The Official Graphics Card and PC gaming Thread

I don't believe I ever said that the water looked realistic...

I like things that look Trippy! Things don't have to look realistic for me to be in awe LOL! Take the boomer or smoker for instance. They were obviously not drawn from life. Yet they look incredibly awesome LOL! Highly creative. The artist deserves 2 pats on the back LOL!

 

the batman is teh sex!

fifa 10 is also very good, but i think im the only one that likes footy.

i got uncharterd for a fiver, and am about 7 chapters in, its a superb game, cant wait to play ncharterd 2.

 

A bit of a warning here - if anyone is tempted by the low budget offerings of the GT210 and GT220, don't.

HD4650: cost $55 - rough equal: X1800XT - performance index: 100% Value index 1.8
GT220: cost $65 - rough equal: X1800GTO - performance index: 80% Value index 1.2
GT210: cost $50 - rough equal: 9200Se - performance index: 12% Value index 0.25 (Note, this is less than half the performance offered by today's integrated graphics chips such as the HD3300)

 

Ouch a 9200 no kidding? That is terribly slow worse so than low end cards from the past several series. I Think even the GeForce 6200 was faster. The GT220 doesn't seem too bad though I would rather get a 4670 over all 3 because it's barely any more money and like twice as fast.

Can you point me to a the benchmark you drew those figures from?

Oh nvm found one. Wow that is sad. I'm fairly certain my 7600GT whomped the GT210 hard. How sad that card is worse than everything and not even worth the money.

 

Indeed, the obvious flaw is 16 stream processors. SIXTEEN? In this day and age?

 

LOL a 9200SE was the first gpu I bought. I can't believe nvidia thought it was a good idea to make something that weak.

 

its a 9400GT with a 64bit interface.

tbh if we are going to hate on these cards we should hate on ALL low end cards. yes for the price they are OTT, but they fill the oem and low end void, and this is where the major volumes sell, not us enthusiasts.

 

I didn't mean to "hate" on the card, it's just that to me it's ridiculous to make a new gpu that's comparable to what was available 7 years ago.

 

It's not even comparable to the lowest end cards from the last several years. I'm fairly sure an Nvidia 8200 or ATi HD3300 integrated chip or the like would stomp it. I know a 7300GT or 6600 would maul it. It really is a sad effort and there are many cards in the low end for a similar price that are easily more than 5 times faster. Not to mention it's faster and cheaper to use an integrated chip. The card has no place in any PC.

 

Oh come on now! Im sure it'll make a nice paper weight LOL!

 

It's such an anemic card that it would probably blow away in a slight breeze. I know Nvidia is only scaling the technology to the price but this is a case of choking the tech too much. It completely destroys what it is to be a video card i.e. an upgrade from onboard. It is useless. You can't take a car/truck and remove all the wheels and market it as a usable product. Just the same you can't take a video card and make it so underpowered it's useless.

The GT210 is slower even than the Radeon 9550 and GeForce FX5500 in most games. Do you realize how slow these cards were even for the time and they outperform a video card that just came out in the last few days? That is sad. As an example look up a review of the GT220 which is only one step up and nearly the same price. And it's easily several times faster than the GT210. In fact I dare say the GT220 is decent for the price. At least it can actually play games period.

I don't care if lower end cards are meant right for multimedia and the like. This particular card is just useless because you can buy any almost other low end card from the last several generations and have it be many times faster. Sure it will be a bit faster than older cards in some new stuff but it still has extremely low power for any card in this generation. Seriously, come on, we can't support junk cards like these.

/End Rant

 

The GT220 is almost 10 times the power of the GT210, and yet the HD4650 beats it. That should speak volumes. Low end cards should serve a purpose and most do. However, these do not.

 

Just trying out Dragon Rising now I have somewhere to install it. First thing I notice is the game does not support Alt-tab, poor in this day and age. Also, what's with the terrible smoke effects? Nice textures but bad smoke ruin the experience, just have no smoke if you can't be bothered to do it properly...

Starting out the first mission at 2560x1600 4xAA all high, I'm getting 40-60fps. Not terrible, but for how the game looks, not great. I stand next to some sandbags which can only be perhaps 80x80 thumbnail-size textures expanded to, when I stand next to them, fill half the screen. They look disgusting. The stars in the sky are as 2D as it gets, FEAR obliterates Dragon Rising for that. So far I'm not really impressed. The game isn't quite smooth enough to max out and still enjoy, yet it looks no better than a few 3-4 year old games, just with some high resolution textures to highlight the areas where the graphics are bad. The menu is very frustrating, you have to wait for the snazzy effect of it flicking into place before you're allowed to move anywhere else. I don't like menus that do this. The intro videos also lag, as the codec for them hasn't been setup correctly.

This game promised much from the preview videos, but quite frankly, I'm very disappointed. While I can enjoy tactical military shooters like this, it takes the game to be fluid and well designed for me to get into them. This stopped me playing ARMA 2, and I think it's going to stop me playing OFDR as well.

 

Uh oh, Sam, the super-critical, is dumping on everybody's OFR trip! Smoke, shmoke, I'm gonna pretend I didn't read that, lol.

And all I can add to the video card discussion is - you guys: sam, jeff and shaff, certainly know your graphics products. The public should be warned about nvidia low-end useless cr*p like that - in this thread is a start.

Well, one doesn't have to be gone more than a day or so for another brawl - this time kevin, jeff and sam are duking it out!

After posting that very interesting old pic of mario bros - kevin has the audacity to say:

Which makes me try to remember what it looked like. I remember only that the rain is really cool - and seems quite real to me. I've jumped in the water to swim from cops before, but I can't remember.

However, estuansis DOES remember:

And Sam adds:

But Kevin holds his ground:

Hahahaha.

(And that's the first thing I was thinking - he didn't say anything about realism. But remember where you are - jeff and sam are the realism dudes of all time, lol.)

Thanks Shokz and Kevin for helping me out on the 360 controllers for the PC - I had no idea - that's cool - and the fact that Shaff, in mentioning OF2, was talking about Dragon Rising. I saw it on Steam yesterday OFragon Rising and my brain understood finally. Steam ran for about 15 minutes and then suddenly started updating my L4D at 700KB/sec so I know I now have crash course.

BB came on and chatted - the one I helped get through "what are you trying to prove" - and said he'd watch for me if I got back on L4D today. I may do it, or maybe just finish the last 15th campaign of Company of Heroes - holding the bridges and blocking the nazi escape from Normandy. I can't go off and kill zombies and let those f**king nazis escape, can I? LOL

Rich

 

From what I remember, the rain in GTA4 was quite good. However, everything else about the game graphically was terrible. The lighting was not only very primitive, but also buggy on most graphics cards until they patched it. The textures themselves are basically uncompressed, so you need a 2GB graphics card (very rare) to play on high texture detail, but the game STILL looks bad!
For how much I panned OFDR in my last post, it is nowhere near as bad as GTA4, it runs better and looks better. It's just not on the "good" list.

 

Initial impressions of the Caviar Black, not done that much testing yet, seek and vibration seems exactly as predicted, very mediocre but not terrible. Continuous R/W writes seem good, but the controller is quite slow. Heavy disk usage can lock the PC for a couple of seconds. Nowhere near as bad as a controller-less first-gen SSD, but still, in real world tasks, that cuts into their performance quite a bit.

 

Related:
http://www.geeks.co.uk/7282-activision’s-bobby-kotick-hates-developers-innovation-cheap-games-you

 

LOL, can someone please fix that...

 

http://www.geeks.co.uk/8765-pc-modern-warfare-2-players-won’t-get-dedicated-servers

that is the main reason for me.