The Official Graphics Card and PC gaming Thread

So do I

 

The latter isn't really true, but if you do underspend, look what happens
The Dell UP3214Q is a wonderful panel that easily eclipses the quality of all the Ultrasharps I've owned before, but the MST hub is the achilles heel - through no real fault of the monitor but graphics driver problems in dealing with a tiled display. The cheapest 4K monitors are less than the proper 27" 2560x1440 displays, but being TN panels I avoided them. The 40" Philips (VA) I tried (at less than half the price) was no real better for viewing angles than a TN and came with a whole host of other issues. The only other display I have my eyes on is the Samsung U32D97KQSR which is PLS rather than VA so should be better, but the almost non-existent press about it does have me concerned given its price tag is similar to that of the Dell. I'm hoping against hope that Dell finally see fit to introduce a high-end 4K monitor with SST in this winter's hardware refresh, I'll be all over that, even if it carries the same $1700 price tag the UP3214Q once did.

As for the hardware demands, I've been running 4K since December 2013 - until Q4 2014 I was running a single HD6970 the vast majority of the time as crossfire and eyefinity were as reliable together as you might expect from AMD. Since then I've been running a single GTX970, not exactly very auspicious hardware. Let's not forget my near-heroic i5 750 which celebrated its fifth birthday in February, still running 35% above its stock clock speed, having been gradually dialed back from the original 54% since around 2-3 years after purchase. At £500 all-in for the CPU, board, 12GB of RAM and the cooler, over the course of 5 years that is one of the best investments I've ever made.

The £150 Zalman ZM850-HP PSU seemed a bit of an expensive punt at the time a bit over 6 years ago but that's been similarly successful. Unlike the i5, however, its days are numbered as having established it'll only work with the GTX970 on the 6+6 rails and not the 6+8 (otherwise several hard locks and BSODs a day) it's clear that one of its rails isn't fully in spec. Of course having used AMDs with it until recently which are less picky over PCIe and 12V rail conditions, that could well have been the case with it since day 1, but I've decided that come my next upgrade over the 970, I'll go with a newer unit to be sure, in order that a newer generation dual-GPU setup won't cause any undue stress. What that new setup will be is likely to depend on what AMD release in June. If the 390X lives up to rumours, then I imagine I'll probably end up getting one or two of those, and pray that a year on, they will have fixed their dreadful MST support.

 

I understand. But price isn't the only factor. But it kind of is. In order to run at super resolutions, one requires GPU horsepower, as well as CPU to drive it all. And those GPU's aren't cheap Essentially, I like to spend between 200 - $300 on a GPU upgrade. I've never spent more than that. And when I bought my current 3D display, most of the 4K monitors I was looking at, seemed to be limited to 30Hz at maximum resolution.
Plus I was kind of hoping for a minimum of 4K/60Hz AND passive 3D. I believe I stumbled on one, but otherwise they are a rare if not non existent breed.
I fear 3D may be once again dying out. Probably because they're focusing on displays that don't require glasses. I once read they are highly expensive, and don't quite compare to the current offerings though So it may be a decade or longer before something like that becomes affordable to me. Lest I advance with my company

 

That's what I assumed you were getting at - I won't pretend it's cheap but as said above, the relatively modest GTX970 can handle quite a lot at 4K. It won't do A-tier titles with AA but no graphics solution I've owned has ever really achieved that with the display sizes I used, whether it was my X1900XT at 1920x1200, my HD3870s then HD4870s then HD4870X2s, then HD6970s at 2560x1600 - games move on - For the sort of games I play nowadays (i.e. not many sadly!) I'm happy to compromise performance/detail in top titles to make the most (i.e. 4K) of the games that will still run fine at that res, that I play more often. If GTA5 is your main game and it turns out to be mega-demanding though, then I can understand 4K being a bit of a daunting prospect

Unfortunately while 3D is good for a laugh I can't see it ever becoming fully commonplace because it just isn't an experience you can view all day long every day like normal displays are. If anything, I wouldn't be surprised if eventually VR stuff like the Oculus Rift takes over from 3D...

 

3D seems to draw my attention more so. As does 120Hz+ displays. The realism is GORGEOUS. I can't believe more people haven't signed on lol.
Oculus Rift, yeah... that's about the next step I expect they'll take.

 

120Hz meaning TN panels and limited to 1920x1080 resolution is what stopped me going anywhere near it, never mind the graphical requirement and the fact that quite a few game engines (Unreal for example) don't support it.
The IPS 120Hz 2560x1440 display Asus have just released is interesting, but I'd still want there to be versions from companies other than Asus before I bought one, plus I'm on 4K now, 120Hz ain't happening, the display interfaces don't even support it

 

Mmmm minor glitch has shown up. Small section of the upper right screen has a weird horizontal flickering stripe maybe 30 pixels tall by 300-400 wide. It wasn't present when I got the monitor and was only visible for a few hours last night before fading out. Checking cables and switching sources had no effect. Restarting the monitor however, fixed it. This monitor does have a 3 year mfg warranty, so I have till roughly 2017 to bother Dell for a return. I'll wait and see. Right now, it's gone. Also, it wasn't visible at all on a moving or solidly colored background, only when there were multiple colors to show the flickering effectively. So gaming, movies, or browsing webpages it generally wasn't an issue, but sitting on my desktop it was clearly visible. Will keep my eye on it. If it's isolated to that spot and never gets worse or more frequent, I don't care. It's really not worth the hassle to replace. If it progresses to other issues, I'm bugging Dell for the warranty. As of right now it's a distraction more in the order of a pixel that gets stuck once in a while rather than a major problem.

Otherwise starting to really appreciate the desktop real-estate gained by the resolution bump. Multiple browser pages and apps on a single monitor lol. The difference in some 3D games is a bit less than I'd hoped, but a great many really shine. 3D RTS games and flight sims are exquisite at the new resolution. Also, any game with high resolution texture mods. A lot of stuff gets a bit bland at high resolution, but anything with a massive amount of detail gets transformed. I suspect newer games with higher resolution textures and more complex geometry will likewise benefit.

Also, Call of Duty 2 still astounds. Absolutely awe-inspiring game that. I have yet to grow bored. Truly legendary design and execution. 2560 x 1440 with 8xAA blasting out on a 665W 5.1 system with all the bells and whistles. It's a thing of beauty.

My setup is pretty beast

 

Man o man! I knew Jeff would go high def - I just knew it!

But I was still surprised anyways!!

What are you up to, Sam, a 40" 4k - so you can lean back like Jeff when he had his TV on his table? What happened to that TV?

So Jeff, you're saying that COD2 supports 2560x1440? I would not have guessed that. I'm trying to think of the last time I played that game. It was the time, the first time, that I realized that one of my Russian comrades was a lady. I think I made a comment here on the forum - a different thread at that time - and Sam said "Oh yeah, you never knew that?"

I DO think that in order to notice that, I was on the 30" Dell - yes likely that is true. Probably right after I got the Dell, still running on the AGP 3850 graphics card in the pentium 4 4ghz rig. That is about the time that I also ran the original Far Cry again, at 2560x1600, and noticed how exquisitely beautiful all the parrots were, something I had never noticed on my 17" CRT the first time I went through Far Cry.

So Jeff, you're noticing some particularly enjoyable graphics, eh! Hahaha! I knew it was just a question of time - your hardware obviously outpowered your 1080p display! And with Sam leaping into 4k, high def 1600p or 144op doesn't seem so "fringe" anymore.

And now here is Kevin, and the GTAV launch! I was about to ask Jeff if I should bother getting back into Assassins Creed Unity or not. You live the game, like Kevin is about to live New York City again.

I briefly visited early 1700s Paris again - I'm 4% of the way through the game. But I had forgotten everything - I didn't even know how to heal myself. I would need a restart.

I got so involved in beating that Ardennes Assault DLC I even put off finishing Far Cry 4. But finally I got my fill of it. My save game system got me through - and not only got me through - but allowed me to replay the most fun bits.

The game basically has no save system at all. In the Ardennes Assault folder, which you find in steam, they are only using folder 33, and folder 33 may have save 4, save 3, save 2, save 1 and save 0. But they are only using the highest one, save 4 in this example. I know because I deleted the other saves, in the game folder, and the game didn't care. But before I deleted them, when you go to the Ardennes Assault campaign, it shows your last save, and asks if you want to load it. Knowing that there were 3 saves below it, save 3, save 2 etc. I one time chose to delete the save it was showing, thinking "well they'll let me start at save 3 I guess."

NOT AT ALL!

When I deleted that save, save 4, the only option was

RESTART THE WHOLE FRIGGIN CAMPAIGN!

I closed the game and thought to myself, "Oh no - I have to go back and do those 6 missions again, what have I done!"

Fortunately that was not true - I slipped in my Ardennes Assault folder in place of theirs, and when I came back to the campaign, it allowed me to go right in where I wanted to go. Whew! Close call!

No wonder that one player that I posted about, a month ago, was so livid with rage, having restarted the campaign 5 times trying to beat the DLC, not realizing that he had to take charge of the save feature, since the devs decided not to be bothered with creating one.

Actually their philosophy was something like "Be careful - your decisions have consequences. You could end up losing your entire company, and having only the other two companies to complete the mission with."

I saw that and I thought to myself: "Screw that. This is a game. Not real life. With my own save system in place, I will always be able to re-do any major mistake I make. I will not lose a company unless I want to lose a company."

LOL

Anyway, there were some bits that were intensely enjoyable. And there were some cheats I accidentally learned that added to my game-playing enjoyment.

For example, I realized that they added 4 manpower points to my total, right after I did a save and quit. They penalized me for creating a save point.

That meant I could only build one mobile mortar (a mortar built on a Stuart light tank base, that can blow up a 4-man infantry squad 20 meters out, or deal heavy damage to a tank 120 meters out, or even further up to about 150 meters if you order up the artillery barrage option) when I had intended to build two of them, at 10 manpower points each. I had found out that they are, hands down, the best anti-infantry and anti-vehicle weapon in the game, besides the little AT cannons.

Suddenly with their 4-point penalty, I was over 80 points and could only build one mobile mortar. WTF!!

But then a short time after that happened, I accidentally realized that by de-crewing a tank (your crew goes to work on repairing the vehicle which is a nice touch) your manpower points for that tank are deducted while the crew is out of the vehicle. That makes sense - if the crew with their light smgs are killed - you have NO tank.

So when I realized that - what did I do? They have their evil little ways, like tacking on points for my creating a save point, and I have my own evil ways - de-crewing all my vehicles and going way over my manpower limits, until I am ready to pull out.

I ordered tanks, de-crewed them, then ordered more tanks. One one of my maps, it shows me with manpower of 150/100. I am 50 points over the max allowable manpower. Just before I re-crewed my vehicles, if I had any points left below 100, I ordered a 4-man support crew at a cost of 4 points.

But that means I can't lose men willy-nilly. If a squad of mine is reduced, standing right next to the half-track, I can't rebuild that lost squad member because I'm way over my limit. But with the right number of Anti-tank cannons, two mobile mortars built on a light stuart tank base, one 10-point sherman for good measure, and a 16-point priest mobile howitzer on a sherman base, just to see what good it was, I had a good mix of mechanized, where I shouldn't be taking a heavy manpower loss if I set up my defenses properly.

This was the beauty of the save system- restart from having built the team, then with the counter attack only 5 minutes away, use the mini-map to launch 3 of the vehicles, the two mobile mortars and the mobile howitzer, rolling right through the capture point, ignoring enemy fire, and across the bridge and 100 yards to the west along the river bank - out of fog of war range of the enemy AT cannon. Then tell the Sherman and the half-track to follow closely behind and take the capture point on this side of the bridge, where they will make short work of the machine gun defenses.

Then I grab all the rest of the guys, with the 3 AT cannons, and post them 20 meters short of the capture point that the sherman and half-track are working.

Then I take my attention to the other side of the river, having told my Major to order an aerial recon, so I can cut through the fog of war, and see where that very dangerous enemy AT cannon is. I then physically select one of the mobile mortars, or just select its icon up on the top right of my screen, and his options open up, allowing me to choose an artillery barrage targeted around that enemy AT cannon. My mobile mortar will move closer to do the barrage, but he'll still be out of fog of war range of the AT cannon. The other mobile mortar rains down artillery barrage death on the enemy mortar crew who are intentionally trying to damage the bridge.

Anyway, the save system allows you to figure out these strategies - my Sherman was destroyed about 20 times trying to invade the hostile area on the other side of the bridge, and kill the AT cannon crew, kill the mortar crew, kill everybody else, before I finally got smart and came up with this brilliant strategy, using the Major, using the artillery barrage attribute of the mobile mortars, getting them out of harms way.

What if I had to start, and rebuild the entire gang, each time I had a failure.

BORRRRRRRING!!!

The game can be made to be a lot of fun and there is good replay value in some of it - provided you create your own save system.


But when I finally got back to fps, that was great.

I finished Far Cry 4 which was beyond awesome, and then I came back to Arma 3, with my own save system, and now I am back handling the counter-attack in the Combined Arms showcase, using one of 4 weapons: #1 the enemy Katiba 6.5, #2 the friendly MX 6.5, #3. the friendly LMG MX-SW 6.5 with 100 round belt clip - a big square clip with 100 rounds inside (it will also take the standard 30 round clips), or the enemy 7.6 zephyr LMG with 150 round belts, which is the most powerful weapon of all in this showcase, where advanced optics (like the dms sniper scope which is wonderful with the MX SW on the Hogs Cove user-created mission) aren't available.

But my save system works in Arma 3, only because I won't upgrade.

They issue a new patch every month, and it wipes out your saves, and some of the player-created scenarios will no longer work properly. So I tell steam to update only upon launch, and I never play until I go offline, and disconnect my Ethernet cable to be sure.

I am finally learning.

You see, Kevin, like you, I don't play multiplayer any more. The idea was to try to get the gaming to be a tad bit less addictive. It didn't completely work, because I can play those counter-attacks for hours. They never come at you the same way - the AI is quite intelligent and driven by probabilities, not by set routines. So one time you get an easy win, the next time they murder you. It's a combat simulator designed to have heightened realism. Jeff is the one to corroborate that.

Great game.

Far Cry 4 was also so awesome. Now you can be killed not only by snakes, and by tigers, but also by eagles - if you hear a screech you better look up, and if you see the eagle descending toward you, don't wait until the last second to start shooting. You will get the unwelcome surprise that the animation takes over and the last 10 feet are a video of you becoming eagle food.

After a while I started scanning the skies a lot, and also standing near trees, etc.

And in this game you can fly around in a gyro-copter. The map is ignormous!! Giganteric!

So pretty soon I'll post some screenshots and pick and choose among hundreds.

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

My question for you, Jeff - now that I have wandered around a bit and heard a lot of french being spoken, of which I understand only the tiniest bit from high school - does Unity offer me a lot in exchange for immersing myself in that world?

The American Revolution, the half-Indian assassin and his black mentor, AC3, and then its pirate-based sequel AC4 and all the accompanying DLCs were - just incredibly awesome.

Is this the same? So far it seems the answer is no. Is it possible that in AC3 and AC4 I already enjoyed the best bits? Is this Unity more for somebody who is a die-hard AC enthusiast, like Kevin is about GTA and/or somebody who maybe cares about the French Revolution? Vive Le France!

Rich

 

Yep, one of us! one of us!
As I expected, you'll get used to liking having more desktop real estate - it's very powerful tool if you work with large documents, particularly spreadsheets.
Games of that era quite often supported 2560x1440 or 2560x1600 actually Rich, it wasn't all that rare. Even the games that didn't natively support it could often just have their config files edited to produce it. By the time 2560x1600 monitors were out in force, support for it was common to all except naff console ports.

The 40" Philips is back in its box downstairs - compared to the 32" Dell it's no contest. After having used high-quality Dell screens for nearly 9 years, going back to low-quality narrow viewing angles, low colour gamut and high response times is just not something I can really put up with knowing what monitor I did have, so I continue to wait for an SST version of the UP3214Q I have now.

 

I always figured I'd end up with one of these panels. They're better priced for what you get, and a bit less demanding for gaming than full-tilt 1600p. The quality and pixel pitch are right up there with $1200 panels from a few years ago. Can't say I'm disappointed.

Rich, yep the large majority of games after about 2001 or 2002 have pretty good resolution support. A great many even support surround resolutions ala AMD Eyefinity or Nvidia SurroundVision without any special tweaking. Many that don't are as simple as editing a text file. Call of Duty 2 automatically detects my resolution as well as doing proper Hor+ widescreen ie it stretches the sides instead of compressing the top and bottom. Many older PC games are much more solid mechanically than new ones in that regard.

As far as AC Unity is concerned I can't really say. General consensus seems to be that the overall franchise quality is there, but that Unity is lacking in content, innovation, and story. The devs basically spent too much time on the pretty graphics and too little on content. So it's still a proper Assassin's Creed game, but it's too much of the same from previous installments. AC3 and 4 were breaths of fresh air after the rapid-fire Ezio trilogy that started with AC2. Unity is very generic feeling compared to the series' post-AC2 installments. In a nutshell, AC is known for each game being plainly better than the last. Unity is the first release where that isn't so certain.

 

The 60GB behemoth of GTA5 is downloaded. Steam only seems to think 31GB of actual network traffic was required to download it so the compression must be fairly good, but my connection to the download servers was pretty heavily throttled somewhere so it still took about 5 hours to download. Now that it's finished downloading, the game also needs installing (unusual for steam titles, but not unheard of) which is likely to take about an hour, on a 2TB caviar black - so double that for a green, add maybe 20-40% for a normal gaming disk, probably third it for an SSD. At 85% CPU however I suspect slower CPUs might also slow down the install process, especially for SSD users.
The day 1 patch is around 250MB as the game was unplayable on immediate release for almost all users. Thankfully they spotted that one fairly quickly, though the mind boggles at how such glaring bugs aren't spotted in beta (forgot to allow special characters in your windows username!)

 

31GB? That's 4 Dual layer dvds :S Or two double sided dual layers. Think they've embraced blu-ray enough to release it on a single BD-Rom disc? I suppose I'll find out. I'm likely purchasing it today. Against my better judgement now. It appears I'm moving in a few months, and need to save save save LOL! $60 isn't too bad though. And I can raise the funds via multiple means.
31GB would take me nearly a day to download. I'm not prepared to do that At least after I've moved, I should see a minimum of 6X my current bandwidth.

 

The data on the discs is not compressed to that extent (and Steam may also not be reporting the data transferred accurately as it seemed to me like a bit more than that was transferred) - the full disc version is 7 dual-layer DVDs I believe.

 

Good lord!!! I would think most computers come with a BD-Rom drive by now!

 

No, they don't
Very few people have use for blu-ray discs in their PCs. I certainly don't own one - their size is actually still rather small for external media storage nowadays when compared to the cost of 3-6TB mechanical disks, or 32GB USB sticks which are considerably easier to use, so it's all down to TV/movie content - people still tend not to play those on their PCs but rather their TVs, so probably with either a bluray player, PS3, or not even use blurays at all (e.g. Netflix with Smart TV and so on).

I quickly tested the game in the intro sequence - set the vast majority of the settings to high, left a few of the memory intensive features (distance anti-aliasing, MSAA) low or off, and ran everything up to, but not over the 3.5GB mark and I get around 26-32fps. It's not all that much fun to play at that frame rate, but there are plenty of other settings I can tweak down. For 3840x2160 on a GTX970 that's not too bad.

 

Uh oh.... I have a bad feeling about this Should be interesting. I'm ready for the investment lol

Sam, no BD-Rom? Wow... This guy is old school! lol This coming from a guy with a 5yr old GPU :S

 

BD is the oldskool technology - optical media is really rather an anachronism these days...

 

You'll get no argument from me there. Fact is, I hate optical discs. But it hasn't been phased out just yet Get more than the average consumer on super high speed internet, we probably will see an era without optical media.

 

If I had 1 or 2Mbps internet like some people I still know not far away from me, then I absolutely would be using optical media all the time. As it stands though, 60Mbps or so (when not congested) kind of negates the need for it.

High-detail GTA5 benchmark: (This picture may take a while to show up as the site is being hammered at the moment, likely due to people looking at this benchmark!
This is with texture settings reduced low enough to allow 2GB cards to run well under the limit.
At those settings I would expect a GTX570 to run around 35/40fps.

 

Yeah, that site is lagging a bit. Thanks for the info! I should have expected a speedy benchmark lol