The Official Graphics Card and PC gaming Thread

LOL I was actually surprised when my 8800GTS ran 10*C cooler. And with the same performance for 40% of the price XD

Agreed on the 3870 as well, is was a MAJOR refresh and was the first decent card from ATi since the X1950... seriously the HD2900XT appalled me. Not even worth it to buy at all. The HD3870 actually wasn't that bad. Very well worth the price and well designed, just not a high performance part. It wasn't until 4870 that ATi could really claim to have a high end card again. The refining of the HD2000 core is what started it all. They were always MUCH faster on paper, but it took a while before practice matched theory. IMO the HD3870, while not even slightly impressive, was the stepping stone needed to get where we are now.

Not only are ATi capable of actually PRODUCING their cards, they already perform better or the same in most tests. The GTX480 IMO is a much worse fail than the HD2900XT ever was. Even with all its bugs, they were still able to make enough to sell. As of currently, Nvidia is still having issues fill out all the preorders, let alone selling on the mass market. And even that will be difficult given the HUGE price difference.

At least the GTX280 was arguably worth the extra. The GTX480 is unquestionably not worth it at all.

 

The 8800GTS G92 was more than a year after the 8800GTX though. Granted it's nothing to celebrate about but in less than that space of time, ATI had the power hungry HD2900XT down to the compact, reasonably quiet and efficient HD3870. Was no better than the 8800GT efficiency wise due to its slow speed, but they still managed a big TDP drop in that space of time. This being back when all the graphics architectures were stagnant, and all you got were renamed products, not new ones. I don't miss that period one bit

I agree really, the GTX480 is another HD2900, but far from being not as bad, it's worse. Much worse.

 

Hmmmm - still - three of them can rape crysis, (given what you said about how they did with warhead).

Stepping back 10 days - wow Sam, very helpful information.

So HD6000 will be coming out on 40nm, just like 5000, (since 32nm yields are bad and and the big chip guys are moving straight to 28nm, which ought to be cranking by what - mid 2012 ?)

(Shaff is saying - Why? Global Foundaries wants the business.)

In that case, I see your point - how they gonna get much more computational power out of the 6000 compared to the 5000 on the same 40nm die without blowing the roof off the 300 watt ceiling on acceptable power draw?

Thanks - that calms me down a bit.

LOL I like the name for the new architecture, Southern Islands, haha. Is there a nod in there somewhere for crytek?

And as for Red getting his i7 up to 4.1 to 4.2 - I don't know. He's got the 930 DO stepping, which will help. Red - how high are you so far?

Wow. So on-board memory is everything at 2560x1600, especially with 4xAA. You're gonna sell your 4870x2's and get that petunia for £750 - exciting! At this point in time you don't plan to crossfire them - but what are you hearing about pci-e bandwidth requirements for the 5970s?

If you threw two of them on your present 1156 motherboard, you'd be at 8x for each card, wouldn't you? Does that seem to be a factor from all the benches you're looking at? Also - those three nvidia GTX400 cards cranking on full enthusiast on Warhead - was that one of those special nvidia motherboards with 16x lanes for each card?

Haha, Jeff is cranking things up!!

Hey - if you like the atmosphere of the game - certainly GTA4 has a lot to offer - riding the motorcycles is wayyy cool - and getting those lapdances - especially when you keep paying - is wayyy ... ah hem. How can I put it?

But Kevin, I know you had Left 4 Dead 1 installed - you had all those screen shots showing you defeating the tank on the roof of the hospital.

I totally know what you mean - these guys are ON TOP of the latest gaming action, and I am like you - I own some top titles - everything except for COD6 - MW2 - but I won't drop the settings low enough to play on my current stuff. However, Miles, the animator guy, has said he's gonna give me a 4 gig 9450 rig that he no longer needs, so that might tide me over for a bit, and maybe I'll pick up a 5000 series card for it when that happens.

Hey Kevin, Sam and Jeff have both endorsed that game - and add Miles, the animator guy to that list. He doesn't play games, but he gets all the steam stuff for free, so one day he sat down and played through MW2, and he was majorly blown away!!

Haha - killing Niko has gotten to you - you've gone bonkers!!!

Still, what can they really pull off with the 6000 if they are stuck on the same 40nm die - they already have 2 billion transistors (but fermi has 3 billion.)

Hey - 600 gig velociraptors are out now for $279 at the egg. What does anybody think about that?

Rich

 

It's not going to make it Either the cpu is a pig or the budget MB is holding it back, barely stable at 3.92Ghz @ 1.3v (current heat threshold for me). I've been contemplating the difference between completely stable and stable enough recently though. I can clock higher on current voltage settings but it won't be able to handle extreme stress, but if you never know/find out does it really matter? My new rig was "stable" for two weeks before WCG showed me otherwise (it lasted 31s XD). So now I'm deciding between crunching and having a higher clock speed lol.

IMO the velociraptors are too much money for what you're getting. Sure it might be fast but I can't think of any reason some one would need that kind of speed for 600GB. I'm going to wait for the prices on the SSD's to come down (and for them to improve).

 

600Gb OS drive is rather large. But since its released, that means the 300Gb will begin to fall in price Which means I'll be tempted by the 300Gb now. And then I can use it for games and particular Softwares that could use quicker load times

The reason my other games aren't installed anymore, is because they were installed on the Windows 7 beta. I'm now running the windows 7 retail edition. So everything hasn't been reinstalled yet. And now I'm encountering a bug, so I'm gonna reinstall windows yet again. That way I can hopefully pinpoint the problem, should it arise again

I'm probably gonna Pickup Arkham asylum, and Call of duty: Modern warfare 2 here shortly. I'm interested in something new New to me anyway

 

I have absolutely no basis to speculate how the HD6 series will perform and how much power it will use. It's simply too early days yet. As for the name, it was originally Northern Islands when it was 32nm.
As for video memory Rich, you have no idea. At 2560x1600, A 2GB HD5870 beats the pants off a 2x1GB HD5970, simply because the latter runs out of memory.
The best example of this is the Eyefinity6 report, which uses resolutions even higher than 2560:
http://www.hardocp.com/article/2010/04/12/ati_radeon_hd_5870_eyefinity_6_performance_review/5
Look at the bottom

PCIe bandwidth for the 5970s won't be an issue. An HD5870 at 2560 or 1920 resolution loses only 5% of its performance when running at 4x speed.
The issue is, two Petunia cards are well beyond what I can spend. My aim is for a third solo GPU, a normal 5870 Eyefinity6. As it stands though, that too is out of budget - or at least it is considering I want to get some redundancy for my server.

The only intrigue for me with the velociraptor is as a games drive, to supplement an SSD.

 

Yeah that article blew my mind. Maybe the first time I've ever seen a definitive test to really show the differences. Funny that even Crossfire is worth it if you have 16x/4x

Yeah a larger Veloci would be perfect as a games drive. But at this point I'm sticking with my current OS drive until SSDs are more affordable. I want at least a 500GB for my OS so that might be a while :S

 

I know Jeff is chuckling. Having bitten the bullet and followed Sam to 30" (and proud of it lol) I have no choice but to look for the most graphic memory I can find. Hey guys, if Miles gives me that 4 gig 9450, how would a petunia perform for me at 2560x1600 on crysis? Could I do high? (not ultra high I know.)

Now THAT is damn interesting information. Did I miss a link somewhere - what article did you guys read about that?


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Well, you've sure gone a long ways from your 3.65 - congrats! Damn close to 4.0. What's your mobo?

And at that speed, which is almost 10% faster than before, where are you on your 3dmark6 scores? You were at 24,000 before, as I recall, and Sam said 3dmark6 is heavily cpu dependent, so a 10% higher clock should put you at what? 26,000??? Closing in on Sam,

I guess you guys have a good point about the velociraptors, compared to what you can get for around $150 these days. It will be interesting to see how affordable the SSDs become over the next 12 months.

Right now, at newegg, we have the 80 gig Intel SSD at $220 and the 160 gig Intel SSD at $435. One guy says "Yes you can argue that 3 or 4 Raptor drives in RAID-0 will give you similar performance and a much bigger size, but will have a higher failure rate and have to go through the hassle of installing raid drivers."

Well, two of the new 600 gig velociraptors at a total of $560 in Raid 0 gives you - what - on Raid 0 you don't lose any space - you stripe across both for reading and writing on two spindles at once, so you get 1200 gigs. But I guess for maximum speed you'd want at least one more spindle, so you could buy 3 300 gigs at $200 each, equals $600 for a total of 900 gigs - and read off of 3 spindles for even more speed.

So for velociraptors,
1. 2 spindles = $560 = 1200 gigs.
2. 3 spindles = $600 = 900 gigs (price on this drive will soon drop)

And if 3 velociraptors in Raid 0 are as fast as the SSD, then that's velociraptors $600 (soon dropping I would guess) for 900 gigs, versus SSD $435 for 160 gigs.

But coming along by the end of this year is the latest breakthrough in 25nm SSD design by Intel and Micro, their company called IMFT, which is supposed to result in a huge DROP IN SSD PRICES . . . . .

Like Nick says "It's getting good!"

Speaking of Nick - there is a new campaign coming for free to L4D2 - the Passing, which combines both sets of survivors. (How do they do that - with 8 players??? - although another article says Bill won't be back because his voice actor, Jim French, has not been available - if true, RIP - Bill is much loved, lol.) This information is all here in this wikipedia article and according to the article, the Passing was due to be released last month, but maybe we'll see it in a month or two. Since I haven't jumped on my gaming machine in almost two months (unbelievable - I'm really trying to get into the swing of real estate phone calls) maybe you guys already have the new free campaign.

Rich

 

http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/AMD/HD_5870_PCI-Express_Scaling/1.html

With basically the fastest single core card. That definitive enough? Proves my theory all along that PCI-e isn't even close to being tapped.

 

The previous score was only ~22200 so now I would expect 23-24k probably, not enough to make large difference. I'll run 3dmark next time I restart this rig, but in the mean time I'm to busy crunching X)
The MB is a UD3R btw.

 

well then what leads the 5970 equate to CF5850s in performance? drivers?

 

Good lord guys! Call Of Duty: Modern War Fare 2 is 59.99 in the states!!! Is it really worth that much? Thats at walmart by the way. Although I suppose the price isn't gonna differ much...

Unfortunately, walmart did not have Arkham Asylum. I won't be relying on them to have that though They did have metro 2033. It was also expensive. Sure wish I was Bill gates about now LOL!

 

get cod4 isntead

 

Yeah $60 for 5 hours of gameplay and crappy multiplayer is a big rip. The campaign, however short it is, is still fantastic though. One of the best games I have ever played. 5 hours of gameplay from a $60 game though... *shudder*. Had Infinity Ward made the game say 3 or 4 hours longer it would easily have been my pick for GOTY. As it stands though, I refuse to pay money for it. Call of Duty found it's roots in having the very best, most authentic single player campaigns ever made. This "multiplayer centric" release, with buggy, dumbed down multiplayer anyway, is a step in the wrong direction. Now they're talking about a monthly subscription model for their next game! For shame Infinity Ward. You are forgetting what the fans want. There was already great multiplayer in CoD4:MW1 plus an awesome 8+ hour campaign!!!

 

IW arnt making the next game btw. they are gone.

i remember watching band of brothers, and then playing cod2. the sound, the look and feel, the way if grenades went of near you, you couldnt hear properly, the sayings of the soldiers etc, was AMAZING.

IMO nothing comes close to that for me.

MW2 screwed most stuff up for me. and it shows on my xfire stats, i have played more BC2 than MW2 already lol. though 1560 hours of COD4 have been played. dont think i will ever surpass that (well not unless you add all the hours i have played in all the pokemon games lol)

 

No, not for shame Infinity Ward, for shame Activision. Do some reading. Bobby Kotick is legendary among games publishers. He's publically come out and said:
"If games were up to me, they'd be even more than $60"
"The only efficient way to make games is to keep the staff under an environment of oppression and fear"
"No game should ever be sold that can't have numerous sequels and addons to turn it into a multi-billion dollar franchise"

When Infinity Ward's top two asked to receive some of their royalties for Modern Warfare 2 (agreed contractually, but Activision hadn't paid them) - they weren't just told off, they weren't just sacked from the company, the security for the building actually hoisted them from their desks and threw them out. 13 Staff have now left the company, to sign with EA under the new name Respawn Entertainment.

 

Agreed Call of Duty 2 has the best single player campaign in a game ever hands-down. And hilariously I would still consider the graphics pretty good

Said it before and will say it again forever: CoD2 is my all time favorite game.

Haha too right. I enjoy a good deathmatch, but BC2 offers better gameplay, better maps, and better community support. Not to mention it was only $50...

Sickening. Just sickening.

So this is how the creators of one of the greatest games ever made are treated? I do hope those guys ended up with royalties at some point. I've bought every Infinity Ward "branded" title to date, barring MW2.

I hope the original IW team can continue to make quality titles under their new name and publisher. It would be sad to see such a talented group of individuals driven from the industry by a few greedy bastards. Considering the retarded amounts of money the CoD franchise has made them, you think Activision would be more intelligent about their choices. They just threw away my money and respect right there.

 

Not really, They're just going to make More CoDs with Treyarch, who didn't get fired.

 

EL-OH-EL. Sounds like EA sports pumping out games year after year. But the difference is that EA Sports games are fun and of good quality... Whatever happened to the team who made United Offensive? Because the current Treyarch members couldn't have made such a quality title...

So Call of Duty as we know it is finished. Has Respawn Entertainment announced any plans? Any new IPs being brought to light?

 

Early to say yet, but the next few months could be interesting.