The Official Graphics Card and PC gaming Thread

Oh yeah!!! Starting the install process shortly A big THANK YOU to the developers for finally getting it released on PC! When it's worth it, I buy it!!!

 

As did I, just on steam

 

You're lucky! I have the maximum in my area, which is roughly 500kB/s

100X the old dialup. I couldn't imagine going back now LOL!

 

They did open preloading a week or so early, I might point out...

 

Holy moly! 7 Discs = far too much clutter LOL! Installing on my SSD, against my better judgement. It'll leave it a mere 80-ish Gigabytes. It would have been less space on my Black WD drive though. And why not run it on the SSD. Theoretically, it'll run smoother. But I have had some strange problems running IV. And it seems to use more GPU than CPU now, on the 4th one.

About 7 minutes on disc 1. Only one gripe so far. Debris on my disc! God I hate Optical media LOL!

Ugh! Halfway through the install, and time for work. Suppose it's just as well. I have shows airing tonight. And much to do this week. Probably won't be able to REALLY play it til this weekend.

 

Seems the game is pretty well optimized and we should all have a fair shot at finding acceptable settings on our given systems. The GTX970 numbers I'm seeing indicate native res shouldn't pose a major problem for me. Intend to buy it on Steam come the first occurence of any kind of discount or sale.

Taking a nap before heading to work myself! lol

 

So far, I'm a bit irritated. I installed all of the discs now, but now it's downloading the remaining 5GB. That takes me nearly 3hrs damn it! LOL! Well, at least the install doesn't seem to be goofy in any other way so far. GTA IV is a joke to install. They really dropped the ball on that one.

 

Another one here for 60Mb internet. I also live in a very rural and technologically backwards area. Recently there has been a surge of new technology entering the area though, and my current connection was made available a few years ago. When I started paying for it, it was 8Mb, which quickly went to 18Mb, then 30Mb, all for the same price. Now, because there are only a few customers in my immediate neighborhood, I get the full 60Mb being allocated to my block with 30 only being the guaranteed minimum. Obviously if I have to share bandwidth with someone making a large download, I drop to 30Mb. But there are so few people in my area that actually task their network connection, I don't think I've actually seen that happen yet. I get a clean 60Mbps all the way through large Steam downloads. And my bill has DECREASED since I first subscribed to 8Mb. Interesting situation I find myself in.

I can force it to throttle though by logging into my neighbor's wireless(with his permission) and starting a full speed download on his connection. Then it throttles me to the minimum of 30Mb.Woulkd be interested in trying it with my other neighbor and seeing if I can get that 30Mb to falter...

My old service was stuck at 1.3Mb for the longest time, and had a small upgrade to 1.5Mb. It was only after I got frustrated and switched services that they improved their service. Now they offer 18Mb speeds, which is honestly enough for the large majority of people. If they had done that sooner, they'd still have me as a customer. As it stands, they were about 5 years too late, and 2 years too late for me. They lost a LOT of business in that time. No business can run properly on 1.5Mb if they intend to have any sort of real internet presence. And so PC gamer will tolerate that if they use Steam. They lost some BIG money to the competition.

My old ISP had the interesting feature of allocating bandwidth per-PC though. All the computers and devices in my house could max the bandwidth individually. So ideally, I could get about 5-8Mbps coming into my house through their connection. Curious if I could have exploited that with dual LAN ports. As it stands, my current motherboard CAN if I run a wired connection over from the neighbor's. He'd let me do it on a permanent basis as well, but the cabling running across the yards is obviously not all weather safe, haha. He really doesn't use his bandwidth too much, just lots of browser games and Facebook, so he's let me experiment a couple times in exchange for free PC repair service

 

Ugh... updated my graphics drivers to the new, and it completely forgot my HDMI audio settings -_-

Ah yes. I recall having 1.5Mb. It was what I called the bare minimum for netflix streaming. I don't know about anymore though. Once upon a time it looked fine. Now I've got 3x that, and it looks blocky at times.

Though at the time, I was using a CRT monitor. Rather forgiving pixel pitch/resolution

Anyone run FRAPS with GTA V? I had it running, but couldn't see the frame counter while playing.
My graphics card is definitely limited. Certainly when considering Memory

I'm really salivating over this GTX 970...
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=14-487-088

 

That's certainly a good card. Better factory OC than mine. That and a mild CPU OC would do wonders for your performance. Yeah, I'm really on about that. It won't affect longevity, and even say the extra 400MHz to 3.6 will make a noticeable difference. To that you add 200MHz on the CPU NB which gives you 2200MHz. A very small voltage bump to both components ensures stability so nearly 100% of chips will be perfectly stable at those settings. It really makes a difference with a 970 and a Thuban, trust me, I know It's so consequence-free you are kicking yourself by not doing it. Also, that small NB OC opens up your memory bandwidth drastically.

 

Thanks Jeff. I will definitely keep that in mind

 

Ahaha I'll stop now Thubans like that extra clockspeed though. They love it. They take right off with it. Certain things will show it more than others. When I was running emulators where every single MHz counts, it was night and day. Also, GTA 4 and 5 will show it. Especially 4, lol.

 

Funny you say that 4 will benefit from it. I played for over an hour recently, and my CPU only warmed up 4C. And the GPU had warmed up considerably more than I remember. Hence why I said it seems to tax the GPU more now.

I suppose my Heatsink is pretty massive though And it is possible that it never exceeded 75% usage. In order for it to really heat up, it needs to be in the 90 - 100% usage range.

The NB really heats up under X264. The CPU runs really cool. Which is pretty much why I haven't overclocked. When I do, the NB runs in the mid 50s. I don't like that LOL!

 

This shouldn't push it that much. Also, 4 is much more dependent on raw speed on a single thread. I always found that the benefits were worth the effort when overclocking.

 

Here in the UK, 'fibre' for the most part is fibre to the cabinet, in other words, up to the last usually anything between 10m and 500m to the premises, much lower for residential areas where it usually maxes out around 200m, higher for very rural areas where it can stil be miles for very remote addresses.
The process is fraut with problems as there is a single supplier in charge of running the vast majority of higher speed connections and they do not provide the service to areas where it would cannibalise full fibre-optic leased line revenue from businesses, so it's only available usually in residential areas, if you live near a lot of businesses, tough luck!
That plus of course not every exchange has been upgraded. The biggest issue, however, is that they can conceal their rollout plans from the public and the government are blissfully unaware of them failing to meet their targets for deployment - frustrating in the extreme as it also affects virtual ISPs like the company I work for, if a business asks for an FTTC connection, we can't definitively tell them yes or no until the supporting line is installed - if not, too late, the line is under a year's contract or more!

Like you, the 65Mbps is not guaranteed - the maximum VDSL2 will currently support is 80Mbps though there is still a little scope to up that. However, my distance from the cab (about 300-400m) means I get 65 down, 17 up in practice (69 down, 20 up sync) and that's unlikely to change. Still far better than the 6/1Mbps ADSL I had at 2100m line distance to exchange.
The minimum guarantee is 15 downstream, unsure about upstream. Typically speaking in times of severe congestion it will fall below that to around 8-10Mbps down, but usually not for very long and only if downloading very large files (e.g. GTA5 ) - most of the time it's well over 30Mbps.
One plan mooted (but I will be surprised to see it proceed to any great extent) is FTTPOD (premises on demand) whereby customers can 'buy' into being the first premises served by fibre-optic directly to their premises, if already served by FTTC - thus allowing future FTTPOD subscribers to presumably get it at reduced rate. This would carry installation charges similar to dedicated fibre but lower monthly costs.
Some people are fortunate enough to be served by FTTP already but only certain cities have fibre-optic run to all the residences. Where I used to live in York, this has been done in numerous areas, but was delayed in my part of town by several years, so nothing other than standard 4Mbps ADSL was available until well after I left in 2011.

While I can understand to an extent why it's happened, due to geographical distance issues that are far less severe in the UK, a country like the US really does surprise me how bad it is for broadband. The UK really is nowhere near top in Europe for high-speed broadband provision due to the issues I've mentioned above, yet the US trails so far behind in most cases it's dire.
There really is minimal excuse for settlements with over 500,000 residents not to have proper high speed (50Mbps+) fibre-optic running to all inner areas at a reasonable price (<$100/month), and from what I understand that's just not happened. Sounds like you've done fairly well out of it too.
Oddly enough the ISP I used for ADSL2 went under and were bought out by a competitor as they refused to offer the FTTC product so were stuck with a best-case service of 24/2Mbps when other ISPs all over were offering, initially 40/10 and latterly 80/20. Seemingly previously being a 'premium' service provider with their own LLU network, they were unsatisfied with the wholesale infrastructure provided by FTTC. I can understand why but it was a shame to lose a previously well-run ISP (BeUnlimited) to a far more commercially-driven successor (Sky, part of the Murdoch empire)


Omega: Yes, I have had Fraps working with GTA5 no issue - an ancient build from years ago, too.
(For frame rate monitoring, not tried video recording as I don't use it - I don't imagine it'd work too well at 4K anyway!)

On the GPU front - R9 300 series is supposedly due June/July, but if you need performance now, I still think the GTX970 is a solid purchase. High performance without all the power consumption and heat nonsense the equivalent AMD cards have, even if non-ref coolers make a good job of getting the heat off the GPU, it all has to go somewhere...
Gotta love the marketing spiel on that EVGA card - '0dB decibel inverter' - thought 'what the hell is this?' and discovered it's just their term for semi-passive operation, i.e. fanless under 60C. Good luck with that in game! Should be alright at the desktop though now that GPUs are finally efficient at idle - that said I find it rare that modern GPUs are noisy at the desktop anyway, my 'crummy' Gainward cooler on my 970 is almost silent until I game, and so is my inexpensive MSI HD7770 cooler, as was the stock cooler on the 290X I had briefly. The last noisy GPU I had at the desktop would have been the 4870X2s simply because they didn't downclock properly in crossfire. Still not as bad as the Sapphire HD3870 single-slot though, apart from failing a week in with audible sparks coming out of it, it's not only the only GPU, the only piece of electronic apparatus to date that has ever given me splitting headaches just by being on. 'noise quality' is very much a thing...

 

An ancient build from 5 yrs ago...
Ha ha! That's more or less what makes up my machine :S I won't take that offensively lol.
And clearly I need to check a few things on my end, to see what's causing FRAPS to fail.

 

Sam, the US's infrastructure is very old and dated for a couple reasons. First, we haven't had any real incentive to update everything because none of it has been destroyed. Europe was flattened by WW2, and the rebuilding allowed them all brand new hardware. The vast majority of our infrastructure was built during the industrial revolution and immediately before and after WW1. Our communications infrastructure is weak at best, and our power infrastructure is in dire need of a complete ripping out and new installation throughout the entire country. We are surprisingly vulnerable to attacks on our power grid. A single station having minor issues can cause a blackout for half the country.

Our roadways are in the same general state as well. Very poor. The entire country needs an update.

 

Telecommunications upgrades even as late as the 1980s would only be designed to support copper lines, either latterly used for modem use or perhaps ISDN. 'Internet' access to small businesses and residences was only really considered in the 1990s onwards - even wiring upgrades designed with broadband in mind were all copper until only a few years ago, which would only allow up to ADSL2 spec - 24Mbps downstream and 2Mbps upstream. Fibre-based technologies to 'end users' is very much a recent thing. Power infrastructure is of course another issue.

Remind me, what has this got to do with graphics cards?

 

Everything and nothing. lol. Downloading the latest games takes fast internet, no?

 

Not if you're still buying them on disc!