Video Card Thread (Mostly Gecube x1950xt)

It used to cause errors in your windows installs, but seems to have stopped doing that now at long last - now it only overwrites the firmware in your optical drives causing them to fail prematurely - it's happened to several people I know, and has seen off at least two of my drives. DVD recorders are cheap now, but they didn't used to be!

 

ouch

i love how the new 4 series eat up eevn 8xAA w.o sweating, loosing about only 5% of their frames.

 

That's not because they don't take a performance hit from AA though, they still do, it's because they're at the CPU cap regardless, with most resolutions.

 

they ahve switched from doing shader based AA (like in the 2 and 3 series) and now gone to do it VIA the TMUs (which now there are 40 of them vs the 16 of before)

when you apply 8xAA they do not take as much hit as nvidia cards now do. (and nvidia were decent in the hit taking aswell)

 

I only hope that doesn't mean the quality of it drops to the standard of nvidia's AA. Could this explain why crossfire works better with the 4000s?

 

no one has reported that yet, so id assume no.

 

Hey guys! Man I haven't been here in a while!

I see you guys talking about the 4870s... Well over on xtremesystems there are many people complaining about the card dying extremely quickly - a few days after they bought it even. In addition, people wanting to flash their BIOS with the fan fixed one kill their cards with that too - Ati Flash and WinFlash do not work. W1zzard created a tool that can be found over at TechPowerUp that flashes it - if you don't have a broken card.

I really plan on getting a few of these - but not until they clear up the problems... All in all it seems like a fantastic card though, ATi got it right this time!

 

just to tell people, its not that the stock cards are dropping, its when people are flashing them badly, so dont worry if one wants to pick up the card, but is worried.

its that normally bios' are 64kb, btu due to the DDR5 ati had to push it up to 128kbs

 

Not interested in a BIOS flash - would much rather fit an aftermarket cooler. The HD4850 could potentially be quiet, but not the 4870, not since they put the sodding MEI fan back...

 

Ray, you're going to "pick up" a few of them! lol

How much money do you have?

 

Hey guys,

I go away for 3 months, and now you guys have moved to the next level!

And Waymon says he's been gone for a while - Ray you started the thread, how could you leave if only temporarily!!

I finally sold a few homes, and today for the first time I went back into Newegg to see what my upgrades cost. I am finally seriously considering getting the sapphire 3850 agp card, ($139) and 2 gigs of memory ($73-89) for my aging - did I say AGING, ok that's an understatement, I should say PREHISTORIC p4 3.2gig. I'll finally bust 4,000 3dmark 6 and all you guys are over 10,000 of course. Lol.

Sam, you recommended Corsair to me a while back - those sticks are now only $73. I saw OCZ memory also at newegg for about $89 or so, the reviews looked good and the heatsink looked good, and the timings looked good - for $16 bucks more is it worth it?

What about the graphics card? Are all you guys ok with the sapphire? The thing is dirt cheap now - about $139. I found an old post of yours Sam, on page 65 which is where I ended up in March, and you said the single slot version which supports ATI tool fan speed control is too noisy. But I play with headphones, and I already have the noisiest pc in the world so I don't care. They have over 1000 reviews - and I came across some bad powercolor and HIS reviews, and some that said they had friends who had problems with powercolor, and also HIS ice, but sapphire worked - some are saying watch out for Via chipset, but my chipset is SIS. So I assume Sapphire is going to be good for me, agreed?

What is GRID?

I played the demo of Crysis with my x850xtpe, and it was ok - sort of low settings of course. With the 3850 and 2 gigs I'll increase the settings and buy the whole game on Ebay. I can't play BF2, because it starts stalling - and somebody said that's because I don't have 2 gigs of memory, so I'll wait for the memory upgrade before I try my BF2 again. Hey Ray, are you still playing that a lot?

Mostly I have been playing COD4 online. I have gotten pretty good - my favorite weapon seems to be the submachine gun silenced - is it the p4?? I straffe pretty well - I'm running in circles and the 50 rounds lasts long enough to usually get my 10 points, unless one of their buddies shows up. Everything should work even better when the new card goes in. And then of course, I'll be able finally to buy Medal of Honor Airborne. Hey isn't Band of Brothers coming out soon with that new Market Garden game they've been working on for the last few years?

Here's some Valve news:
My nephew, Miles, has been keeping me up to date on the Valve news. He is the animator at TurtleRock, (did all you guys know that Valve officially bought TurtleRock) which was doing 100% valve contract work for the last 4 or 5 years - they had developed the bots for Counter Strike and Condition Zero - and of course they were working on the new game, Left4Dead - the zombie online coop game. Anyway, there is no more TurtleRock, it's all Valve, so now Valve has an office in Orange County - southern California - for the people who don't like the constant rain in Seattle.

Valve put about 50 extra people in Seattle to work on Left4Dead after buying Turtle Rock (which had about 12 employees including Miles) and they delayed the launch until end of this year - but they have been working furiously to get ready for E3. Miles animates the game - the fluid moves of the zombies that the press writes about come from him - he tries to make it as lifelike as possible - the way people have to lean in when they run around a corner - all the stuff that people really do. Anyway, he told me recently without going into too much detail, that Valve decided the 4 main characters weren't identifiable enough - the biker, the girl, the soldier, and somebody else - so they were looking at redoing the main characters. That makes sense. If people are going to buy the game and if it really catches on - you have to want to be one of the 4 characters. So stuff like that has moved the launch back to end of the year.

So anyway, in catching up in the last 10 pages: I like those AA posts of yours Sam on page 68 - the frame 2 with the only decent window AA from the ATI card - you have a great eye for detail! (I confess I had to agree with shaffaaf on an earlier posting - I couldn't really see much AA difference in the trees in Crysis.)

I see Abuzar of the 8 spoken languages is over 15000 3dmarks now - Sam over 13,000 with crossfire and Ray's suggested tweaks. Abuzar has the best sig of all! When you speak that many languages you don't have time to think of anything as mundane as a sig

Excuse me while I recover from my heart attack - on page 72 Sam disowns ATI

I join shaffaaf :O

It gets worse on page 73. Mike (maccerm) Mr 8800, is gloating - "Graceful climbdown Sam". I don't get it - why is Ray churning along with dual 3870's and not having any problems, and Sam is disowning ATI and he's got the same hardware? Is it powercolor vs sapphire? What is Waymon doing that Sam is not doing?? Awesome crysis pics Ray!

Okay, I see on page 74 that Dinc is looking at the same card I like - the sapphire 3850. I also see that Sam specifically has complaints about the powercolor 3870 - meaning maybe that - similar to the bad reviews I read about the powercolor 3850 vs the sapphire, that I should definitely stay away from powercolor???

On page 74 sam tells dinc not to buy a 3850 for agp - but for $139, why not. I just had this same argument last week with my old friend Mo of the - he has a computer store and builds systems for a living friend. My side is, for $200, memory and graphics card, I can breathe new life into my p4 3.2 (probably push it to 3.5), get shader 3.0, buy Medal of Honor Airborne, double my 2264 3dmark6 score, smooth out my cod4 online gameplay, etc etc whereas to move over to dual core, pci-e, etc. I'm looking at least at $600. The extra $400 is a deal killer. These houses are not selling very fast!

See you,
Rich

 

GRID is Codemasters their latest racer.
It's pretty awesome, it's like a mix of realism and arcade.
So you know, it's not lame "new Need For Speed" but still accessible for anyone that likes to just race.

The big thing about this game is probably the physics.
Which you need in this day and age. XD
The damage and movement, everything like that is just done great.
But the racing and the whole sense of speed and all is just a great experience.

Personally, I dropped my hopes for 'Need For Speed'.
I was a big fan, but this arcade-crap lately versus the earlier stuff just disappointed and disgusted me.
Codemasters, while I already knew their awesome TOCA-games and such, is my "new" favorite brand for racing.
Apparently they're also going to do a F1-racer, which I was looking for lately, so they're doing great for me.

 

Thanks Dinc,

I remember a couple of years ago playing some of the race games - nothing multiplayer. I was not too good - but I think it was Need for Speed of about 5 years ago. You could customize the colors and also the suspension, etc. You could run from the cops as I recall.

I gradually drifted over to shooters - especially world war II, the exception being now cod4 and crysis. But for some variety I recently tried the demo for Curse of Juarez because I actually have been to Juarez (right across the border from El Paso Texas) several times, and also because so many of the graphic card test sites use the game - apparently the graphics are state of the art (not that I would know with my rig - had to turn all settings pretty low.) The gunplay was weak for the preacher character, but for the Billy the Kid character I actually got a huge kick out of riding the horse - it really felt like riding a horse. So I might actually buy the game on ebay one day after my upgrade and see how nice the graphics really are.

But I digress. Your description of Grid, Dinc, sounded very interesting. It kind of made me want to at least download a demo of Grid and check it out after my upgrade.
-Rich

 

Wow, big post for a big absence...

Personally, I prefer Corsair memory to OCZ, someone here had quite a lot of problems with the stuff and generally as far as overclocking and reliability goes, nothing ever seems to best Corsair memory - it's hardly expensive either.
With the 3850 AGP I obviously have to warn you of what a vast difference there is between it and the PCI express version in performance. Generally I like Sapphire above all others for graphics cards. HIS always seemed to be a good manufacturer, but the negative reviews for them are starting to pile up, not sure why, I know their pre-overclocked cards can be troublesome, but that's often a given anyway. The only time I wasn't in favour of Sapphire was their HD3870 PCIe, it has an appalling cooler (not only is it noisy it also doesn't cool that well) and it was also DODOA (dead on day of arrival) - and given that Sapphire made their own version, it's their fault, not ATI's.
Apart from this Sapphire have done well, but you'd be wise not to get the 3850 AGP if it looks like a similar design.

it's been said further down, but GRID is a new codemasters racing game with pretty nice graphics and playability, been playing it quite a bit. The PCIe HD3850 can run it at 1680x1050 on high detail without too much issue, on an X2 4200+. With modern games like this though, only having that single core P4 is really going to hurt your performance.
truth be told, I wouldn't recommend playing current titles with anything less than a dual core, even if it isn't a very fast one, and at least 2GB of RAM as well.

I'll explain the rather alarming few posts I made a little while back - it's all down to drivers. For the first 3-4 months of owning an HD3870, it was juddery in most games, had numerous errors and crashes and was generally a bit unstable, like an unfinished product. Finally when Catalyst 8.4 and 8.5 came out and especially on a fresh XP install, that all disappeared. The early drivers for the 3800 series were useless, they're finally starting to mature a bit.
I had a Powercolor 3870 for a while (before I destroyed it trying to attach a rather poor quality aftermarket heatsink) and it was ok, but the stock cooler was a bit poor, and Powercolor have no warranty of their own. The Asus card I'm using now is miles better in the cooler department, but Asus also don't really have any useful technical support. To my knowledge HIS and Sapphire do.

I tell people not to buy the 3850 AGP for old systems because they think it'll solve all their problems. For cutting edge games, CPus like P4s and 1GB of RAM just won't cut it, there's more to gaming performance than just the graphics card I assure you. In a PCI express system with a dual core an X850XT PE could probably manage nearly 4000 marks already.

DInc: I certainly like GRiD, and I enjoyed Race Driver 2, and certainly dislike modern Need for Speed games (they're all a bit samey really), but Codemasters lose a lot of marks in my book for still using Starforce.

As for Call of Juarez, that's a top end game, you won't see the full gains out of that without a 4000 series PCIe card, a dual or quad core CPU and lots of RAM - it's a night and day difference between high detail and low detail in games like this, and high detail really stresses a gaming PC to its limit!

 

Oh, is Starforce the engine they use then?
If so, I guess you mean "that they still use the same engine"...

But I forgot to mention too, that GRID has great graphics for the lower or even lowest settings.
And on top of that the game just performs great, even for my system.
It has some stutters here and there, but overall it runs smooth.
Which makes it certainly playable, especially if you have a feel for things.
Of course it is not recommended to have an old computer like mine.
But if I'd have a GeForce 7 at least it would be no problem.
If you can live with like Low/Medium overall settings I guess.

At least kudos to Codemasters for the improvement in performance with graphics.
Because I also tried DiRT, and that thing just slugs and cripples at like 10 frames.
It's barely playable, but it just takes away the whole feel of speed and control and all that.
Compared to that, GRID is acting really good.


- - - - - - - - - -


And yeah, there is much of the same in Need For Speed.
I always loved the first couple of games.
Played the first demo, then also got the original of 'II SE'.
Then the era of burning CD-ROMs and downloading came and I got ones like 'III Hot Pursuit', downloaded 'Porsche Unleashed' which was one of the most realistic ones.
I always loved the dashboard-views of the earlier games and found all the details in "Porsche" quite amazing, like the light-controls and even the roof. XD

But then I didn't look at them for a while, skipped ones like 'Hot Pursuit 2', 'High Stakes', 'Underground'.
Until I found 'Underground 2', which I found awesome too, only I was disappointed there was no "first person view" anymore.
'Most Wanted' was a pretty awesome introduction too, with the return of the cops and everything.
'Carbon' was OK, I only found the improved customizing interesting.
And 'ProStreet' was just a mistake.

The whole "newer half" of the NFS-series just got too action-arcade, very Burnout-like.
And with 'ProStreet' they just put that over the top and got bad ratings too.
The concept is cool, besides most probably find the free-roam should be put back in, which I pretty much agree.
Because NFS was based on street-racing after all, and to completely "legalize it" kinda takes out the excitement.
But then came 'GRID', which is similar to 'ProStreet', and stamped 'ProStreet' into the ground!

The only thing I would say is, GRID the game and ProStreet's online features should be merged.
Because, even though GRID's online-interface is quite nice and simple, it misses a lot of the awesome features that like for example ProStreet has.

 

Starforce is not the engine, it's the copy protection - it can cause errors and crashes, but more importantly it slowly destroys DVD drives.
GRID performs at double the speed of DiRT for the same detail levels, but looks every bit as good if not better, I'm impressed with it.
I agree with pretty much everything you say about NFS, played 2SE a lot, loved 3 Hot Pursuit, overall enjoyed Most wanted but was disappointed with its sequels.
I don't play racers online so can't comment on that.

 

Oh, that's messed up, how does it damage the drives? :S

But I haven't really played NFS online either.
Except I ever attempted to play Underground 2 online.
But I had a hard time getting an account and I think there was a lot of LAG.
Cars jumping all over the place, ghosting and everything.
But I did enjoy single-player, a lot of speed in U2 and the races were pretty exciting too.

I did also play the demo of GRID online and that worked fine.
Sure sometimes other players with a high ping would kinda stutter around while still being in the same spot basically.
But overall that wasn't much of a problem.
The only problems I had, and they were pretty messed up,
first of all was that I got disconnected a lot.
Well, I did a whole bunch of good races, but a lot of times I just got disconnected at the beginning (when finally playing!) or like halfway or sometimes at the end.

And the other thing was that once you don't press "ready" in the first second you're in the lobby, they start to kick-vote you.
Which happened to me like half the time, making me not able to play.
And when I complained at the forums, most were against me and just agreeing that it's OK to be an impatient azz.

 

Thanks Dinc and Sam,

So Sam, you're doing okay now on with the Asus 3870? I know you burned up the Powercolor with a bad add-on cooler, but did you replace it? Most importantly, do you own two 3870s like Ray, and did you finally get crossfire working to your satisfaction? Lastly, what 3dmarks are you getting these days?

It's sounds like what happened to you is another reason for me not to be on the cutting edge! (Ok I know, I'm so far behind the "bleeding edge" it's like I'm still riding a horse to work.)

I appreciate your warning about not getting my hopes up too much for "decent" graphics with the 3850 and 2 gigs.

Sigh! Ok, the p4 will be a huge bottleneck. Well, this will be absolutely the last dollars I put into this old rig. An all-new build is coming, maybe for 2009 or 2010, along with a 30" Dell. (Hey by the way, Sam, you said you got a good deal on your Dell on ebay a while back. Out of curiosity, converted to dollars, what did you invest in it?)

Lastly, you and Dinc have really gotten me curious about Grid. Sounds like I might be able to get some decent detail even with my system, when the 3850 goes in, right? I don't know if I'll go online with it though, being kick-voted all the time might get to be depressing!

- Rich

 

Lol, it's probably just me and my bad luck as always...
And I'm sure in the full game there are a lot more games/servers to find.
I know there are plenty of players that are decent and serious drivers.
Just too bad that the majority are childish prix...
By the way, even offline there is plenty of racing to do.
If not even more so.

But if you at least have a P4 (3GHz), 2Gb DDR SDRAM (PC3200) and a G6800XT (128MB / AGP / a bit overclocked), which I don't doubt(?), it will at least be quite playable.

 

I will have almost exactly that - P4 3.2, 2 gigs pc3200, and I'm putting in one of the sapphire 3850 agp cards that you were looking at. As soon as that goes in, I'll give Grid a whirl - first time back to driving in about 3 years.
-Rich