The Official Graphics Card and PC gaming Thread

See how long its been LOL! I don't have the foggiest idea who that is now...

 

The 5850's fan is incredibly loud, 50% sounds like my old gpu at 90%. Hopefully Vapor-x will do it's job and it won't ever get anywhere near that....*wanders off to dream some more*

Respectable enough score though, little more than double my old gpu.

 

22k is fantstic! esp for a dual core.

PS what was yuor old GPU?

 

haha my sig is inaccurate now (sorry), just haven't updated since the OC on the i7 930 isn't finished yet (at 3.65Ghz now).

The old gpu was a 8800GTS

 

understood. eww only 3.65. crack that upto 4.2 and be happy

 

Hahaha! (Does it count that I upgraded the p4 from 3.2 to 3.8 - oc'd to 3.99 - and also maxed out at 2 gigs ram?)

All right, I already know the answer: "NO!"

Wow, Red comes back from the greenie guys after a decade away!! So you and Jeff will have the same card (Jeff with crossfire.) If you have any problems, ask Estuansis!

Well I certainly never said such. But, as I recall, you did throw out a perfectly good first name that your parents gave you, for some silly reason.

Red - 22,256 3dmarks!!! Holy shmoly. Pretty hot chip, i7 930 at 3.65ghz - what would your score be at 4 ghz with crossfire - could you catch sam's 27000? Shaff says your chip is dual core, but I'm reading it's a quad core direct replacement for the soon-to-be-discontinued 920. What are you talking about, Shaff? - Oh - he pulled the processor off your sig instead of off your cpu-z picture - lazy shaff!!!

Yeah, I agree with Shaff, get that up at least to 4 ghz, and maybe throw another 5850 into the mix like Jeff, then let's see if you can give Sam a run for his money!

On one other note - I saw that little video about tesselation - I think you guys maybe were talking about it before. The games aren't using it yet, but DX11 supports it - and in nvidia's movie on Tom's hardware review, they talk about a 10-fold level of detail, without too much of a performance penalty on the gpu. But to do that they re-organized their gpu for much more massive parallel processing. On Tom's chart they showed the 480 and derivatives performing at about 83% with tesselation turned on, whereas ati had dropped to about 65%.

Do you guys think tesselation will start to become the big next thing in making video games more realistic?

Rich

 

yes i do, i just think the time it starts propperly taking off is whent he next gen parts come out. though i have to say, for supercomuting, i dont know what nvidia did for fermi, but damn is it good! physics, folding, encoding tesselation, its got on lock.

and 2x5850s shoudl eb faster than a 5970 and shoudl be faster tthan sams setup, id assume.

 

If I can afford it (money and heat wise) there's another 5850 coming my way, this is an X58 platform after all lol.

I think sam's 27k will stay a far off goal for a while, even with CF and 4Ghz I think it would be a push.

p.s. 3.76Ghz now, needed to bump the voltage again though

 

nim sure CF 5850s and a 4GHz i7 would beat the 27k mark.

 

Maw: Not really, latest catalyst should be fine. Aftermarket drivers are too out of date to be worth bothering with any more.
Omega: It's mainly people who own nvidia cards who post that ATI drivers are bad without owning one of their cards (becomes obvious if you press them for more info). Some of them are genuine complaints, but about stuff nvidia are just as bad at. I won't say ATI's drivers are great, they're pretty dire, but so were nvidia's the last time I looked. Graphics drivers are just bad in general.
I see it this way. ATI drivers have had bugs, occasional dodgy textures, and if i open 2 games at once my cards are stuck at 3D clock speeds until I reboot (ATI are not going to fix this, I think it's deliberate for reasons I don't understand).
However, at least my graphics drivers don't turn my fans off, and even if they did, it wouldn't destroy my card.
I wouldn't avoid nvidia for their drivers alone, they're not bad enough, and until the GTX400 series arrived, I wouldn't avoid nvidia for performance either. What I would avoid nvidia for is that their hardware is weakly manufactured and tends to fail when it gets old, and the company as a whole is in my top 5 most corrupt businesses list. The company's business ethic is absolutely shocking.
Having made the mistake once though, were I to find that nvidia offered the only realistic card (i.e. HD3800 vs 8800 series), I'd jump ship. The last time, sticking with ATI through the bad times was just a plain bad idea.
Rich: I would guess that Maw's system at 4Ghz would be about 24,000 or so. It would take two 5850s and a clock speed more like 4.3-4.4 to beat my score, as even with two 5850s, my ageing X2s are a good 30% faster.
I'm pretty set on the 4GB HD5970 if it comes out at the expected £700, which is likely to reduce my 3dmark, since the card is not quite as powerful as the Quad CF array it replaces. It will, however, vastly improve efficiency, high resolution performance (due to the 2GB per GPU) and non-CF performance of course. I would love to run it in CF with another 5800 series card, either a 2GB 5870 Eyefinity6 or another 4GB Petunia, but neither is realistic at present, especially not with 4GB of RAM, I really need to step up to 8 at some point.

 

dman 4GB of GPU and 4GB of system ram. how mental is that! never thought id see the day.

though i am surprised that 2x4GB RAM hasnt become standard. its been a few years now.

 

I already have 4GB of GPU RAM, just split between four GPUs and not two

 

ahh lol, thats true. now 4GB of ram per GPU, only needed for quadHD?

 

That or eyefinity setups with AA applied.

 

All Points Bulletin Beta (AA Excluded)

Minimal: Radeon X1800XT/HD2900 series/HD3690/HD4650/HD5570 or above, Geforce 7800GTX/8600GTS/9500GT/GT220 or above
Reduced: Radeon HD3850/HD4700 series/HD5670 or above, Geforce 8800 series/9600GSO G92/GT240 or above
Moderate: Radeon HD4770/HD4850/HD5750 or above, Geforce 8800GTS G92/9800GTX/GTS250 or above
Good: Radeon HD5800 series or above, Geforce GTX280/275 or above
Optimal: Radeon HD5870 or above, Geforce GTX295/GTX480 or above
Extreme: RadeoN HD5850 Tri-CF or above, Geforce GTX285 Tri-SLI/GTX480 SLI or above

 

sorry about that ddp, wont happen again.

 

Wow, I see that ddp is on the lookout - we better keep our boots polished. Where, oh where did Binkie go, lol. (just kidding ddp )

That was a very interesting comment on whether you guys think we'll be seeing a lot more tesselation.

Shaff: "Yes I do, I just think the time it starts properly taking off is when the next gen parts come out though."

What's your take Sam? The 10-fold, order of magnitude, increase in graphic realism at less than 20% performance penalty, which nvidia is boasting about, actually sounds rather intriguing to say the least.

I believe that I read a few months ago that the 6000 family is in the works for some announcements by third quarter of next year. If tesselation is going to be that big of a deal, I sure hope ati has begun folding their arms around it so they're ready by then. (About the time I upgrade, lol.)


So, Red is gonna go crossfire too, like Jeff. Outstanding. It seems to me, since he's already at 22,500 with 3.5 ghz or so, that he's gonna beat sam's predicted 24000 - although I see sam's point about the 30% more power of each of his 4870x2 cards.

Speaking of your setup, Sam, switching to the 4 gig petunia 5970 and selling off the 4870x2s will likely drop you to what? - 25,500?

But I really like what you said about HIGH RESOLUTION performance from the increased graphics memory! So, aside from 3dmark6, you expect your petunia 5970 2560x1600 performance to beat what you are getting currently with quad cf?

And then, if you actually went to quad cf with two 5970s - and upgraded your system ram to 8 - what kind of 3dmark6 would you expect to hit, and what kind of 2560x1600 performance would you expect to get? How much would 8 gigs of system ram set you back?

Rich

 

I am getting a graphics card for my PC but I am hell confused what to buy. Which one's the best for gaming under 100 dollars??? The one which'll play GTA IV and all the edited by ddp coming this year. I was getting a 9400GT but someone said it's not meant for gaming and edited by ddp like that. Please help!!!

 

Tesselation is an interesting thing. In raw theory, the GTX480 card is going to absolutely demolish the competition at it. However, latest ATI drivers have improved their tesselation somewhat, though their design still prohibits them from competing with the Fermi cards at it.
However, this is only a problem when you use tesselation in its raw form, i.e. in the synthetic benchmark Uningine. In real world titles, as it stands right now, both companies can handle tesselation equally. No game has tesselation demanding enough to stress the ATI cards too much.
A 10-fold order of magnitude for better graphics performance? I lol'ed at that. Nvidia aren't stupid in bigging up what is their most important selling point these days, after the gimmicks of 3D vision and PhysX, but 10-fold increase? Right now, AA is more beneficial. I've seen what Tesselation can do and I'm impressed. However, even at its best, a 10 fold increase in detail, for a start is subjective, you can't quantify how good something looks, and secondly, even if you were to do so, a 10 fold increase would be more like the difference between minimum and maximum detail in most games. Tesselation is good, but it ain't that good.
Ultimately, the real killer here is that by the time we see the advantage of tesselation really shining through for the 400 series, they're going to be outdated cards, and it will take something new from nvidia to really earn them the lead. Here's hoping ATI have put a little more thought into tesselation with the Southern Islands Architecture (HD6000). Not too much, the only way they can truly match their tesselation performance with equal GPU power is to have a horrifically overdesigned GPU as they have, we don't want that. Especially because TSMC have abandoned the 32nm process level after being no-confidenced by their customers, and gone straight for 28nm, which isn't going to be available in large numbers for a long long time. Thus, the HD6000 is also going to be 40nm. Unless ATI pull some seriously magical stuff, the TDP of the HD6000 is going to be a lot higher than the HD5000 series if we're to see any more than minor performance increases. Here's hoping it's not sufficiently high they can't make a next-month dual card - one of ATI's best marketing strategies. Southern Islands should be ready way before Q3 2011, I wouldn't be surprised to see the first stuff possibly come out before christmas this year, assuming no delays. Remember, X1800 series: end of 2005, HD2900 series: beginning of 2007 (18 months), HD4800 series: July 2008 (15 months), HD5800 series: September 2009 (14 months). 14 months from September 2009 is November 2010.
As for the 3dmarks, remember Rich, 3dmark06 is utterly bound by CPU performance. At this end of the scale, upping your graphics power by double probably only gets you one or two extra thousand marks because the CPU is such a limiting factor. This is why I don't predict them beating me. I'm not exactly worried, but to beat my score, it takes a CPU faster than mine. Unless that i7 hits 4.1-4.2Ghz, it ain't happening, Plus, I've measured power usage during 3dmark, and where it counts, Quad Crossfire scales very well. Two 5850s aren't as powerful as 4870s in an ideal environment. Two 5870s aren't either.
With regard to how the 4GB HD5970 performs at 2560, put it this way, due to graphics memory, in Crysis Warhead at 2560x1600 with 4xAA, two HD5850s perform half as well as one HD5850, which performs half as well as a 2GB HD5870. Not only that, but when the ATI cards aren't limited by graphics memory, they actually perform on equals with the GTX cards, a 5870 can take on a GTX480 until you turn AA on. Nvidia really deserve some praise though, three GTX480s in Warhead with 2560x1600 all Enthusiast, 4xAA are pulling off average frame rates in excess of 50. That's damn impressive.
If I were to go quad CF with two 5970s (which I won't), I might nudge close to 30k, but I'm pretty sure I'd need to bump my CPU higher to cross it. What I would see is a huge increase in my 3dmark Vantage, as that isn't so badly CPU limited, as it isn't as old.
An extra 4GB of RAM would set me back a little over £100. A substantial hit, but nowhere near the £750 I'm expecting for the 4GB HD5970!



Apotter: First of all, tone down the language, that's not tolerated here. Secondly, the 9400GT is indeed a pretty poor card, the best you can get for $100 is an HD5670. It's not that powerful, but it will be able to play most modern games on low graphics settings without too much lag.