The Official Graphics Card and PC gaming Thread

I lol'ed. That's an interesting effect, but can you not disable that feature normally? What effect does it have on the detail?

 

Absolutely nothing. You're simply enabling Vsync. Considering you probably don't hit 60 much to begin with, I think the trade is worth it.

Like I said the r_gi tweak isn't really recommended and several people on that forum have confirmed my thoughts about that. The FOV and Vsync ones work a treat though.

He mentions copying it over. He's referring to the directories. There's a cfg in the AppData folder and an identical one in the Metro 2033 install folder. After you change one, set it to "Read Only" and overwrite it over the other one.

 

evga rape the 3dmark vantage record for all 4 catagories

http://www.evga.com/forums/tm.aspx?m=316295

with aa QUAD GTX480 setup. (and 12 cores (24 threads))

 

Interesting but not really applicable to anything at all as 3DMark = Nvidia's Private Sex Slave

 

nothing harp on about in the real world, just damn impressive.

 

Oh for sure it's a very impressive system. Not disputing that.

But first, four GTX 480s? I'm surprised the 1200W PSU they were using was enough. Even then I think they were using two...

Also, all evga? Nice system and everything but branded systems like those make me sick. The only reason Kingpin uses all Evga parts is because they pay him to do it. You should pick components on their individual merits, not their brand name...

That system is virtually impossible to build with retail parts. The Evga Classified SR-2? Show me where that's actually for sale. It's been out almost a month and so far the only working one I've seen is in that test. Also the price would be over $600 in retail stores. Oh yeah not to mention there are only a handful of cases in the world that can fit that board and every single one of them either needs mods or a custom-order motherboard tray...

I understand it's just a record benching system. But the simple fact is that it's about triple the price of the usual ultra high-end gaming PC, and without LN2, really isn't that much faster in practice. Vantage is about the only thing to use that kind of power. Most ACTUAL GAMES are still just barely warming up to quad cores, let alone 12 cores.

I can almost guarantee two 4GB 5970s would challenge that for much cheaper, much less heat, much less power draw, and they would live longer too. The GTX480 goes back to the 8800GTX, the 6800 Ultra and even the FX5950 Ultra. I wonder how long before the reports of dead cards come flooding in...

Kind of sad really when Nvidia promote the speed of their cards on a benchmark designed specifically to make Nvidia cards look WAY faster than they are and scale perfectly in SLI...

Like I said, I totally get the spirit of why it was done. But it was wholly unnecessary and took like half of Nvidia's stock of working 480s...

 

lol whats with the rant? its just benchmarking. everone knows its got nothing to do with real life.

 

Made some edits, added more. Specifically this:

Benchmarking is one thing, but that was just a waste of time. Even with all those parts crammed into a working gaming PC, much slower systems would probably match or beat it simply because nothing scales that high yet.

Also it doesn't hurt to mention I severely dislike Nvidia for many many reason, not the least of which being their bully tactics and retardedly high prices with little to no performance to show for it...

Yeah I may be biased but I have my reasons

"Nvidia, The Way It's Meant To Be Played" What, you mean on fire? Or do you mean not at all because the card is dead?

 

waste of time is subjective though. for benchmarkers, it wont be, for us normal people yes.

 

I have to agree with Jeff to an extent. What is the point of the EVGA setup? It's as bad as liquid nitrogen results really, perhaps worse since it's more expensive.
For a start nvidia abuse 3dmark scores by artifically raising the score if PhysX is enabled.

Rather hilariously (well not really, but in an 'I told you so' kind of way) this week sees both the death of an 8800 in one friend's system, and an Asus P5B board bricked through the BIOS updates being bad from someone else.

Benchmarking stems from usability scoring. When benchmarking has got so far ridiculous it ceases to mean anything. After all, stupid high clock speeds on CPUs, we'd never need them, but if we replicated them we'd get improved performance. What use does the EVGA example serve? Nobody could ever hope (or want) such a system, especially when Quad SLI fares so poorly compared to Triple SLI, which is far, far more available. Add to that fact that nvidia's multimonitor system is basically non-existent, so all this processing power is going into 2560x1600, to play what? Crysis Warhead? Two 4GB 5970s would take care of that. Metro 2033? Maybe, but because you're using nvidia cards you only get high detail, not very high. What's left? There's needless benchmarking and then there's just utter pointlessness. This is the latter. These cards got a very high benchmark score. Likewise, if you attached large rockets to a car it'd be the fastest road car ever, but er, you get the point.

That and what Jeff said, nvidia's corruption. It was almost forgivable for many when their products were good. Now that they're bad, there's no real reason to buy anything from them, save PhysX, and I'm sorely tempted to try the fully hacked drivers that run the PhysX straight off an ATI GPU and forego the hybrid.

 

actually it was ALSO liquid nitrogen, but id assume that that is known when dealing with benchmarks this extreme. eahc GTX 480 was LN2s.

what it means is that they have the best hardware int he world and the best overclockers, that can push it is all. its got nothing to do with real world test. i dont remember anyone complain for years before hand about extreme results.

it really is an ATI thread here isnt it?

 

No, but given that the current nvidia high-end is so bad nobody should ever be buying them, it will certainly seem that way. I'm not among the big haters wishing nvidia will go bankrupt, but you can't ignore all the hideous badness of the 400 series.
It's a little extreme just to say the entire experiment is completely pointless, but its result is inevitable. GTX480s are marginally faster than HD5870s so the damn well should be setting records with 4 of them. The fact that you can only do it with a skulltrail-esque board, two kilowatt PSUs and liquid nitrogen though [I have severe doubts about how well four 480s would do even at stock clocks] makes it a bit of a farse though, especially when you could conceivably do the same [shortly] with ATI hardware on two 650W PSUs and any board with two 16x slots, minus a few percent, and the overclock [and given the Toxic 5970s have got over a gigahertz, I daresay they'd compete quite well. How far were said 480s overclocked? Much higher than 18% from reference?] This is air performance, it's 2500rpm, so not astonishingly loud, it's air-cooled, it's cool, and above all it's how it comes in the box. £1500 on cards and £120 on a board versus £1800 on cards, £500 on the board and goodness knows how much for the LN2 kit, for maybe ooh, 5-10% extra performance, scaling/bias excluded?

 

At this time probably it is. But I might add my 8800GTS is still in use every day and it still does a fair bit of gaming from time to time. It's a very well designed card, it uses reasonable power, it runs fairly cool, it's pretty quiet, and best of all, it won't die prematurely like the GTX480.

Yes the 480 is a very fast card, but they are also very poorly designed. The 8800GTS was a paramount high-end card of its time. The GTX480 is an overpriced, power sucking space heater. So was the 8800GTX for that matter but it was was actually so much faster it was justified. That's the black and white of it.

If Nvidia would play fair for once instead of bribing every single developer and publisher, I would at least see the GTX480 with pity. Right now I'm laughing at it because Nvidia talks so big all the time, overprice their stuff for no reason and fix all the games and benchmarks so they're crippled on ATi. Now they couldn't come out with a product anywhere near in time to compete, and couldn't even get their manufacturing process right. It's a taste of their own medicine when all the big talk comes back to haunt them.

Again, I'm not anti-Nvidia. I loved all the Nvidia cards I've owned. But there current gen is a poor effort. Even the GTX200 series cards are far better.

------------------------------

In other news I've had dual 5850s since last week... not done much benching but all here should know BC2 runs amazingly. I'll show up with some performance numbers eventually. And change my sig too lol.

 

Your 8800GTS may not have died yet, but there is still a fundamental reliability issue with all nvidia products. For the hardened enthusiast, they typically last long enough to be obsolete before they break, but for the average user, not so much. I think of the dozen or so people I know with 8800s of various kinds, around half have already kicked the bucket, G80s and G92s inclusive.
The main reason I take shots at nvidia though is not dodgy products, it's the semi-legal business practices. They get good press not for making good performers, but by bribing developers to code against the opposition to make them look bad. Such incidents bring about unnecessary negative publicity, for example nvidia were accused of drowning Lucid. Turns out Lucid was just crap anyway

Sadly, the nvidia PR machine is so strong, and people so stupid, that such practices assure their place in the graphics card market for all time. It would have taken the GTX480 to not exist for people to not buy it.

 

Splinter Cell: Conviction (AA excluded)
Assumes 1.8/2.52/3.24x multi scaling

Minimal: Radeon X1800XT/HD2900 series/HD3690/HD4650/HD5570 or above, Geforce 7900GT/8600GTS/9500GT/GT220 or above
Reduced: Radeon HD3850/HD4700 series/HD5670 or above, Geforce 8800 series/9600GSO G92/GT240 or above
Moderate: Radeon HD3870X2/HD4770/HD4850/HD5750 or above, Geforce 8800GTS G92/9800GTX/GTS250 or above
Good: Radeon HD4850X2/HD4890/HD5750CF/HD5830 or above, Geforce 9800GX2/GTX260-216 or above
Optimal: Radeon HD4870X2/HD5830CF/HD5870 or above, Geforce 8800GTX Tri-SLI/GTX260 SLI/GTX470 or above
Extreme: Radeon HD5850Tri-CF or above, Geforce GTX285 Tri-SLI/GTX480 SLI or above

 

That's the third SR-2 I've heard of XD I didn't know they were for sale yet, last I heard EVGA was keeping quiet about why they haven't been released yet.

I'll gladly buy another Nvidia gpu when they make one worth my money; all I care about (for the most part) is the price/performance ratio.

Didn't know that the G80/G92 cards died prematurely, my G80 has been going strong in a hot environment for 3 years now.

 

I just rented a couple BD discs to see if their video quality warranted purchase

Star Trek 3, the search for spock. The video quality is WAYY better than I expected. Given it's a 1984 movie, and I've seen even older with GOOD quality, I have no doubt now, that Star Trek TNG will be re-released on BD discs. And I'll be first in line

 

Did I not explain that to you before? With TNG-> the action is recorded on film, but the effectd are overlayed digitally, so in order to make those series HD, they have to re-render all the effects from scratch in HD. I doubt they'll be coming out on BluRay, sadly.

 

Well the G80s are the main culprits. The G92s surely have a failure rate as well but AFAIK they're nowhere near as bad.

I gotta believe the large majority were G80s...

 

You do realize that the original star trek (1966), was released on HD discs. I bet my right arm, that they WILL do it. Even if they have to find a new way to render it. They'll do it The fan base is WAYY to big to NOT do it...