - "well if those buggars at COD4 can start off with a rainy ship raid, why can't we?"

Well, first off, COD has better writers. And better pacing. And more play-testing. And the rainy raid was only a 10 minute warmup. This one was - "here's this room, kill everybody, avoid the helicopter." And then "here's this next room - kill everybody - no helicopter." Room after room.

And the enemy, the same each time, "Prophet, show yourself you bumhole. That suit won't protect you forever." The same childish 6 lines of taunts repeated over and over again throughout the whole game. Hahahahaha! It would have been better if the Russians had taken advantage of the alien invasion, come in to help with the East Coast, took over New York and domed it, and then sold alien energy at bargain basement prices, and created a monopoly and a stranglehold on the economy. All the taunts could have been in Russian and only the Russian video game players would have been disgusted at the cheap writing!

But like I say, the game gets more and more interesting. And now that you know how to work the arrow, you can start off having more fun right away. The bow really is cool!

And you get to do some driving - that is really cool But it is over way too soon. That's what I mean by pacing. In Half Life 2 you do some major driving - you're powering that dune buggy through those concrete washes for miles. New York is immense - they could have stretched it out quite a bit.

So savor it when you get the chance.

You also do some neat aerial shooting down of alien ships, with psycho piloting a VTOL - vertical takeoff and landing aircraft. Psycho's daddy, he informs us, flew over Nazi Germany and was quite a pilot, and Psycho assures us that his daddy had nothing on him. That was pretty cool.


You don't just go around shooting stuff, sometimes you drive a dune buggy or this tank!



So here below is one of the first glimpses of New York - and I believe that is the tower with the guns that we have the fun of taking out, once we find the big alien pinch rifle. By the way, THAT gun, a couple images up, is indeed one of the most amazing contraptions I have ever seen. The artist is to be commended. In fact, the game was filled with great art all through. I can see why Cevat was jazzed - but art is not everything - the story, the pacing, the variety. It all has to harmonize, to complement. Cevat has lost his touch!

But the music was good. And perhaps I'm being too critical. A lot of it was pretty good.

We're back to New York, and some corporate dudes put a dome over the while city!



Anyway, I'm so glad to be out of that rainy metal ship and industrial complex, that anything outside is a breath of fresh air. Or as DDP would say, another day in a winter's wonderland of white.

So here I am, out in this dam area - yeah below a dam - and this is my first time through, and so I have not used the bow and arrow the way I did on a replay yesterday, going back to this same place, now knowing how to use the damn thing.

But anyway, I have killed most of the enemies, with a one-shot kill from sniper scope - see above image, and the two below. By the way - the game lets you trade in your pistol for a second rifle - don't assume it won't like I did for the first two days. It's nice having the extra fire power two rifles can give you, especially when you have one set for single-shot sniper scope, and the other for close in reflex with red dot. You can get a lot of one-shot head shot kills without a dedicated sniper rifle - just change the weapon settings and pick the sniper scope. (The sniper scope is not always available - change to a rifle that DOES have that scope.)

By the way, here's a hint - if you have sniper scope on a scar, and you come across one that says "reflex scar" you can't get that ammo. But if you temporarily change your scope to reflex, all of a sudden you are the same gun, and you automatically grab that ammo. Nice trick, huh!

Here's sniper scope. In one of the first bits of outdoors, I was trying to take a good screenshot and not get seen!



They did some really nice work with the water, similar to Far Cry 3.

I was walking back and forth, rather amazed at the large ripples my movements produced.



There is something else you should know. You get a few suit upgrades. I got only 3 upgrade points the entire game. You can change your nano suit loadout at any time in the H suit menu. At first I chose stealth, instead of hacking assist. Then - remember - I said pacing was a problem - they threw a hack at me that was at least twice as hard as any of the hacks before. I tried to hack that reactor shutdown for more than 30 minutes, over and over again - failing on the last really tricky one several times. It had 8 points of resonance, and any misstep and your time is reduced.

I was ready to tear my hair out or retreat from civilization and go live somewhere remote like Canada. Finally I dropped from veteran down to soldier - just one position above recruit - and it still took me 15 minutes to beat that hack. That got me really ticked off.

I was already down at the highest level, veteran, that gave you a bow cross-hairs versus nothing at all, no iron sights, nothing for the bow. But damned if I was going to play the rest of the game at one whole level easier than I needed it to be, just for that one hack.

Then I remembered when I had passed up getting that hacking assistant perk. I forgot where it was, and I also wondered if I had some hacking choices in the beginning. I could have gone back one chapter, but I went back to the beginning of the game again. This is about 5 hours into it. Also I wanted to see what happened, because the screen directions say "Press Enter to enter the game" while Psycho and his buddies are invading the ship that has you as a prisoner. I thought I was supposed to hit Enter, so I did, and I missed all the cutscene explaining how I was rescued. Every other game has "hit Enter to skip" so you know not to hit Enter unless you want to skip on a re-play. Like I mentioned, Yerli had nobody play-testing this thing. It's a wonder it wasn't filled with more bugs than these few.

Finally I found the nano upgrade and I chose hacking assistant, and that hellish 8-position hack was reduced to a doable 4 positions. Hacking was much easier after that. I saved the next two points, and near the end I used them on special climbing ability - a 2 point perk. Maybe there were more suit upgrades that I missed. The boxes blended in with all the other countless boxes throughout the game.


Graphics-wise, I played the game at the highest setting - Very High - which is where the game put me, except on textures. It put me under Very High, but I raised it to Very High. In the early part of the game both cards are being utilized, the first at above 90%, then second in the 75% range - memory at about 75-85% each core.

CROSSFIRE DROPS OUT OFTEN
The screenshots in this post tell an interesting tale, and mostly it's a tale about an fps just above 20. Since there was no steam, to make these screenshots I had to go into windowed mode with Alt Enter, and hit Print Screen. That is why you see a band at the top from my desktop. But unlike the steam screenshots, these capture the OSD, which I believe is a steam option.

So in looking at these screens right now, from the OSD, as far as I can tell, only the first and the last show crossfire - for some reason the second card had dropped out when I took the other screen shots. Many times I was getting 45 fps, but I see now that when the second card dropped out, my fps dropped to 20-22, but I didn't notice it because of the style of combat. ​

The graphics are quite nice. Especially the water effects.

This is my favorite screen - look at the beautiful reflections - on my journey through downtown.



This is a great $20 game - best one I ever played. Definitely worth it.

Rich

 

A 290X, not a 290!

Sure, I'll try and post some 2160p screenshots in a moment.

The card's performance is stellar, and it's a good performer for the price despite the noise level, but what really lets the card down is the abysmal driver support. I moved from crossfire to a single card to try and reduce the number of performance and stability issues I had to put up with when using crossfire, especially in a 2160p setup. In all honesty, the system is even less stable than before, and it's really quite a chore to use. Not knowing when your PC is going to randomly disconnect your monitor requiring the latter to be rebooted, or reboot the PC entirely without warning, is not really a very pleasant state of affairs, and it's no fault of the card as you can run it in a demanding game for hours at a time without issue, yet the PC can randomly reboot after having been sat at the desktop for as little as 10 minutes.
The displayport dropout issues are definitely not solved with the new driver released this week (14.9) but I will give it a few more days before calling it on the reboots, as installing a different driver did in the past offer a stay of execution on that for 2-3 days each time. If both issues still persist, then the card is genuinely going to be swapped for a GTX970 instead.

 

Dropout issues. For crying out loud.

Well, yes, if it persists I won't blame you for switching.

Speaking of dropout, why do you think I was losing crossfire support half the time I was playing Crysis 3? I didn't fully keep track of it, but maybe it always dropped out after the first hour of play, I don't know. What do you think - the game? My profile? Any thoughts?

 

The display dropout thing is blamed on the monitor, as AMD refuse to support the UP3214Q due to 'known issues with this monitor' - what they don't say is that the known issues are on AMD's side, not Dell's. This is easy to prove as 9 months using HD6970s only ever caused displayport link failures either at boot or when enabling/disabling crossfire. With the R9 290X (and indeed a friend's 290X) they occur at random mid-use.

This is annoying but not quite a dealbreaker. Updating to 14.9 has made some difference, but the reboots have now been replaced with continuous instances of the 'display driver stopped responding and has recovered' bubble messages.

As for crossfire I was going to say, the frame rates you posted in those screens look a little on the low side! It's been a while since I've seen that bug, but crossfire used to drop out mid-game if a certain texture was rendered, so you'd always have it at a certain point in a game, regardless of playtime up until that point. I assumed it was some sort of video memory leak bug with certain titles. Only a couple of games ever used to do it, I remember one being OFP Dragon Rising.

 

Hmmm.

Yes the frame rates are low, but there were many times I recall looking up and seeing 45. I dropped the size of the font on the OSD, so I ignore it most of the time.

However, on the first and last screens, the frames are low, with both cards engaged - frame rates of 20 on the top, and 22 on the bottom, gpu load on the top showing 98% and 60%, and on the bottom screen, 97% and 64%. So I guess just a lot going on - and the game I guess is bottle-necked on the first card.

But the other frames without crossfire show 24.8 fps on the tank driving shot, with 99% load on the first gpu and 1% on the second, with other non-crossfire screens showing 20, and 19, and 19, two of them with 99% load on first gpu, one with 73% load on first gpu - maybe just a momentary thing.

I don't know if there is a point to that rambling, but I guess I was trying to say that no matter what, crossfire or no crossfire, I'm running the same frame rate, from 19 to 25. At least as far as those 7 screenshots go. So I just find that interesting, that during gameplay, I never realized I was losing the second card.

And like I said, at times I DID look closely, and I saw 45 fps. That may have just been on the ship at the beginning of the gaming - after which I probably stopped looking at the OSD at all, in trying to stay alive and keep out of sight.

Your memory of a bug caused by rendering a certain texture resulting in loss of crossfire is quite interesting. I was actually shocked when I first realized I had lost the second card - right at the end of the game in the main boss battle - and I just figured that the graphics at that moment were not very demanding. I dropped out of the game at one point, ran furmark and saw both cards at full 975 clock (because I thought maybe Catalyst had dropped the second card which has happened before) and went back in-game, and I can't remember - I think crossfire stayed OFF.

But there was one point at the very end, where the game dropped to single digit fps, maybe 3 fps - a slideshow. I figured a memory loadup of some type, dropped out of action, went back in - same slideshow, then did a full game quit. I ran furmark, result slow, logged off in windows as I recall, logged back on, furmark was back up, and then the game was back up. But I think it was still non-crossfire at that part - and still I didn't feel much lag even if it was only in the 19 or 20 range - but I think it was in the 40 range. It reminded me that I had played crysis one and two and warhead, all on one card before I finalized on a second card to buy.

Anyway, I'll attribute it to some kind of crossfire bug. Of course, as you have pointed out in the past - it could be the OSD itself.

Rich

 

Impressive screenshots. Wish I had more time for gaming right now

No, I'm far away from Klamath Falls. K-falls is bordering the california border. I live north near washington. This should put things in perspective. I live in umatilla, where the gold star on this map is. Just west of Hermiston.

 

If we're playing the map game...

 

Mmmm, London is an area of the world, I've vowed to see before I die

 

Definitely go see it perhaps. Living there, not so much - I maintain I don't live in London, however. Close enough to be able to commute there to work, but far away enough to have fields & trees behind my house rather than other houses

 

Yeah, Prefer the country myself now. I grew up in a very large town. And now small town life appeals to me It certainly aids my metal scrapping ventures. Not too many nosy neighbors here lol.

 

Wait, Kevin, you're on the northern border - not far from Pendleton, right, which means not far south from Walla Walla.

Wait, Sam - you have fields behind your house. I thought you were right there in the thick of things, next door to Mick Jaggar.

So you commute. Do you take the tube, the pit, the hole, the tunnel, or the chunnel?


Since we're playing the map game - I looked but couldn't find LA. But look what I DID find.



Yep, DDP certainly is north of Kevin. In fact he's north of Sam too. That's what I thought.