The Official Graphics Card and PC gaming Thread

I use a cheap Dell PS/2 keyboard for LANS. Always functions well. Unfaltering performance lol. As far as mice the Logitech MX518 V2 serves me well. Not a bad mouse at all. Very comfortable for my large hands Durable and excellent performance as well.

Also just a heads up. The Samsung performs wonderfully and both WD20EZRX 2TB drives work fine. Nice and quiet, good vibration characteristics, good performance when I was transferring files from the WD1001FALS to both drives. Lovely result Enjoying both upgrades immensely. Nice to have my storage array on the main PC unshackled a bit in performance and capacity. Not to mention replacing some VERY aged drives. 40K+ hours on each non-stop since new.

Getting more used to the keyboard. My typing is overall quicker and more freeflowing but a few more mistakes than usual. Lots of double button presses due to the sensitive switches and my shaky fingers lol. Probably good to refine my motor control. Am learning to type more carefully

Now that I've upgraded my aging drive array and bought a somewhat expensive mechanical keyboard like I've gone on about for ages, the CPU, motherboard, and RAM will follow in the coming months I now have a 4770K promised to me for absolutely FREE before Christmas, through the same avenue my 955BE appeared from. Bought, benched and OC'd a little till the upgrade itch hit, then traded to me for the 1100T and 990X board. Christmas is soon enough for that type of deal! It has a Z87X-UD4P with it that I intend to replace with a Z97X-UD5H. A set of 2 x 8GB Mushkin DDR3-2133 with nice timings to follow after that

 

I'm glad to hear that keyboard is working out so nice for you Jeff. Let's face it - we have hands on keyboard at all times no matter whether gaming or everyday stuff. It's nice to have special equipment that one can be proud of.

Question: Why do you plan to put 16 gigs on your Christmas 4770K?

The Backlight!!! hahaha

Here I've been going on in my head all day about these bright yellow and blue keyboards all over England - I looked at my black keyboard and it suddenly felt stuffy and overly formal, like a tux.


hahahaha

Well, now that we're talking about the light, yes, now that you mention it, I think the Saitek is a soft blue light - it's terrific. I walked back over there to check - definitely blue. Which you don't like. (Well aren't we picky.) So, a soft yellow light? Well I guess that would work too.

I just don't know. I have been knocked off my yellow keyboard high horse so far, I'm having a hard time adjusting to that it's merely the illumination, and not the whole bright kid's room peripheral! So I guess yellow would be fine too.

This logitech low profile is so faint - the light comes through the keys and the white letters shine - I would say it's some kind of very dim white light.

Kevin - seriously you're having some allergic reaction to the mouse - like itching, etc.? One in five experience this? Well, you learn something new every day.


I just bought another game today - Avatar, from 2009, for about $15 shipped by amazon. I liked the movie so much, I always thought the game might be kind of cool. Cameron's daughter suggested to her dad that he license a game. Sales were slow at first, but picked up with the success of the film and later release of the dvd, so that to date, overall, ubi sold 2.7 million, and they feel it was a good investment for them.




=============== SCREENSHOTS ==================


Finally, some new screenshots! I never got to the game yesterday, so I'm going to just post these pretty quick, without too much commentary. They are all 2560x1600, so hit the image and let it pop open full screen for maximum impact!


These are the cast of characters: Michael - psycho - on the left, Rausch in the middle, and Claire on the right.


Again, as we realized before, my framerates are much higher than shown, since to get the image I had to drop out of full screen. That is why the image above, at the very top, shows a small slice of my desktop. Attempting to just capture the window with Alt-PrintScreen didn't work.

However, I opened up fraps, which DOES provide screenshots - I thought I remembered as such - and I started getting full-size screenshots, and you can see the difference in the framerates that are shown on the next 8 screens. You can also see on the next 7 screenshots that there is no small slice of desktop at the top of the frame.

However, I had to stop using fraps. I'll explain at the end of this post after the 7 screens.


Aren't these water effects lovely? This is from the dam area. The enemy soldiers are dead.


This first fraps screenshot above was a puzzle - it's showing that I lost crossfire. I had to pause the game, open furmark, verify that crossfire was running, then when I came back into the game both cards were working after that.

Open up this next screen shot full size, and check out the 55 frames a second. Actually - there it is on the bottom right, and it's visible without going into full size.


The first time through I was debating whether to take a screenshot - but the second time I went for it. Nice colors.



There are some interesting weapons in this game. The image above shows my second rifle, a scar, with reflex scope, in full auto mode - the ammo is 4mm. My first rifle is a grendel, set up as single shot in sniper mode with full scope, which you find for the first time in this map. The scar did a good job at headshots, but the grendel with the heavier ammo doesn't require an exact head shot to make a kill. You can tell the difference. As soon as I got it I converted my former scar sniper to my full auto backup rifle, ditching the scope for the red dot sight as shown above.


This next shot at 36 fps, shows a typhoon, which carries about 1500 rounds - notice that I still have 1000 left. It takes special ammo which you find from time to time. The rounds come out so fast that it makes a high-pitched whine - it has 10 barrels that all fire at once, with 75 rounds per barrel. I didn't pay attention to the size of the rounds - I imagine they are smaller than 4mm - maybe even pellet size - but I should verify that.


You first see the typhoon at the dam - one of the soldiers is carrying it. It is considered a very special rifle.



The next time I pick up a typhoon, I will hit X for weapon adjustment, and it will tell me the ammo type.

WILL TYPHOON TAKE OUT A HEAVY?
A typhoon will cut something up pretty bad. You can put a full scope on it, but it kicks pretty hard - not really practical at distance. I don't know how it would do on a very heavy alien that comes a little later in the game. He is a big guy and shoots a mortar. He is super heavily armored. I usually turn invisible and leave when he is around.

But this play-through I'm going to try to kill him to see what rifle and what ammo it takes. (There is one point where you have to kill one so Psycho can land - but I happened to be carrying a 50 caliber at a time from a sentry position. Usually I don't have one of those. )

The typhoon allows single shot mode where it just spit out 10 rounds at a time. But those 10 don't cut up an enemy like I thought they would. The soldier dropped down a bit, then recovered and got away. On full auto that doesn't happen, but you spit through 150 to 200 rounds before you know it.

Once I saw that single shot mode wasn't that deadly, I began to question whether I was that interested in the weapon. You can go through ammo pretty fast. Once you run out of bullets, if you don't find special ammo for a while, you are without a close-in weapon, unless you make changes to your sniper rifle. But I like to have two rifles at all times - sniper, and walking around second weapon full-auto with red dot.


Another view of the dam. I really like the water effects and the terrific reflections. Just as pretty as Far Cry 3.



The dam from yet another angle. I suppose I should pick out the best screen - but I love them all!




Did you get enough photos of the dam - you didn't? Okay, if you insist, here's one more!



This is the last one - I promise. Here's a full view from up high, and I'm carrying the wonderful bow.


If you didn't notice, my frame rate was in the mid to high 30s on all those shots. On the last shot I had fraps showing on the top right, but most of the time I had the fraps fps counter on bottom right.

That mid to high 30s range is perfectly acceptable for me.

Sam I recall you mentioning recently that you didn't mind 30 fps either. You had one title that played at that level, but occasional dips to 18 or 25 depending on the action.

==========================================

Sorry guys, no more photos of the dam.

That doesn't mean I've run out of screenshots. But it does mean that I have run out of fraps screenshots. Why no more fraps?

Because the game went entirely buggy when I had fraps running, and recovered when I stopped using fraps. I am 80% sure it was the fraps doing it. Here are two examples of what I mean by buggy.

#1 When I got killed, I didn't respawn at the last checkpoint, I respawned one or two checkpoints back. I know I wanted to replay the game, but that got to be ridiculous - I was almost sent all the way back to the beginning. I thought maybe Crysis was doing it to me, knowing it was a replay, and expecting me to not ever get killed. I almost considered purging the cache, and re-downloading the game from Origin. But I took fraps off, and the game started to behave.

#2 At first I didn't think it was fraps. So I put fraps back on. Next thing I know, Psycho can't get through a large automatic open door - his character does a repeat walking animation, then pop, he's through and on the other side of the room past the opening. But I can't get through it. I can't throw anything through it. I quit the game, and suddenly I respawned 2 checkpoints back.

I began to wonder if it was fraps, and took fraps off. The game behaved perfectly after that. I am afraid of fraps - I don't want to replay everything quite so often.

Well, on second thought, I wouldn't mind replaying the whole chinatown again. This next replay I would get near one of those red glowing things, and then blow all the lizards away with their own rifle with never-ending ammo courtesy of the alien power source.

Maybe I should give fraps one more try tonight, and report back what happens.

Rich

 

Interesting. I never had a problem with Fraps. Though I did have a problem with Evga Precision's OSD :S It has been a while though And I've never run crossfire/sli. Too rich for my blood I guess lol.

 

If it's a Saitek Eclipse II Rich it can be blue, red or purple - I used red most of the time when I had mine
I have never once seen a problem like that with a game with fraps running. I can't even fathom how it can possibly happen...

Edit: Well, just placed the order for the GTX970. Let's see how this turns out
The thought has crossed my mind, if the new card is successful, I will probably experiment with SLI in the near future since the cards are relatively inexpensive and have such a low TDP.

 

The GTX900 series is undeniably amazing. Very interested in a single GTX970 or a pair of 960s. Another 760 OC 4GB as a twin to mine also wouldn't be the most terrible idea. It's already a pretty beefy video card in its own right.

 

Well mine's been dispatched now, so I'll let you know how I get on hopefully Thursday night. It seems a shame to return a card as powerful as the 290X with no real hardware defect but I don't really have much of a choice. The retailer have kindly agreed to extend the 14 day 'unwanted item' period for non-faulty items a few extra days and granted an RMA for the card after explaining what the issue was and that it took considerable time to properly diagnose, on the condition that I bought the new card from them as well. Seems fair to me!

 

Rich, I want new RAM because it's time for some higher speed RAM and the Intel will benefit from it much more than the AMD. I assure you, I WILL be upgrading to Intel quite soon. 16GB because I happen to use some things that take a lot of RAM, and multitask a lot, so have reached some 6-7GB of usage before. Something over 8GB would give me much more breathing room

 

http://www.pcgamer.com/revisiting-crysiss-amazing-fps-sandbox-how-the-series-lost-its-way/#page-1

Sums up what I think.

 

From what I've seen, this looks pretty accurate, but you're in a far better position to judge than me. I had no idea the physics had been dumbed down so much from the first title, some may call it a gimmick but IMO that's part of what made the original game interesting.

 

Do you think they made the box big enough?

 

GTX970 installed, had a few interesting 'display driver has stopped responding and recovered' issues when playing with the control panel, but it seems stable in-game, and so far so good at the desktop. As soon as the drivers were installed, off it went. I didn't even need to power-cycle the monitor for it to come up at 60Hz the correct resolution. I had to disable the resolution scaling feature to avoid a strange wrap-around issue, but once that was done it seems to behave well enough. Time will tell of course, but so far so good. It's not exactly a quiet card and I think the noise level could be a little better for a 145W card, but it's still streets ahead of the 290X in that regard. Performance-wise the old adage about nvidia hardware seems true, in real-world terms it has similar performance to the 290X but seems to suffer sudden bursts in demand much more noticeably than the Radeon, it doesn't have quite the, I suppose 'torque' is the only analogy I can think of - those big explosions that brought the 290X down from say 55fps to 40, would bring the GTX970 down from 50 to 22-23. It's only instantaneous, but it's worth noting I think.

On the whole although it's a slightly slower card, if it handles 4K properly, I'm sold on it.
At the moment though it's not fully stable yet, occasionally will reboot the PC when opening video files (that aren't GPU accelerated) - I'll work on that...

Update: GTX970 would appear to be DOA - constant VIDEO_TDR_ERROR blue screens when in the desktop, just not in game. Tried a clean reformat of windows and received the same BSOD almost immediately once the driver was installed. Might return this one as well, but not sure what I'd replace it with.

 

UPDATE: FRAPS WORKS FINE

Me neither.

You guys, Kevin and Sam, are 100% correct. I am so glad I gave fraps one more try, because it wasn't fraps at all.

I did not have those two bizarre problems this time (the game must not have loaded incorrectly I suppose) and it is so much nicer to hit the F12 key - the steam key - and get the screenshots, with no slice of desktop, and with the small yellow fraps framerate lower right corner. It's so easy in fact, that I have to fight the impulse to spam screenshots - there are so many Kodak moments in the game.


====================

MISSED OPPORTUNITIES
After playing through - to the end again - skipping only the dull beginning, I am even further convinced that Crytek had a total winner on their hands, if they had used a different beginning, and augmented a few areas very slightly.

When I speak of augmenting, I'm talking about the area where you get to drive a tank - that's super fun - but there are almost no enemies to fight.

I am also talking about the area where you are in a dune buggy on the way to rescue Claire, which is an amazing spectacle of alien warships vs Cell helicopters, and you can just stop and get out of the vehicle, and watch the show - it repeats about every 4 minutes! That's all it is - a show - not a single one of those alien fighters is targeting you, (although when you first get in the dune buggy things crash around you, so you think you're being targeted, but you aren't.)

As you watch the alien overhead show - and yes I do have the screenshots - you are in a shallow watery area that is fun to barrel through for a minute or two - but just too much water flying around, too noisy, and no jumps, and nothing shooting at you to add a little spice - not an enemy in sight.

But it's about a 3 acre wet playground with old apartment buildings, some of the leaning at crazy angles, and the water reflections are incredible. It's all well-lit, but the sky is sort of a dark hue, so the lighting is subdued, the better I supposed to bring out the fiery red thrusters of the alien fighters. When they reel around just over head - maybe 100-200 feet up, and take aim at a nearby building top - that is quite lovely to watch.

Stick around - the show repeats in about four minutes.


TAKE YOUR TIME - THE GAME DOESN'T REALLY CARE
All this is going on when I promised Claire that I would be there in 5 minutes to rescue her. Time has no meaning in this game. In one section they said that the doomsday ray would commence in 15 minutes, but 45 minutes later as I was plodding slowly through on foot (if you jump in a vehicle you lose the heavy sentry machine gun you have taken from its mount) - the doomsday ray had still not occurred of course. So when I promised Claire to be there in 5 minutes, but actually went back to get my sentry 50 caliber, and hoofed it on foot that 800 meters, Claire was not in any more danger than if I had sped over there post haste. LOL


JEFF'S LINK
http://www.pcgamer.com/revisiting-crysiss-amazing-fps-sandbox-how-the-series-lost-its-way/#page-1

That was a terrific link Jeff - how crysis lost its way. Good read. I agree.

I actually liked Crysis 2 quite a bit - there was tremendous variety. And the graphics with Directx 10 (or was it 11) were amazing.

And one thing I like about Crysis 3 is the graphics - which are even more amazing.


STRUCTURES ARE NOT DESTRUCTIBLE - BUT EVERYTHING IS MOVING!
In the read above, with Jeff's link, the very astute author mentions that the structures are solid, not destructible. He's quite right. But I see something here in Crysis 3 that I don't think I saw before in 1 and 2. What takes a huge amount of cpu power, is the fact that the large grasses, which are everywhere, are waving in the wind, at varying speeds as gusts blow through - constantly waving, moving - and combine that with the ripples in the water - ripples you generate when you walk - you have a very dynamic, realistic-looking environment that is enthralling and very captivating.

At one point early right after the dull opening, if I stand in one spot, and slowly pivot around, I can see my cpu usage climb dramatically and framerates drop, when I rotate to gaze at the grasses near me in constant waving motion.

But no question about it, lost opportunities are everywhere. The author of the article talks about one area that is mostly shallow water, with an occasional hill. He's either talking about the one I just described in the dune buggy with the alien fighter light show overhead, or the area with the APC (amphibious personnel carrier) tank vehicle.

THERE DEFINITELY IS OPPORTUNITY FOR VARYING YOUR PLAY-THROUGH
While I agree with the main gist of the article, there definitely is quite a bit of opportunity to "play it your way" still left in Crysis 3.

For example, I am going to go back, maybe tonight, to that last main tank area, to see if I can get the tank past one point with poisoned water where I was killed. I was able to get past on foot, using a narrow rocky area on the right - I think a tank would make it. I actually didn't care about going on foot, because I wanted to carry the heavy 50 caliber sentry gun with me. But tonight I'll forget about the sentry gun, and see if I can stay with the tank. If I can drive the tank past that point, that will significantly increase the opportunity for tank engagements.

There is a second tank area, that I played on foot the first time through the game. In a large watery area, you see the unforgettable top of the Statue of Liberty. Strewn around are many APCs destroyed, and maybe burning. However closer to the statue, one of them is still alive and operable. Just make sure that you don't have your situational visor activated, or that you aren't holding a sentry weapon or an alien weapon, if you want the "Press E to use" choice to be available.

(The game uses E for cloak, W for armor. Those are good uses for those keys, since there is no lean. I like lean in some games, like Arma 3. But for Crysis 3 I switched armor to Caps Lock, and cloak to F. That frees up E for use, and Q for last weapon, my normal key assignments.)

"amphibious" Question for Cevat: do you know what the word means?
On my original playthrough, I found that the amphibious vehicle amazingly could not traverse an area of hip-deep water - it drowned!!!

Come on Yerli brothers. It's the exact same kind of real-life apc that is featured in Arma 3 - it even has the small propeller on the back - and in Arma you can run those in the ocean as long as it's not heavy surf. They are called amphibious for a reason. It's the same vehicle - at one point Claire says on the radio "The ceph disabled our APC."

But amazingly, this one cannot float!

I suppose they wanted to keep your on your toes, to avoid deeper water. But what would have been wrong with boating around for a bit? It's so laughable to have a game apc that can't float - I can overlook the fact that this puny dam in no way could generate 50 megawatts - but a non-floatable APC!!

So anyway, after drowning the good apc, I carried on with the rocket launcher, and got too close to the Pinger alien. On respawn I found that the apc would not let me in. So I had to kill those 3 pingers with rocket launchers which are spread around the map. That was tedious, and mega challenging.

However, the problem with the tank not letting me in, - while it may have been a game bug - like the open doorway I could not get through - it may have been something as simple as the fact that I was carrying a 50 caliber sentry gun, or maybe an alien gun, or maybe I had my situational visor activated. As I learned later, those will usually, but not always, block the "Press E to use" game hints.

I would call that unnecessary, since sometimes they DON'T block the "Press use key." But once you realize that might happen, it's no big deal. Similarly, there is an area on the final boss battle, where I can reload my 3 rocket launchers, but only if I drop my high-powered alien rifle which must be done to allow the "Press E to pick up JAW" to activate.

On the last play-through, near the Statue of Liberty, the apc DID let me in, and I carefully and successfully traversed a very shallow water section to get closer to the action. Then I used the APC's cannons against the 3 very dangerous huge pinger machines, when they turned their backs to me, otherwise keeping out of their way - they could easily take out my tank and in fact did on the first attempt. Fighting the pingers in the tank was certainly easier, and quite a pleasant change from sneaking around and using the rockets. It was a very cool change of pace.

As I write that paragraph above, I am reminded of the link that Jeff gave us, where the author mentions lack of variety. So my point is that maybe it's not quite so bad as the author implies - there ARE sections where you definitely can vary the play style.

Another example of that is my very much increased use of the bow as opposed to my first time through the game.

=========================

Sam, at first I didn't see that you had the two boxes side by side - yes Nvidia definitely went for a Big Introduction with that packaging!

DDP didn't think it was large enough, since in Canada, they often have to huddle in very large boxes, such as the kind that appliances come in, in order to help manage the sub-zero temps - so they like as much cardboard as they can get their hands on. ​

So Jeff, 16 gigs of memory for the new build - you've seen usage close to 8 and you want plenty of room to spare. That's probably a good philosophy, since memory is reasonably cheap. But more memory - harder to overclock - isn't that true? However, the Haswell's are already clocked pretty high, I recall.

Oh, I see your update, Sam. That's a shame about the GTX970. However, since that retailer is so reasonable - maybe check with them to see if they suspect it's just a bad card, and swap out for another.

Rich

 

We recycle all those things also. The difference is we don't try to use them as extra insulation for our homes.

===========================

Sam, why don't you just drop the idea of an all-everything PC?

You had mentioned that with the R290X, the dropouts didn't occur in-game - just at idle. And you explained why idle is a special challenge, and why at one point, regarding some older cards, they kept the cards running at a 100 watt pull, for stability.

Like myself you have two computers. I know you LOVE the idea of every-day computing on an HD screen. I believe you ditched your 30" dell, or did a trade-in, so it's not like you have an extra HD monitor lying around. But that is easily remedied.

You quite enjoy the extra immersiveness of the 4k for gaming - and you quite love it also for the day to day extra desktop real estate.

Except that you can't find an everyday desktop gpu that works reliably.

So my suggestion is - stop trying to combine gaming with day to day. Drop the day to day 4k. Use your other computer for that. Pick up the most reliable gpu for 4k gaming!

Rich

 

Glad you discovered Fraps wasn't to blame. So I continue to speak highly of it

DDP, and Rich, you two crack me up LOL!

 

Rich - not really appropriate. In both cases, the main issue is with the desktop, not with gaming. I concede that the HD6970 handles things fine at the desktop (largely) but doesn't have the grunt for 4K gaming, but really my desk setup at home doesn't cater well to gaming on a secondary smaller display - I've done it on numerous occasions when I needed to play Left 4 Dead 2 with a skype call up back at the time my PC wouldn't run skype until it was reformatted, but it involves sitting at a rather unpleasant angle, it's not something I'd want to do full time.
As far as just using 4K for gaming and other monitors for the desktop goes - 4K is less important to games than the desktop - desktop usage is really why I bought the display in the first place, so I don't want to surrender that - besides, it's not as if the 290X was stable in games either - it was just more stable than the desktop...

I've tried this new reformat with the card plugged into the other rails on the PSU (Graphics 3 & 4 rather than 1 & 2 as before - on the ZM850-HP 3 & 4 are only 6-pins so this is only something I can do with the GTX970) just in case there's any issue with the 6-year old PSU. If the system is stable with the card plugged into those connectors it might be time to upgrade the PSU.

 

Rich, APC stands for Armored Personnel Carrier. Whether or not it is amphibious is entirely up to which model it is and how it's equipped. Our current frontline APC, the M2/M3 Bradley, was designed to be amphibious from the get-go. But with its current depleted uranium and ERA armor package, it's not amphibious at all. Simply too heavy. They don't even bother to outfit them with their original amphibious gear anymore.

Rich, the problem with the later Crysis games is a very complex one. It has to do with everything from physics implementation to level design, to art direction. They simply are not as good of games, period. Are they terrible? No. They're great and I particularly liked Crysis 2. But Crysis 1 completely revolutionized the FPS genre in many ways that the later games did not. The later games also completely ignored or poorly implemented many things that Crysis did spectacularly. Neither Crysis 2 nor 3 are as well designed as Crysis 1 by a longshot. One of the biggest problems is that the later games are HEAVILY scripted. Crysis 2 and 3 put you in a lush, but limited, hallway and throw wave after wave of enemies at you until you either win or die. Crysis 1 in particular basically threw you in a sandbox and let you work out your own way to the other side. They still allow you to vary your play style, but the variation that article mentions takes place on a much larger scale. Crysis' levels were very reactive to the players actions in ways that the later games simply miss.

 

Sam, Gigabyte currently produce the best Nvidia cards by miles. With the Windforce coolers they are dead quiet too. Rarely ever hear my video card.