The Official Graphics Card and PC gaming Thread

Yeah, Samsung 5 series LCD, not the latest model, but good enough, 5-star reviews and all that, 40" 1080p for £630 at amazon.co.uk...

 

The different colors between high and very high is called color grading and it was part of very high in the original Crysis. AFAIK the settings in Warhead translate directly to the settings in Crysis. I've tweaked them enough to know if there was a difference anyway...

Try turning stuff to medium and see what it does...

 

Wow,

I can't believe how reasonable the HDs are these days. My brother says Plasma is an energy hog. Have you heard that. But a guy at a store a couple years ago really made a great case for high-end Pioneer plasma - single thick glass instead of double pane - so no internal reflections. Also versus LCD I think it depends on if you are concerned about glare on the screen or not - and also if you need a wide viewing angle - lcd is still kind of a narrow angle for max brightness, right? (Oh, I'm getting off-topic.)

 

Oh yeah. My sis's TV is an LCD. It's a Visio whatever that is... good image quality though when used right.

 

My friend has a 42inch Visio, looks pretty damn good to me. It was cheap too. It's available at Costco I think.

Oh and I'm actually not part of the "popular" crowd at school, but I have my buddies I'm an only child so it gets lonely without friends or video games, OR computers! ahaha

 

Yeah they're not bad. I liked the 50" just fine. Looked good for 50 inches and had little to no ghosting. Not to mention games look ridiculous at high res on a huge screen with heavy AA

Other news, Gears of War PC is awesome now that it didn't F up my Windows installation. Last time I installed, it screwed up all my drivers... I put the disk away for months...

Anyhoo, 1920 x 1200 is no problem and plays glassy smooth. This game seriously matches FEAR or Episode 2 in graphics. The section with the pouring rain and the abandoned factory... perfect atmosphere. Way more creepy than any part of FEAR or Crysis, IMO. Especially when you hear the monsters screaming or see them running up the side of a distant building. Kind of like the movie Pitch Black. Scary as f***.

OMG Xbox 360 eat your heart out. Standard def doesn't do this game any justice at all. It's loaded with all sorts of wicked awesome graphics

I feel though that I've seen Marcus Fenix before. Isn't he used as a character in UT3? I'm fairly sure they've recycled and re skinned the model...

 

As far as replacing GPU cooling systems, how easily does that happen? I really like this Palit card, but this 70mm is pretty brutal once you start noticing it a lot. And it's not very practical to disable it as your idle goes from 45 degrees to 60 :S I'm not going to go as far as water cooling, but it it possible for me to replace a part of my GPU?

 

Yeah, Thermalright makes GPU coolers that are pretty good. You should look into that. I think Sam has one.

 

Rich: I saw your post, but my internet connection went down before I could reply. Fraps lists a very low frame rate for Warhead, and when it gets very low, it feels as it is, but honestly, 17-18fps does actually feel playable, which is bizarre. However, performance at higher resolution and lower GPU fan speed does indicate the second GPU is idle, which is a shame, as the game is clearly better optimised, and for once, we have native very high settings and AA works properly, in DX9. Maxed out, the game looks mindblowingly pretty, but without 2 GPU support, no amount of optimisation can make up for only having half as much graphics power to render the game, so until that's added, performance for me is notably worse than the original.
Given how vastly different Gamer looks to enthusiast though, I want to stick with enthusiast, which I can do at 1920x1200, and if I can put up with a very small amount of judder, I can enable 4x AA at that too, but you know, it's nice to use all 30", rather than just 23...

I don't know about the energy consumption of Plasmas, but what I do know is that my 30" monitor uses 70W at minimum brightness (which is what I use it at, minimum in a dark room with a mostly white image is still dazzling), and 130W at full brightness (only necessary or appropriate during daylight), and since the 30" is S-IPS, viewing angle is vast without any colour degradation.
I'm glad you get on well with GoW, I will have to try that again at 2560, now I can run it without a hitch. I like my spooky games.. hehe

Shamb1es: I used an HR-03 on my old X1900, which was quite a power hungry card. They really do a good job, especially if you stick a slow fan on them, it needn't be any faster than what is completely inaudible, and it will cool the card plenty well enough.

 

So Sam, do you agree that they've really fixed Crysis? I think they did a lot to make the game better. Granted Enthusiast looks better than Gamer. You should try the Cheap Very High hack and see if there's a difference. There really isn't, except in performance...

http://www.tweakguides.com/Crysis_13.html

Read that page. It will explain the differences and how to enable Cheap Very High. I strongly suggest you try it as it works in Warhead too.

 

There seems little point, Enthusiast works in XP and offers pretty much all the features that the very high hacks used to introduce. I won't say they fixed crysis, as the performance improvement isn't much, the random occasionally crap textures are still present, and unlike the original there's no crossfire support. I'll wait for a patch before I make my decision, What is worth noting though, is that I would recommend nothing short of a 3.6Ghz processor for the game, preferably even higher, the CPU limit is around 22-23 in most areas with a 3.24Ghz Q6600.

 

Looks like i'm going for the HR-03 GT (50 CAD), what should I be looking for when I pick up a fan for it though? More than anything I want it to be quiet. I'm already spending more on the GPU than I would have if I spent a bit more on a better quality build, might as well make it even quieter than the better builds at this price.

 

You're right about the CPU. My friend borrowed my copy and his 6000+ made it all the way through the game fine. But there was noticeably more lag with an HD4850 at 1680 res. Especially during the heavy parts. The video card might not be the biggest bottleneck for this game anymore. I had lots of noticeable improvements with Quad in physics, loading, AI(actually reacts quicker). Regardless of what they say, Crysis uses Quads quite well.

I'm saying that the cheap very high settings takes less of a performance hit than real very high.

I still say you should try it. You might get near identical visuals with better performance. It worked well for me. I get better performance with the same visual features. I get colorgrading, POM, cinematic quality water, light rays. Everything that you can actually SEE in very high. It's a very close comparison.

 

I use Nexus fans, which are available from Canadian PC component retailer, http://www.ncix.com - they're silent, nice fans. I take my low noise PCs very seriously, Nexus stuff is the bees' knees.
Thanks for the link Estuansis, but it's not really very high that I have a problem with right now, it's just 2560x1600 resolution, no matter how low the details are set doesn't run well at all.

 

I think Warhead is till a vast improvement from Crysis though. It's disappointing that Crossfire doesn't work. A patch or driver update will surely fix that.

 

Indeed, I'm expecting as much, but I would have hoped this time around that CF support would have been included from the start rather than waiting for a patch.

 

There are two models of the nexus fans. One is 15kRPM and is a little more expensive than the 25kRPM. Naturally it gives the noise range for the faster one, but only a single value (Probably at 700RPM) for the other. 34 customer comments on the slower one so I'm guessing that is the model you have and the faster one is new to the market. I'm not sure how loud the 25k RPM seems at 27.8dbA at top speed.

 

Just so you know, 1k is 1000, not 100, so you mean 1.5k and 2.5k...
As for the fans, I refer to the 1500rpm versions. They are quiet and more than adequate for that purpose. The 2500rpm ones will be noisy at full whack.

 

Hey Sam, being kind of ignorant about monitors - what did you mean by that, and is that a feature also available on HDTVs?

Estuansis, thanks for the link to that crysis guide. Very helpful. I'm saving that link for the time ..... (in the far distant future when automobiles fly) ..... when I have completed the new build.

It is certainly a shame, Sam, that Warhead doesn't support crossfire - which gives you no advantage over estuansis. Estuansis suspects a patch will shortly be in the offing - am I hallucinating or don't I remember the same about crysis itself - no crossfire support initially, only sli support, which was later obviously remedied to the tune of 80 to 90% performance gain? Was that done by crytek, or by ATI, or by both??

 

Hardvdguy, S-IPS is a type of LCD panel used in monitors and TVs. It only applies to LCD monitors and TVs. The cheap panels are TN panels and the viewing angles suck compared to S-IPS.