The Official Graphics Card and PC gaming Thread

For me, sick is generally bad, but I know a few people that use it as 'good'. Something you can easily tell with speech, but not so much with text

 

slang ftw. its liek how wicked is also awesum

 

I can just see the mods shaking their hads having read that...

 

http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3646

sam, i have found your next mobo

 

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814102856&Tpk=5870

 

guru3d have the firt review out!

let me show jsut ONE picture:




heres the link

http://www.guru3d.com/article/radeon-hd-5870-review-test/1


LOL @ this:

 

Shaff, Extremely impressive posts. Im friggin drooling over here LOL! That Lucid motherboard sounds REALLY impressive. I may put off my next build til I know more about this new and improved gaming rig

 

You know what comes next - Sam's too-much-time-on-his-hands statistical analysis!
Crossfire 5870 results are up on some sites, so expect coverage of that too. This one looks interesting - REALLY intesresting.

 

Hahaha. There's always a catch. (Thanks for the phone number.) What do you mean, second phone?

I've been playing Company of Heroes finally. I am embarrassed to say that I got so frustrated with it I threw it away, and then after thinking about it for a day or so I bought it again for $6.88. I know what you're thinking: "Don't make rash decisions!" LOL

The chapter that I got frustrated on has become my favorite, and I can now easily beat it on expert. If you guys have played the game, it's the chapter about being in the countryside, and fortifying one stretch of road for the Red Ball Express, so the allied can capture the port at Cherbourg after the Normandy invasion. It takes about 3 or 4 hours. You have to have patience.

Anyway, to beat the level, the secret is building an impregnable base. That way you never have to look back and worry about "homeland security" when you eventually take two or three shermans and some engineers and a half track etc. out on the mission to capture most of the rest of the sectors and then destroy the Nazi tank-building center.

Building an impregnable base means tank traps. And after I saw the convoy trucks leave the road and bypass a group of MG nests at an intersection, I realized I could build the tank traps beyond the road for more protection to the base. So I put them way out there, just out of tank shot, and then I created one killing zone for the tanks to come in, and for my tanks to get out - right in front of a battery of three or four AT cannons (moveable anti-tank artillery).

It is fun to just sit there sometimes and watch those panzers come in and get blown to kingdom come - without me having to marshall a tank or lift a finger. Hahaha.

I'm on a new chapter, capturing Hill 192, that is frustrating me now - trying it on Hard (not expert) and being frustrated by not being allowed to build a sherman after losing all my tanks. So next week I'll try it again and not build any anti tank weapons or half-tracks or anything until I have my third tank. I think it's a game glitch, but whatever....

Then next week I won't stick my neck out any more until I send the little jeep out to see what lies ahead of me, so I won't stumble on an aggressive panzer who ignores my main tank and destroys my weak flame-throwing Crocodile anti-infantry bulldozer sherman again. And I won't spawn too many engineers until I get a couple of mortar teams - you have to have those mortar teams - it just makes it so much easier.

Anyway, I have to thank you, Sam, for encouraging me to get an RTS game after I have been strictly FPS all these years. It IS interesting, and it gives me a different way to look at things. It's not quite as personally gripping as fps (I just read one review that said that Company of Heroes comes close to the excitement of fps) but it is nice to get the commanding officer perspective. I guess it's the kind of strategizing the WWII captains and majors and colonels had to do to win battles, with the limited resources that were available to them.

Rich

 

personally im not liking the 5870. the 4870x2 is mostly better, sometimes not, for alot less, though itll be second hand.

the 5850 though shoudl be better and it should drop the GTX 285 price.


personally anyone with a high end card, no need to upgrade, realistically the cards otu now can pracitally play any game.

 

Rich, the second phone is given to you by Roman, after the second or third mission. At least I think so LOL! It was a few months ago when I accomplished that. He mentions getting a better one after the first mission I think...
Suffice to say, the second or better phone(I think there are more phones)is needed to use cheats.

 

Ignoring the price for a moment, I think the HD5870 is a fabulous product. It is hands down the single fastest GPU there's ever been, it scales very well in crossfire and paves the way for the rest of the DX11 generation. It has landmark changes in power consumption for that level of performance (especially idle). The only negative against it, apart perhaps from the card length (but fitting an 11" card into most cases IS doable, it might just be a squeeze) is the price, which was always going to happen if there was no competition for it. You have to remember, The HD4870 was released after the GTX280 came out, so the pricing of the 4870 was rather strictly enforced by the fact that a faster card was already out. At the moment no such thing exists bar the dual cards, the 4870X2 and GTX295, and in a few games (the ones were CF scaling is dubious at least) the 5870 beats the X2, and in a few it comes very near to the 295, and remembering what I said all along about the GTX295 at 30" res, if anything the 5870 is a better card than it. It uses much less power, performs not far behind, has no dual graphics scaling issues and doesn't fall to pieces at 2560x1600. Two 5870s is a force to be reckoned with, unmatched by pretty much anything out there (MARS 295 SLI included, bizarrely enough) in all but the most nvidia-exclusive titles. The scaling of quad crossfire, while reasonable, real world just won't stack up against the absolute power of the 5870 GPU combined with the better scaling of having only 2 GPUs. I expect STALKER Clear Sky and Left 4 Dead to be the only games where two X2s would beat two 5870s.
Considering how rare 4870X2s now are, and when you do find them they're at least £280, the 5870 only being £20 more at £300 isn't really that much of a stretch when you consider the advantages it offers over the X2 card. (Another bizarre point to put forward is you should be able to crossfire 5870s in XP, you don't need vista or win7 to do it). The GTX285 now it's finally been cut to a sensible price is a slight poke in the backside for the 5870 as it's generally only 20-30% behind and only costs 20% less at £250. Still, £50 extra for that much of a performance benefit is better than what I'm used to seeing in the high end sector of the market.

Long story short, I am liking the 5870.


A few examples of where the 5870 is already starting to show promise:
Far Cry 2 - has essentially no support for any more than 2 GPUs - allows 2x5870s to gain a 55-60% lead over two 4870X2s.
Also, two 5870s are 20-50% ahead of GTX285 SLI. This trend continues in left 4 Dead, HAWX and Sacred 2 - to a greater or lesser extent.

Crysis Warhead - two 5870s slightly outperform two GTX285s even in this title. Only problem is, immature drivers mean performance drops for minumum frame rates at the moment - once that's fixed, nvidia's best single GPU offering in SLI mode will finally have been bested at Warhead

Stalker Clear Sky - one 5870 beats the GTX295.
Dawn of War 2 - one 5870 beats the GTX295 handsomely.
Call of Duty:World At War - due to the Crossfire minimum frame rate bug (as yet I'm unable to tell if it will affect crossfired 5800s) one 5870 triples the minimum frame rate of a 4870X2

 

on ebay i see them goign from 160 to about 220.

if the 5870 can hit about £250, its VERY good. i see the 5850 being a good price at £200 hopefully it can ge tto £180.

 

ebay is cheap for a lot of things, so that's irrelevant. I scored a 4870x2 from ebay for £255 back when they should cost £370 - it's luck of the draw. I never mention ebay prices when comparing how good value products are - there's nothing stopping you from potentially getting something 1/4 of the price it should be - that doesn't make it good value for everyone else.

I see the 5850 reaching £180 quite soon after release, perhaps around christmas or earlier. The 5870 may very well reach £250 once nvidia have something to rival it.

 

I love it when 2+ companies duke it out. The consumers are usually the ones to reap the benefits

 

Precisely - look at the price of all the CPUs AMD/Intel are rivalling on compared to the top end ones...

 

Yes, Keith, you should get GTA4 - quite entertaining.

Jeff, I normally can't take lag - and maybe Sam, you're right, the lag is what makes the driving tricky - but in general I don't seem to mind it that much. Now here's something interesting - combining my 10fps lag with Niko being drunk and the screen waving here and there - now that is one hullava interesting driving combination!! Hahaha.

Keith, back to you - what did you just say: FOUR HISTORICAL FIGURES!! WHAT!!

And just how many historical Brits are there?

I can only think of two off-hand - King Henry the 8th, and Margaret Thatcher. Whereas for Americans, we've got George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Winston Churchill, Sir Isaac Newton, and Barack Obama - and I'm just getting started.

Furthermore, you have every God-given right to be an atheist, if that's what floats your boat, and are you really telling me you're another of those cricket-playing limeys - the long lost Abuzar would cheer, while Shaff on the other hand is a big footie fan!

5870 HERE AT LAST
The 5870 is out and it is just about exactly equal to the 4870x2. Wow!! Let me say that again. Wow!!

Sam, great case for the 5870:

And what about that board that Shaff came up with - which Kevin also took note of - with the Hydra chip that load-balances across gpus. Sam, do you see any promise to that technology, or do you think it's a gimmick?

Oh, yeah, I think I remember that. Yes, then if that's the case, I DO have the latest and greatest phone.

Thanks again for that phone number!! Can you fly over the airport and shoot down 747s as they take off? Hahahaha!

(I seem to be in an evil "kill hundreds" mood - I just saw Hurt Locker about a bomb squad in Iraq - intense!)

Hey, speaking of seeing that movie last night, I went with - guess who - Mr. Valve animator dude Miles Estes. And when I got to his house to pick him up, just before we left, he sat me down in front of his Dell 30" (Valve took a tip from Sam and picked up those monitors for all staff eliminating the dual 20" monitors they had before that) to see the latest progress on Left 4 Dead 2.

LEFT 4 DEAD 2
I sat in stunned amazement, watching a trailer that was far more realistic and detailed than anything we've seen to date - at least 50% longer than the Left 4 Dead opening video in the current game. When it was over, I said "Wow, that is awesome. Is that the new trailer?" He said, "Nope, that's the game-opening video!"

It was unbelievable! It looked very finished and very high res. Totally movie-quality like something from Lucas Films.

Miles was talking to me about normal maps, where they take a very high-res face for example, with detail at the pore level, and lay it over a more manageable low-res model, and then compute a normal map that is a texture map of sorts, which tells where the apex of each polygon is, and where the polygon sits in space, and this normal map, when laid over the low-res image, produces a light reflecting image that looks just like you have a very high-detailed model.

I was asking about colors, and he said that there is a separate color map. Also there is a shininess map, and several more types of maps that can be laid over the model in layer after layer, as they make each successive pass to define the frame.

I asked him if this was also done in real time when one is playing the game, and he said he wasn't sure - he was mainly talking about the movie department and how they produced the video he had just shown me.

The video starts out with the four people - the gambler in white suit, burly black guy named "Coach", young black girl who wields an axe, and young white guy in baseball cap - who are going through some kind of store - maybe a gun shop. They are reading notices about the zombies. The baseball cap guy says something to the effect "Well, I'm just gonna blow them all to hell" as he burnishes a pump shotgun.

Next thing you know . . . . . (I can't say anymore - sworn to secrecy - you'll have to wait til November, lol) but rest assured they wreak zombicidal mania!

(Hahaha - that reminds me - Sam also remembers Carmageddon - what a trippy game. Miles worked for the company that made Carmageddon in Irvine, Orange County, Southern California, as his second job out of college, on the game "Run like Hell." He used to complain to me every week when we had lunch, about what a miserable bunch of management he was surrounded by making terrible decisions at every step of the way - changing to a different game engine halfway through the development. The company ultimately failed, and Miles had long left by the time that game came out. The game was awful - I sent him a review where the author wrote "Space is empty and nobody can hear you scream that you want your money back!" LOL)

One more tidbit: At one point the coach yells, as he man-handles a zombie "This USED TO BE a nice neighborhood!" Okay, that's all!

Miles says the game is about 60 days out - something like November 17th. Which reminds me. Did they ever download the new September freebie - the small little level that happens after the hospital helicopter crashes?

Rich

 

Yes keith, You should definitely get GTA IV. Its very entertaining. Don't let anyone tell you different. When I get off work, and need to unwind...You know, one of those nights where everything is against you! LOL! GTA IV can sure make everything feel better again

Rich, im afraid I've only had suicidal missions in the Helicopter LOL! I almost landed on a cop one time. I was laughing like crazy imagining how he would have reacted

 

Are you having a laugh Rich? lol, you say there are hardly any historical british figures and then when you reel off a load of supposedly american historical figures you list a load of british people! I suppose what you must mean is people who are commonly referred to historically in your country, in which case there's too many to count, far too many. You have to consider that people like Joseph Bazalgette are important historical figures as well (constructed most of London's sewerage system in the 19th century).
Benjamin Franklin's an interesting one, because his father was english, born in Northamptonshire.

As for the Hydra technology, I am essentially praying it's not a gimmick, I don't really see why it would have to be - its success would obviously depend on how successful it was in terms of games compatibility. If anything, I'd buy one just for the PCI express bandwidth on the P55.
As far as I'm aware, the opening videos for Valve titles are 1280x720 video files, they certainly aren't game renders. So "High res" wasn't in fact that high res at all, heh - unless perhaps you were watching the original before transcoding.
With regard to the normal mapping, I could be wrong at this, but as far as I know most of those processes to create, say a face, are used in-game, but rather than do them one at a time they're done simultaneously.

As far as the telling us what happens in the intro video goes, don't spoil it!
For one, I want to see it, and for two, I'm pretty sure that's not going to sit well with Valve you having posted exactly what happens in the intro video eight weeks before the game is released.

The new DLC for the original Left 4 Dead, "Crash Course" will be available Tuesday 29th September. Left 4 Dead 2 is being released week 6 in mine and shaff's academic calendar (17th November for the US, 20th November for the UK)

 

That blew up.

It was a gentle joke that proved quite offensive to someone.

My cricket reference was me making a joke about my own race to prevent this very situation from occurring. If you weren't so fast in jumping all over something I assumed a well educated person would not take quite so personally you might have noticed this.

On a side note: 'Assassin’s Creed 2 PC has moved to the first quarter of 2010' :'(