The Official Graphics Card and PC gaming Thread

Ahem PC has both ahem. I can't believe even the dumbed down PC multi is worse than PS3 multi.

 

I dunno... There's something about the console version of CoD that just clicks... And anyway, the whole reason i got it for a console is so when my mates come round we can all play it together.. Something the PC never got

Well, there's LAN i suppose...

Aaand, i have a new signature! After over two years

 

well firstly, lack of lean, is meserable, as is lack of ping numbers. its the same as the PS360, BUT the PS360 hardly lags, unless you get to 2 bars, where as on the PC, even at 3, when you try to run it stops you.

i know there is special ops on the PC but its not the same when you have 2 people in the same room comunicating through it. much better experiance with another person there.

 

http://forums.hexus.net/graphics-cards-monitors/175282-nvidia-msi-lucid-speak-about-hydra-delay.html

 

Haha Sam way to go grilling him

 

I'd like to consider it 'inquiring' more than grilling. The more I spent in that conversation the more I thought I knew before realising I haven't really covered any ground...

By the way, Left 4 Dead 2 is now out, playing it yet?

 

My rigs pretty sad right now. GTX 260, and no games to stretch her legs Just reformated/installed windows 7 again. Another half hour from disc to windows desktop. Xp actually didn't take much longer. It was around only 35-40, on a semi slower HDD. I was attempting to install windows Xp on an alternate drive, and corrupted the Windows 7 MBR. Then I went to reinstall windows 7 on its drive, and corrupted the XP MBR! Whats funny is, I've done this several times before, and now its not working. Aww well. Guess I need to read up on Dual booting anyway
The games are gonna have to wait for now. I figure I'll wait til I have the proper windows 7 installation finished. And at that point, this particular rig will only be my gaming/internet machine. And a few side jobs of course She is after all my Quad! What I really need, is her networked to another machine...I do have the crossover cable, unfortunately neither of my rigs have dual lan/ethernet ports...

 

Haven't played Left 4 Dead 2 yet though I will probably have it before Christmas. Currently Dragon Age Origins is my addiction. Oh how I do love Bioware

 

Yeah lots of Dragon Oranges going on in my community at the moment, along with Borderlands, and undoubtedly now L4D2.
All 3 systems are awake at the moment, though the E5200 is only up due to me wanting a quick setup PC this morning after coming back from Fragsoc last night (slightly skewed chronology as i'm still awake from the 16th) With a proper KVM going, I suspect all 3 systems will be in near-continuous use - I can still use one part of the KVM switch and the 3008WFP as the USB hub to make up for the fact that only one of the KVM's ports works in Win7 , I'm just too lazy to dig it out

 

Seems the reason for Borderlands being so bad right now is in ATI's drivers. The Catalyst 9.10 and 9.11 Beta dramatically reduce performance in all Unreal Engine games. I can no longer play UT3 at 2560x1600 with good frame rates, which will explain why Borderlands runs so poorly. This will also presumably have an effect on Batman: Arkham Asylum. These driver problems affect the HD5000 series too, so their performance is still very poor in all of those titles. In fact, performance of the HD5800 series is driver-limited all round, with very low CPU-based performance figures. The fps lows for the HD5800s are as low as 7fps on a 3.2Ghz i7 in a lot of titles. It's an unfortunate reality that as ATI's hardware progresses, the driver support is slowly getting worse. Couple that with the ever increasing number of games that employ code from nvidia to needlessly cut performance on ATI hardware, the HD5800 is really just a necessary upgrade to get the performance you used to get from your HD4800.

 

Well i'll be damned... Just as we were thinking it'd never manage to show its face...

http://www.bit-tech.net/blog/2009/11/18/nvidia-posts-picture-of-a-real-fermi-card/

 

I'll reserve judgement until I see a bit more of the card before I don't think it's another fake.

 

Sam, good going on the new hydra update - so there's hope!

Sorry to hear about the ruination of MP fps - but single player COD6 has shaff foaming at the mouth - it's that good. (All has to wait for new build - and I still have not had any appointments - but things are moving along in a good direction.)

Bah humbug. So that damn crysis is still going to beat 2 5970s? Hmmm.

Jeff is on a roll - the game is as good as Shaff has been saying. I'll be playing it soon - next summer at the earliest

More news from sam - 5970 not as strong as was thought. Oh heavens. Maybe they'll speed it back up later after the engineering settles down - I can only hope. Raping crysis still is the goal.

Not a very long game I take it.

Hahaha. That's because they sanitized it for you Aussies and took out the violence. (just a guess - after hearing that Left 4 Dead 2 was banned in australia - is that just a rumor?) After all, you don't want to get a former penal colony too stirred up, do you?

[cheap low blow - shut up rich]

WAS - so you also slammed through it in one setting? How short IS this game - 3 hours and 27 minutes? lol

Oh, more from Jeff - 8 hours. Hmmmmm.

Oh, yeah, shokz - I noticed it immediately and I meant to say something.

The new Shokz sig rocks!!

I will be hitting the Launch button in 5 minutes - then it will be time to check advanced video controls and turn off vertical synch and some other settings so I can BARELY run it at 1440x900, like the demo. But Miles says he will try to join me today.

He was telling me about realism mode - no blue outlines - if your teammate is behind a bush - good luck finding him. Realism mode he said, is available on all the various levels of game play, easy to expert. The idea is to really play as a team - he says this was how the game was first meant to be played before they came up with the other ideas.

See you guys. If anybody joins me today and if Manhands is on the team, (I believe that's his handle) then that's Miles Estes, the Valve guy, who modelled Nick and the Coach, and did most of the animating on the first Left 4 Dead.

- Rich

 

There is no official driver for the HD5970 yet, only a beta, and the beta driver does not allow Crysis to be opened at 2560x1600 with 4 GPUs (Let's not forget, nvidia never allowed Crysis to run at that resolution with two GTX295s either), let alone play well. At other resolutions, the scaling is also negative, so we will be waiting until Catalyst 9.12 before we can say what the 5970s will be like in Crysis. Since 9.11 was only released yesterday, that's going to be a full month. Fortunately, plenty of time for ATI to implement plenty of fixes. Since the waiting lists for HD5870s from the board partners now numbers in the tens of thousands the HD5970s aren't exactly going to be in great supply until the post-laser-calibration batch of silicon works its way out in the form of retailable products, probably late january-ish.

Not exactly, it's all drivers. The HD5970 itself is a magnificent card, producing over 150fps average at 2560x1600 max with 4xAA in many recent titles, such as HAWX, Far Cry 2 and Modern Warfare 2 (though the latter pair have driver performance glitches that do not show in the benchmarks - these, however, affect all ATI GPUs in Win7 in the case of Far Cry 2, and all crossfire configs in the case of MW2)

5-7 hours, same as most COD single player campaigns.
Had a few goes at Left 4 Dead 2 and I love it. Some spectacular work there guys. Very impressed.

 

http://www.caseandcooling.fr/carte-...ig-bang-fuzion-hydra-200-en-details?showall=1

mmm 16x 16x 0x, OR 16x 8x 8x.

no DUAL GPU cards supported ATM. only single, and only 2 single cards. if you are mixing, nvidia at top slot please.

im still baffled though. the link to the CPU is ONLY via DMI, which for PCIE 16x slots, is just that, ONE 2.0 16x slot. no matter what is communicating to the CPU, thats the max bbandwidth, so even if both slots work at 16x, and feed the lucid 32x in total, the lucid can only communicate with the CPU via 16x. lucid + x58 seems perfect.


PS x58 is now a year old, any x68 planned?

 

I don't get why the Lucid would need anything more than 16x to communicate to the CPU, it's only interrogating the DirectX commands. I also don't get why the X58 would need replacing, what would they add? People seem to get into the mentality that just because something isn't brand new any more, it has to be updated for no reason - this is how stuff gets broken...

In other news, tried installing DanielK drivers on my system again, but the stuttering is unbearable. Sound repeats itself so much that a 3 minute MP3 file can take up to 7 minutes to play. Not impressed. A shame, as I really do miss having CMSS support. Ah well, will have to just buy a sound card that doesn't rely on DanielKs to run in Win7 after christmas.
Wait a minute, I'm a genius, put the Audigy SE in the Windows XP PC! Why didn't I think of it before..... <slaps self> Sad thing is, I did want to upgrade that PC to Win7 at some point. Guess that's going to have to wait.


As yet unsure of which way I want to take upgrades for my system. No longer do any of the current games I play either support crossfire, or even run properly when it is disabled. Single GPUs are looking oh-so-attractive at the moment. The Lucid system could be the saviour of this, but how heavily reliant on drivers it is, is really now putting me off. There is only one game in that list that is current and is supported by Lucid that isn't supported by Crossfire, which is OF: Dragon Rising. Admittedly they are still in testing phase, but if the Hydra system is no better than Crossfire for launch times then it has little to offer (since the ATI + nvidia scaling is very bare right now) other than a bandwidth doubler, which if I'm right, can't be used outside of Hydra mode, rendering the platform almost useless.
At the current rate of progress it's actually looking like I will be buying a GTX295, and just abandoning being able to use AA at 2560x1600, since that actually seems the most powerful solution to play games at the moment, nvidia GPUs being mandatory to play half of today's titles...

of course, ideal world, I'd have three PCs to test this with. The first with an i7 with an SLI-capable board, with two GTX295s, one setup in part-PhysX.
The second with a Hydra/i5 board and a GTX285 and two HD5870s, and the third with another i7 and an ATI-based setup, two HD5970s I guess.

Is this really what it's come to in order to play any game you like at high settings? Three £2000 PCs?




(In case you're wondering what brought this rant on, yesterday I played Borderlands and Left 4 Dead 2, two of the most fun games out at the moment, both of them I really enjoy, but both of them run so badly it's hard to enjoy them. With Borderlands in one section there were almost no textures rendered at all, so I had to get someone else over voice chat to guide me around the room, since I was walking through black nothingness, and even at only 1280x1024 res, the game lags quite noticeably. Later on, in left 4 Dead 2, I had to put up with a fps spike down to 30fps every 2-3 seconds which was very offputting and shadows that flash fast enough to give someone an epileptic fit.
As I type this on a £50 keyboard that randomly inserts extra characters I didn't type with my other PC hooked up to an £80 KVM switch that is incapable of anything but a USB switcher, I do find myself wondering - Was it worth it? There's about £4000 worth of equipment set up in here, and quite frankly, apart from the monitor, I would actually be better off if the rest of it added up to less than £800. I've spent so much on technology I can scarcely afford to eat, and what have I got to show for it?

 

to show for it u have an xbox that runs all of what u need, nicely on your new TV





xD hehe


its why im now content with my dual core 4870 PC. upgrading so much was not worth it. i think only an SSD is really worth it right now.

 

Congrats. To show for all my PC hardware, I have an Xbox....

 

haha, drink all around?

 

Sooo...you guys think that Left 4 Dead 2 is worth 50 USD? To hear sam speak highly of it, it must be quite the winner indeed I don't like spending money on myself before christmas, but darn it I am itching to play this new installment! And I don't think it'll hinder the purchase of the PS3 for my brother to much...