The Official Graphics Card and PC gaming Thread

I've noticed a few of these, but not been playing the game long enough yet to have discovered many of them. Some are logical, others are really quite interesting niceties that must have taken quite a while to code but have no impact on the game per se other than for people to go 'oh that's cool!'. It's pleasing to see there are at least some UK game developers making successful A-tier titles after so many of them have long since either disappeared, sold out or eschewed the mainstream genres for casual arcade or mobile titles.

As for Project CARS, I believe this is GameGPU's test segment:

which achieved the following results

So at 1080p, if you can live with frame rates in the 40s and/or cut AA, you can get away with one top-end card like a 290X or 970. With AA turned down, a 980 should be cruising past 60.

DiRT Rally, however, is so far much more forgiving, achieving similar results at 4K:

From the screens, Rally looks a little flat, like it could perhaps do with more tesselation and depth of field, but in high-speed motion, the test segment does make it look quite nice:

 

Super Interested in the new Dirt game. Dirt 2 and 3 were not what I wanted and Dirt 1 almost hit the spot. They also added cockpit view back in the game which was left out of Grid 2, a real shame.

On another note my modded Halo Edition Xbox is a wonderful piece of hardware. WD Black 500GB ATA133 HDD, Gigabyte 80 pin ATA cable, X unleashed softmod, all EMF shielding removed to give better airflow and allow viewing the internals, 80mm fan mod with Blue LED fan and a blue LED strip along the spine. Also replaced the thermal paste on the GPU and CPU. Reduced my temps from 64 degrees celcius at the menu 70-80 in games to about 55 at the menu 65-75 in games. I have the hottest running revision. My 55 degrees at the menu is pretty impressive some struggle to get below 60. The 80mm fan was a big help there. It runs relatively cool for what it is, though my unmodded version 1.6b Xbox runs about half the temps. It's not as easily modded though.

It can make backups on its own or play downloaded backups. I do happen to have a pretty impressive hard copy Xbox collection though. Nearly 70 games I think. ALL the good ones minus a few of the more obscure or expensive which had to be downloaded.

The Gamecube had a much smaller stable of core games that were really essential to own for the console, and I have most of them. Probably about 15 really great exclusive games, and 20 or so okay ones. Everything else was multiplatform or can easily be emulated. Actually playing backups on the console is a pain, and requires hardware modification, and/or hacking up the case. There are few enough exclusive games I bought most of them used. The Xbox is the current king for my 6th gen multiplatform gaming needs.

My PS2 languishes in the closet. My PS3 can play all my PS2 exclusive games and has quite a few high res re-releases with trilogies on a single disc, which has allowed me to box up some of my collection and save some space haha. The PS3 and Xbox see the most use by far. I have a huge backlog of 6th gen games to play.

 

Wow, Wow, lots of GTAV action - I spent about an hour on that blog article that Sam linked to - the graphics are unbelievable if one can run it above normal. And that last little link from Jeff about the subtle fine points in the game - clerks asking how something that you were buying clothes for worked out - things that as you played - you would go "What?" "Is this game actually doing this - did they actually go to this much trouble in making this thing seem so realistic!!"

Back to Sam's blog, - what are the levels of graphics? After normal, you have what: High, Very High, and then Ultra? I saw dozens of ways to customize the game. I wonder how far I'd have to tweak it down to get into the Very high range?

Really impressive. As I think Jeff said - "the new crysis."

And at the end of Sam's link - there it was, 3d.

I went into the house to try to find my old 3d glasses but tripped and was "wasted." Like how Kevin's cat hit that dog, or all the people who got "wasted" in Sam's video link.


I couldn't find the 3d glasses but I bet Kevin did.

KEVIN DID YOU SEE THAT 3D IMAGE AT THE END OF THE BLOG POST?

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

I COULD HAVE BOUGHT A NEW COMPUTER !!

I''ve been gone for over 3 weeks having shelled out over $600 for 5 enterprise WD hard drives - paying enterprise big bucks.

I have no choice - the temperatures in this trailer are killing my non-enterprise hard drives in both the gaming machine, and in my every-day business tower.

These aren't the super capacity ones - but they are big for me. I had 1 TB drives in my gaming rig, now I have doubled that. I quadrupled what I had in the Raid volume of the everyday desktop.

As I said, I picked up 5 enterprise hard drives from Newegg, 3 of them 1 TB, and 2 of them 2 TB for the gaming rig. Sam was talking about 6 TB. I know they're out, but do they work? Reliably?

Probably they do, but in this trailer I've got a hot box environment to try to deal with.

We had a total heat wave about two days ago when I wrote most of this post!​

It was 102 degrees in here today. I bought the utility HD Sentinel about six months ago, and it really got me thinking about hard drive temperatures - the author seems convinced that high temps are the culprit most of the time, and I am beginning to agree with him.

Suddenly a month ago, my gaming 1 TB hard drive would not boot. Fortunately I had cloned it two months before and all my Arma stuff was safe on the clone. Then once I booted from the clone, I got all my Company of Heroes Ardennes Assault saves back. So I didn't lose anything.

I had already finished Far Cry 4 - fantastic game!

By the way, that game ran on only one overclocked 7950 - it did not use my crossfire like Arma does - and I had settings maxed. My frame rates were usually low 30s.


So as I was saying, earlier today, the thermometer on the back window showed 102.


I know DDP is probably thinking, "102 below zero, what's the big deal?"


No, DDP, I'm talking about ABOVE ZERO. You know, the desert - HOT - think sweat.

"What's that?" ​

Well, that's when people in warm climates exert themselves and the body puts out water on the skin to cool itself off by evaporative cooling.

"People getting too hot?" "Sweat?" ​

Listen DDP, you're just going to have to use your imagination!!


I was in the middle of testing the final drive of the five, and I had to turn everything off until this evening.

All 4 drives were immediately at 45 degrees C per HD Sentinel - and I had just gotten started. By the 4 drives I mean the 3 drives in the gaming rig, and the one drive getting tested sitting on top of the spedo inverted on a metal bowl to get some air underneath, with a 12 volt trailer fan blowing on it, feeding from the esata top front port of the spedo, through esata to sata, for the data line, plus an apricorn power adapter to molex sata power for 5 and 12 volt power.


All 4 drives immediately hit 45 degrees.

That's a fine temp for enterprise, which can operate to 55 degrees, but I still have one disk, my XP 320 gig drive, which is mainly a paging disk besides doing a couple of other things, and it should not really be running too much above 40.


So I'm back here tonight because the desert cools off at night - no DDP we don't get snowstorms! I said "cools off" but that means like maybe 60 - there's no snow. Never any snow!!! For cryin out loud, just use your imagination!


As I said, I'm back here tonight finishing up the testing.


On my business desktop, after ordering the two enterprise drives for the gaming rig, and then starting to test the regular drives that were now freed up, my business desktop Raid started acting up again, for the third time in 12 months.


Eventually - this was last week - I broke the Raid 1 mirror and I was able to get full testing on them, and I found that the drives that had given me problems, showed lifetime high temps wayyyy above 40 degrees. How about 61 degrees - that's what I call wayyy above 40. That one failed - the other one that did not fail hit a lifetime high of 58.


HD SENTINEL IS THE BOMB ON KEEPING TRACK OF HARD DRIVE TEMPS


I never had that lifetime temp information until HD Sentinel took apart the hex string for temperature, and found the historical data buried inside it. I guess I could have done the same thing - maybe - if I had googled it, and been able to extract it with a SMART reader, but there it was in HD Sentinel in nice graph format.

It was never anywhere in the HD Tune health information - I didn't even know there was more SMART stuff on the WD drive.

I just knew that they no longer report on reallocated sectors - they used to, but no longer. I think they felt that it was hurting their marketing. So no matter how many sectors get re-mapped, and how many pending sectors, or offline uncorrectable sectors get dropped to zero, by a full zero write operation, for example, or by spinrite testing - those pending sector counts go down, in fact they go away, but that reallocated sector count never changes - it remains at zero. And then you have a disk with 761 offline uncorrectable sectors on it, and you write zeros until you are blue in the face, and it still has 761 offline uncorrectable sectors, because, guess what, the disk ran out of spare sectors! And WD continues to report, zero reallocated sector count. LOL ​

And not only does HD Sentinel give me the historic lifetime high temp, HD Sentinel also gives me real time temps in the system tray.

And get this - they give me the temp of one of the Raid drives!!

You might say, what's the big deal. The big deal is that once you put two drives into a Raid volume, they disappear into the void. No utility will give you any information about the individual drives in the volume. At least, that's how it's been until HD Sentinel.

I had never been able to pierce the raid with any utility to get individual drive statistics. Now I see the temp of the main raid drive right in my system tray - 38 at this minute. That's nothing. It was 45 for several hours this afternoon. But no worries, as of last week, the raid set are enterprise drives - they work 24/7 at up to 55 degrees.


So what happened was - with HD Sentinel throwing these temp numbers in my face, I realized that I have been cooking drives that are not made to run at these kinds of temps. So I decided to invest some money and simplify my life in terms of not having hard drive failures every time I turn around, and get some bullet-proof drives that can take the heat!

Forget about SSDs for the moment.

When your hard drives go bad - all you have left is some fancy silicon registers, a screaming clock chip, and a bunch of fans. Nothing interesting is happening, no nudity, no shooting, no nothing.

I threw the nudity in there for you Kevin, but I have some nice Far Cry 4 screenshots for you. Jeff knows what I'm talking about! ​

The gaming 1 TB with the one block that was bad and which would not boot - it was block 6 on the HD Tune error scan, and only that one block.

So I used spinrite to laser focus on that one bad block, to get it to remap. There are 50 lines on HD Tune, with 50 blocks per line, equals 2500 blocks, so each block is 0.04% of the drive. I partitioned the drive with 100 gigs in one partition. Then I ran that partition in spinrite level 4 testing, from 2% to 2.4% to exercise the bad part of the disk. Five good blocks, would be 5 x 0.04% = 0.2 %. But the partition is only 1/10 the drive, so multiply by 10, means I can start testing at 2% of that partition. I actually ran 2% to 4% but the error came up immediately. I ran it a few times - rebooting - until it ran clean, and then I brought windows 7 back up (spinrite boots the computer into dos) and now the error scan shows a perfect disk. ​

Another wonderful utility, is SpinRite. Without spinrite my option would have been to run WD Data Lifeguard write zeros on the entire drive - which DOES work, taking hours of course. But the spinrite thing allows you to focus in five minutes on the problem area of the drive.

So the bad sectors got re-mapped to spares and the disk is good again, but minus a bunch of spare sectors. Lifetime high temp on that disk was 58 degrees - this being a disk sitting in an HDD cage right behind a 120mm cooling fan. But when the air coming in is 80 or 90 or even 100 degrees F, then yeah, you might have drives actually reaching temperatures in the 50s C.

That was my gaming rig.

For my desktop Dell, there was no hard drive cage with a fan blowing on it. I never considered that those drives might be experiencing temperature problems - I wasn't gaming in the machine.


So first I had to get some disk cooling - even before I replaced the ordinary Raid with enterprise Raid. I had naively thought that since I didn't push the machine, like for gaming, everything would be fine the way it came from Dell, which would be true in a corporate office building, but not reality here in this hot trailer.


So I mounted a 120mm fan on the drives, which sit inverted near the floor of the dell case.

(By the way, this is the tower that animated Left 4 Dead!)


Yes, this tower was at Turtlerock when they had so much fun playing LAN games of 30 AI terrorists armed only with knives against 4 real player counter-terrorists with assault rifles - that Mike Booth said to himself, "hey, this is a total blast - let's make a zombie game!" They hired Miles to do the animating, which he did on this tower.

And that's not all. Read the below which is a rather shocking coincidence.

One of my Steam friends in the game went by BB. He became the one I played with the most - I helped him get his "What are you trying to prove" by telling the rest of the team, that we had to get wiped out on the finale of the corn field map, Blood Harvest, if BB got killed, because this was the only map he hadn't beaten on expert. And so the team looked out for him, and when we all jumped into the armored car - right there on the screen was "BB gets achievement: What are you trying to Prove."

Six months later I was back on the sequel, Left 4 Dead 2, after a bit of an absence from online, and there was BB who jumped on the team with me. I guess he pulled up his Friends list and saw me online. He probably had been keeping an eye out for me for some time. Because of this

We chatted a bit after the round. Some time had passed since we had been playing regularly. Sam and Jeff know when I first got on Left 4 Dead - they were there with me.

So finally BB casually says "Oh, I met that guy. Dave Booth." I said, "Oh, do you mean Mike Booth?" He said, "Yeah, the one who made the game."

"Actually, I was at his house. He had a Left 4 Dead plaque on the wall. I'm a realtor from Pasadena. My buyer bought the house."

Well, I'm a realtor also. We talked realtor talk for a bit. "What was he asking for it?" "What did you guys get it for?" A nice casual conversation. The last one I had with him - it's been about 3 or 4 years.


WTF!!!! ARE YOU KIDDING ME!!!!!


BB is a realtor from Pasadena whose buyer bought the house of Mike Booth, who put it on the market to move up to Seattle to work for Valve, after finishing up Left 4 Dead for them.

This is my best "steam friend" on Left 4 Dead.

THINK ABOUT IT!

How many millions of people bought and played that game?
How many of those millions of people actually met the game developer?

Well, I have.
And my best Left 4 Dead steam friend, BB, also has.

Now for all I knew at the time, BB lived in Chicago, or Canada, or Oregon, or London.

On my steam profile, it mentions how I should have been playing Left 4 Dead way before the time when I started playing it, which Sam and Jeff know exactly when that was, because on a few occasions we were on the same teams, and I was totally green - green and bewildered!

I had met Mike Booth because Turtlerock Studios happened to be right across the parking lot from the real estate company I worked for, and my relative Miles came down from LA twice a week to be onsite, and we went to lunch once a week, and I met Mike a couple of times, and I even did some early play-testing of the game when it was REALLY rough. It's in my steam profile.

And now my best Left 4 Dead buddy, BB, one of the other millions who have played the game, who could have been up in Canada across the snow-field from DDP in his own igloo, for all I knew, has also met Mike, not to mention he sold his house. Because he's not from Canada, he's from Pasadena, and he happened to have a buyer in that price range, for a home in Irvine, which is about 60 miles south of Pasadena. And that buyer bought Mike's house.

So BB, not from igloo-ville, met Mike, and saw the plaque on the wall. And then he looked me up online, so he could tell me about it.


What are the freakin odds! ​

Miles was flabbergasted. ​

I'm typing on that stupid Turtlerock Dell right at this minute. Zombies are spilling out of it and messing with my keyboard.

So yeah, the business rig is back to life, has a revamped ENTERPRISE Raid 1 mirror in it, has a 120mm dedicated custom disk cooling fan, and is now an official bullet-proof zombie animating tower.


So that's where I've been and now both computers are so much more solid.


I am so impressed with the GTAV graphics, from going through that blog article that Sam linked to, and yet I wonder, should I even try to run it right now? Will it support crossfire? I didn't need crossfire for Far Cry 4, but I do for Arma. But my cpu barely exceeds the minimum quad 6600 requirement. Yes I have a good 35% overclock on it - but would I be able to tweak the game to Very High?

Rich

 

Bit late now, but hard disks are really not difficult devices to cool, if you were having failures due to overheat (and bear in mind, even with consumer drives this means they need to run at 55C or above on a regular basis, otherwise your failures weren't heat-related) then you should just invest in some cooling for your disks.
Enterprise disks are quoted for lower error counts, higher warranties etc. but mechanically are little different to their end-user counterparts.

In the summer without my A/C unit on, the heat from the PCs can get my room up to about 35-36C (95-97F) but that's about it. It might go a little higher but that's where my tolerance ends!

FWIW I have a Seagate 7200.10 750GB still in use, dating back to 2006, that used to run at 61-64C 24/7 in one of my earlier fileservers for about 18 months. Now older Seagate drives were built solidly, nothing like their drives of today, but still, that should suggest that 55C with a peak of 61 is not necessary a major issue.
If I see bad sectors coming up on my disks, I replace them. End of story. Not so easy since as you pointed out, RAID controllers typically obfuscate SMART data and don't pass it through to system utilities. Fortunately good enough controllers allow you to see SMART data from within their own interfaces, but not cheap ones like Silicon Image add-in cards.

As for GTA5 Rich, you'll have to fill me in with what CPU you're using, I don't remember

 

Hey Jeff - by the way, I forgot to mention, thanks for the feedback about Assassins Creed Unity.

I don't think I'll get over to Paris at this time - maybe I'll restart the game some other time. But you mentioned Ezio being a triple game hero.

And I heard that before - that many people felt that the "Indian half-breed" was a let-down from the flamboyant Italian Ezio.

I however liked the Indian character - the climbing of the trees to develop his skills, trapping animals, and I liked his black mentor, who somehow had lost his family - they never got into any details about how that happened.

Culturally AC is very inclusive - I played all the DLCs including the black pirate, and the girl pirate. I like the whole multi-cultural aspect to the franchise.

But I don't know when I'll get back to Paris. However, if the game really heats up as you play further into it, I wouldn't mind hearing about it for sure.

Regarding Ezio, I started on AC2 and I liked it - I got to the horseback riding which I noticed was the same excellent quality that they carried over to AC3. If I were to get back to Ezio - are the other two Ezio games DLCs that I can get on the PC, or are they just available on console and I am out of luck?

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

Sam, that was one heckuva disk. Your Seagate 750 was indeed a brute to have been able to handle those temperatures!

Regarding bad sectors, I believe you are quite correct. Get rid of the disk.

Western Digital stopped updating the reallocated sector count, and now it always shows zero. I believe they did it for marketing reasons, as they used to have that SMART data item. Now it's always zero. You can write to 10 pending sectors, get them to drop to 0 pending sectors, and you just know they've been mapped, but WD shows 0 reallocated sectors.

Yet, there are things about WD that I like, and this new information about lifetime temps is useful, plus their Lifeguard utility seems better than the Seagate Seatools utility. Especially the write zeros has "fixed" several disks.

Still, even without reallocated sectors, you can spot problems when you see those pending sectors appear - that's a sure sign of sector problems. And google found that any sector problems at all, meant that the disk was twice as likely to fail as a disk with no sector problems. So I think your policy is a good one - replace the drive at the first sign of sector problems.

I'm crossing my fingers that these enterprise drives will stand up to more abuse heat-wise. The 2 TB are anchored at both ends of the spindle, unlike their non-enterprise drives. That isn't true for the 1 TB that make up my Raid mirror, but they share the same 55 degree 24/7 spec. They use more measuring points on the platter to compensate for wobble compared to non-enterprise - there are several mechanical improvements to enable the drive to stand up to more heat, and as you say, to produce one-tenth as many unrecoverable errors as non-enterprise.


NOISY AS A DIESEL ENGINE - AND JUST AS TOUGH

The reviews said that they were noisier than regular - and that is true. You can hear these - whereas you usually cannot hear the regular drives - you are hearing the head move - the acoustic diaphragm makes more noise on these drives. The 2 TB in addition to the acoustic head placement, also use piezo electric to fine-tune the head placement.

Anyway, I don't mind the noise. On my Raid here, which I am typing on right now, the slight bit of noise says "SOLID" and I like it.

On the gaming rig, of course, with all the fans in place, I can't hear the disks at all, and I game with headphones, so a bit of noise is no bother.


Regarding GTAV, I'm on the old 9450 quad, overclocked to 3.343ghz - about a 35% overclock. I know I am cpu bound, as my two 7950s coast along at maybe 50% or so, while my cpu cores are pushing in the 80-90% load range. Occasionally I have to drop the quality in Arma3 down to very high from ultra, when there are many enemies around as in Operation Greenstorm, since that high number of enemies causes my fps to drop below 30, and sometimes down in the low 20 range where I start feeling the lag. All this time however, the gpu load continues to stay around 50%. Cpu load never hits the 90s, only the high 80s. However, possibly I am not getting a completely true indication of cpu load in the Onscreen Display.

I can track cpu load in another way if I had any doubt that I was cpu bound. There must be some element to the Arma 3 quality that loads the cpu, as dropping down the quality DOES thankfully give me an fps boost.

So, Sam, do you think that I would have any chance of running GTAV at very high, or should I just put the game off until a cpu upgrade?

Rich

 

Rich, most of the Assassin's Creed series can be had for PC. Steam is your best bet. I played AC2 and its siblings on PS3 but I know some of them are definitely on PC.

A true CPU upgrade is well past due for you. Those 7950s are screaming for a more powerful system. Ideally a modern i5 with at least 8GB of high performance memory for the type of gaming you do. As far as whether or not your CPU can handle GTA V, it seems to be mostly video limited so far. I'd definitely give it a try. Your biggest weakness though is going to be video memory. 3GB means you'll have to sacrifice a bit, but the game scales quite well. Not much should be lost visually.

 

Jeff - all WD consumer drives have had StableTrac (i.e. being anchored at both ends of the spindle) for a couple of years now, I believe the WD30EZRS was the first. I'm pretty sure all EZRX and EFRX drives since have had it too.

The 750GB Seagate (which I'm still using by the way, it will eventually be retired but not quite yet) is noisy as hell. It seeking is audible over everything else, including my server's fans at max speed. That said, it isn't the seek noise that's really irksome - the 7200.10 had a strange design flaw where at random (but only when seeking) the drives would chirp loudly (we're talking 60dB+) - it's not indicative of failure and large batches of 7200.10s had the issue. Still, very annoying when the drive is busy, fortunately it's not busy often as the OS drive in that PC is, like all my OS drives, an SSD.

As for the CPU, the 9450's a bit long in the tooth now so it may well be worth pursuing an upgrade there, it's not like current gen CPUs are enormous amounts ahead of the Q9450 but a current gen stock CPU would probably be 70% faster than your current 9450 with its overlock, and of course if you bought an unlocked chip you could overclock that too if so inclined.

As for GTA 5, I'd say try it. You won't know otherwise It's a demanding title on both CPU and GPU but I think a 3.3Ghz 9450 would still be able to play it.

 

You're right Jeff - I was thinking there wasn't anything in between AC2 with Ezio, and AC3 with my favorite "half-breed" but a Steam search will probably yield the complete Ezio trilogy.

Well, regarding features like StableTrac, it appears to me that these features come, and then they go, so while a class of drives may have once had that feature, they may no longer have that feature. For example, the 1 TB WD enterprise class of drives that I just bought, apparently DO NOT HAVE STABLETRAC.

At the end of 2012 when I was first seriously studying drives and when I put together the first Raid machine for Miles to store his family pictures on, with 3 mirrors, I bought two 1 TB enterprise drives at that time. Both of them had StableTrac, along with a host of other features that were unique to the enterprise class of drives.

But a month ago, in buying the 5 new WD Re enterprise drives, Western Digital specifically mentioned that StableTrac came on the 2 TB and higher-capacity models, but not on the lower capacity versions. So I'm sure I don't have that feature on the three 1 TB enterprise drives, and I am fine with that. Apparently as they constantly improve their manufacturing methods to increase drive capacity while still attempting to maintain reliability, they have figured out how to reduce wobble, without needing StableTrac until they get up to 2 TB and higher capacity.

As long as the spec still shows 1/10 the UREs, and 24/7 operation at 55 degrees, I consider them built to a higher standard, and that is what I am looking for.

(By the way, I loved your singing hard drive story regarding that Seagate that can stand running at oven temperatures - but chirps like a loud little birdy at 60db - what they hell could that noise be???)

Well put.

And I noticed, haha, that now that you're in the 4 gig vram club, you're looking down on my measly 3 gigs of vram. I love it! I'm just messing with you. I think it is absolutely fantastic that you jumped from 1 gig to 4 gigs - reminds me of what I just did in going from desktop hard drives to enterprise drives - rated to keep on chugging 24/7 at 55 degrees dammit!

Okay, so now I'm short of vram memory - but maybe I can tweak things. Fair enough!

I appreciate all the encouragement - maybe I will give the game a try since you guys, Sam, Kevin, Jeff are now cruising around ----- in my part of the world - meaning Hollywood, USA!

Rich

 

With all the settings perfectly maxed at my native 1440p sans AA, GTA V just touches 4GB of usage. Given the results my friends have been able to achieve on 7970s and similar, you should be able to get it down to 3GB without sacrificing anything too major. Some of the largest VRAM hogs in the game are very minor effects. Lots of effort put into rendering distant objects for example, with very small increments of quality for very large amounts of VRAM. Tuned for 3GB of VRAM usage, the game should still look incredibly crisp and play very fluidly, far above any console version.

The 3GB of VRAM on the 7900 series is really a small shame and one of the things that kept me from jumping aboard. You can still scale your settings without much loss, but the amount of power the cards have suggests more memory would have been appropriate. Especially when using Crossfire at high resolutions. 3GB basically makes AA a no-go for some games, even if the cards have plenty of rendering power to spare. The GTX680 and GTX780 are guilty of this as well. Both could extremely easily utilise a 4GB framebuffer without batting an eye. At 2560 res I'm starting to think 6GB or more would be beneficial as newer games come out. Jumping directly to 8GB would be ideal.

Never let a lack of hardware stop you from playing and enjoying a game though Rich. Some of the finest gaming I have ever done was at or below 20FPS. In contrast, I doubt most people could spot the differences in GTA V between our respective PCs. Any sacrifice you make with a system of that caliber is going to be infinitesimally small in comparison to PC vs console.

As far as CPUs go, I would put your overclocked 9450 as an equivalent to my 1100T at stock for 99% of games. It should continue to get you by for quite a while, but a newer CPU would really help in those problematic titles. ArmA, for example. With say, my CPU for example, we're talking double framerates in CPU intensive situations. Maybe even more. I was shocked by how large of an upgrade the new CPU was.

 

Jeff, your remarks were very interesting.

Yes, it would be lovely to double my framerates. I sunk my spare cash into those disk drives, but the next investment will be the cpu. Next year.

I'm glad you have friends who are gaming on the 7900 series so you can clue me in on what they are doing to make the game work well for them.

So how much memory is available on some of the newer cards - like the card that Sam is giving some thought to getting in a few months if it promises to handle his 4k setup?

Rich

 

What you'll probably find Rich is that in the old days the 1TB drives would have been comprised of 3x333GB or 4x250GB disk platters, hence the need for StableTrac.
Nowadays you can get a terabyte on a single platter, so there'd be little point.

Also, technically a GTX970 is 3.5GB, not 4

To answer the other post:

R9 390X is expected to be 8GB.
The GTX980Ti is expected to be 6GB.
The Titan X is 12GB.
The 290X and 980 are both 4GB.

FWIW, I have cut down some detail settings obviously in order to achieve 3840x2160 on a single 970, both for memory and processing power reasons. That said, I'm still able to run the game smoothly with a lot of settings set high. If you spent some time with that blog article I linked you will have spotted that quite a few settings have no appreciable impact at all. Minus some of the less important draw distance-based options, some post processing and anti aliasing I can still enjoy the game in high detail at the full resolution. If a 970 can handle 3840x2160 like that, half the pixels at 2560x1600 should be no drama.

 

It's 3.5 + .5 if you want to get really technical It does have all the advantages over 3GB.

Rich, the highest-end offerings currently available are offering 6GB and possibly 8GB. Going by the pattern, I imagine you'd want absolutely as much memory as can be crammed onto a video card. I would love for mine to be 8GB, though I think 6GB would suffice. the current 3.5, as Sam pointed out, is adequate for most things, but can still be a limit depending on the game.

 

Indeed, but practically speaking once you reach the remaining 512MB you're going to encounter performance problems, which is exactly what'll happen if you just run out in the first place, so as far as I'm concerned, it's 3.5GB
Doesn't change my opinion on it being the right card for me, but damn, nvidia's implementation of displayport still needs a lot of work.

 

Displayport works just fine for me, though I'm not using a multipanel monitor so can't comment on that. Just plug and play. It was an easier and simpler alternative to hunting down a specific DVI cable type I don't have readily on-hand, and some cables aren't even guaranteed to support it properly. Same thing with using HDMI. I need to guarantee it's a highspeed cable to do it, as this monitor requires an HDMI 1.4 compliant cable. There is no such difference between displayport cables as far as display resolution and refresh rate are concerned.

 

Yes, Sam, I see your point about multiple platters. So am I understanding you correctly?

With the reduced weight and vibration of fewer platters, there is less of an issue in combating wobble, and for a single platter securing it on one end is entirely sufficient. ​

Wow, 6 gigs, 8 gigs, 12 on the titan.

Yes, by the time I think in terms of new graphics cards, I'll definitely be looking for a huge chunk of memory - which I would pretty much have to have if I ever followed Sam's lead into 4k. If I ever get totally convinced that it's gobs more immersive then I may someday be tempted - if I'm rolling in the bucks at that time!

Rich

 

Dual link DVI cables are expensive but easy to get hold of and a doddle to identify as you just look at the number of pins in the connector. With displayport, technically speaking there's no such thing as a v1.1 or v1.2 cable etc. despite the fact that changing cables to resolve issues is common practice.
My biggest bugbear with the standard is a lack of passive EDID so if you turn your monitor off but leave it connected, the PC doesn't know what resolution your monitor is and stuff starts resizing itself.

You're right that tiling is a major source of issues but plenty of people have reported wake failures with regular single stream displays with nvidia. Further, when AMD cards lose sync the display goes blank, your game might crash but rebooting the monitor usually fixes it - worst case use remote desktop, save your work and reboot. When nvidia cards lose sync the PC crashes, which is a much bigger issue.
Also, my card only came with one DP port activated, the other two are locked out either in BIOS or in hardware, which is annoying!

Rich: yes I believe so, that's what I would expect. OTOH, single platter disks are usually very quiet as there's only one head to move around...

 

I have used remote desktop just a few times, as that is how Miles communicated with his photo server - having no monitor on it. I was surprised at how well it works.

So, when you say "use remote desktop" then obviously you're talking about from another pc on the same LAN. If so, then it would not be a bad idea to have another pc set up to control, through remote desktop, the pc that tends to lose sync with the monitor.

Am I understanding you correctly? I would never have thought of that - sounds like a very clever way to protect yourself from problems.

 

If you thought remote desktop was good, you should try Citrix

That's what we do at work - customer IT systems are relocated to terminal server farms in datacentres, and the PCs on-site are just thin client terminals. All processing, all day is handled off-site. Expensive, but it beats having to look after on-site equipment and makes connecting from home much easier. People are often resistive to it as it's a little different from their normal working environment but when this happened -

http://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/624/media/images/82076000/jpg/_82076527_82075388.jpg (observe unlit part of the city)

and there was no stable power in the area for two days, people were very grateful they could work at home as if nothing happened

But yes, for my purposes, RDP is enabled on my PCs and also allows double hop - I can go to my file server from a remote IP address anywhere in the world where firewall rules allow (most places) then RDP again from there to another of the PCs if need be.

 

Yeah, when you first got the job you were talking about thin client PCs.

It reminded me at the time of how things were before PCs came along - "dumb terminals" connected to mainframes. So in this case the dumb terminals are not so dumb - probably very smart in fact - and in charge of desktop layout, screen presentation hdmi stuff, with all crunching and storage done remotely?

Do your thin client PCs have a hard drive at all - or just an SSD - and maybe a 2.5" hard drive to back up the SSD.

Are they connected via internet? I assume so. Then what speed service must be available in the area in order for this to be effective? Are you in the sales side of the business, or the migration side, or both?

 

Rich, the thin clients I've used are usually just a cable box/DVR equivalent with peripheral inputs/outputs. You can insert a USB stick or a DVD like any other PC, but there is no PC hardware in the case. It was being run directly through the campus's Gigabit network so there was some noticeable input lag but it was relatively snappy performance and response-wise. The servers have decent video hardware as they can do some light gaming as well. When I last looked while I was there they had passively cooled ASUS AMD cards. HD6450s I think??? Presumably for the basic hardware acceleration that CAD students need. They did have an internal HDD/SSD that held a basic mirror of the OS I think but all storage and processing was done remotely.