Video heaven

Palladin

Ok so in my next machine I want to experience video heaven between 40 and 60 FPS.

Questions:

1) Do I need to run two video cards in crossfire / SLI mode

     a) Why

2) What vid card would you recomend either duel or single?

     a) Why

ASSume current and future game market.

marinrider

I think its important to know what your actually going to be playing.  I can get 40-60 in Doom on my Laptop no doubt, but that doesnt help you if your wanting to run something like Skyrim.

Quizzical

Are you looking to get a new computer now, or just thinking about what to do eventually?

CrossFire and SLI are really only for people who think one high end video card isn't good enough, so they'll take two.  Most people don't have the budget to spend more on video cards than the $550 it costs to get a Radeon HD 7970.

How much graphical performance you need from your video card(s) depends heavily on a number of factors, including but not limited to:

1)  which games you play,

2)  the monitor resolution you use, and

3)  whether you insist on max settings or are willing to turn some things down.

On #3, willing to turn some things down doesn't necessarily mean playing at low settings.  But sometimes by selectively turning off or down a few settings, you can double or triple the frame rate you'd get at max settings with only a negligible hit to image quality.  People who insist that they really have to max settings, rather than just wanting the game to look nice, end up needing to spend a lot more to meet their goals.

Palladin

Originally posted by Quizzical

Are you looking to get a new computer now, or just thinking about what to do eventually?

CrossFire and SLI are really only for people who think one high end video card isn't good enough, so they'll take two.  Most people don't have the budget to spend more on video cards than the $550 it costs to get a Radeon HD 7970.

How much graphical performance you need from your video card(s) depends heavily on a number of factors, including but not limited to:

1)  which games you play,

2)  the monitor resolution you use, and

3)  whether you insist on max settings or are willing to turn some things down.

On #3, willing to turn some things down doesn't necessarily mean playing at low settings.  But sometimes by selectively turning off or down a few settings, you can double or triple the frame rate you'd get at max settings with only a negligible hit to image quality.  People who insist that they really have to max settings, rather than just wanting the game to look nice, end up needing to spend a lot more to meet their goals.

1) current/Future games

2) 1920x1080 to 2560x1440

3)I want the game to look good but performance is more important. I usually turn dhadows off.

grndzro

With the recent news that AMD's upcomming Piledriver is using Resonant Clock Mesh I would have to reccomend a low to mid range FX cpu coupled with a dual fan direct heatpipe tower heatsink and OC the crap out of it till Piledriver launches. Then Ebay the proc.

I wouldn't count on Keppler since NV's yields are abysimal......and Apple just superceded them in wafer alloction......

The 7950 seems a better price point. Itl OC to as fast as a stock 7970...but then again for 100$ more an overclocked 7970 smokes 7950.

I don't think Keppler will compete with the 7900 series so the price is probably goin no where till october or something.

Ridelynn

At the resolutions your looking to run, a single card is more than enough, of anything in the $300-400 price range (or higher), and you could probably even drop down to the $200-300 price range and still see very good performance (at the expense of just a few graphic options).

For current cards, that would be the AMD 6970 (and up), or the nVidia 570GTX (and up). The $200-300 range would include the 6950 and the 560Ti.

It will very soon include Pitcairn, the upcoming 7800 series, which should compare favorably to the 6900 series in terms of performance, and fit in that $200-400 price bracket.

What does RCM, or Piledriver, have to do with SLI anyway? After all the hype bulldozer received, and looking at what shipped, I'd very much just wait and see on anything on the CPU front. Even if you add up all those 10% improvements, you still have a lot of ground to make up against Intel, and AMD has already stated their core focus is not the upper-end PC market (which is where we are looking, if we are honest) - they are going to push the low-priced segments, where their APU makes a lot of sense (laptops, small form factor, HTPC, all-in-one, etc). I absolutely wouldn't get caught up in that hype machine until we see a retail piece of silicon and some comparisons.

Palladin

Originally posted by Ridelynn

At the resolutions your looking to run, a single card is more than enough, of anything in the $300-400 price range (or higher), and you could probably even drop down to the $200-300 price range and still see very good performance (at the expense of just a few graphic options).

For current cards, that would be the AMD 6970 (and up), or the nVidia 570GTX (and up). The $200-300 range would include the 6950 and the 560Ti.

It will very soon include Pitcairn, the upcoming 7800 series, which should compare favorably to the 6900 series in terms of performance, and fit in that $200-400 price bracket.

What does RCM, or Piledriver, have to do with SLI anyway? After all the hype bulldozer received, and looking at what shipped, I'd very much just wait and see on anything on the CPU front. Even if you add up all those 10% improvements, you still have a lot of ground to make up against Intel, and AMD has already stated their core focus is not the upper-end PC market (which is where we are looking, if we are honest) - they are going to push the low-priced segments, where their APU makes a lot of sense (laptops, small form factor, HTPC, all-in-one, etc). I absolutely wouldn't get caught up in that hype machine until we see a retail piece of silicon and some comparisons.

I have always been an AMD man myself. Mostly due to price. I've never been one to jump on the cuting edge bandwagon. I know enough to get parts that suit my need at the time I buy with a bit of groth for future use.

Personally in my opinion Intel is over priced and always has been.

I've never spent more than $150 for a vid card before due to cash restrictions. Well not I have the cash to splurge on a good vid card and plan to do just that. I am still talking myself into a $300-$400 price range..... which is why I am here asking avice....let you all do some of the leg work in talking me into a vid card in this price range. I am thinking I will buy a new vid card in the next 3-6 months.

At the moment there are no games out or in production that have captured my interest. The Only game that comes close is Eve but I am more of a fantasy escapist.

I've loked at some of the current hype for games coming soon archage, Amalure, Guildwars 2 and I really don't think any will approach the lvl Eve has been at for several years.

ForumPvP

If you want high scores on 3dmark then maximum dual experience.

but for gaming at this very moment *570ti is best choice i think.

 

and it cant be explained,monster rigs even today cant run EQ2 on max setting smoothly.

 

 

Quizzical

Originally posted by ForumPvP

If you want high scores on 3dmark then maximum dual experience.

but for gaming at this very moment *570ti is best choice i think.

 

and it cant be explained,monster rigs even today cant run EQ2 on max setting smoothly.

 

 

The video card you recommend doesn't exist.

It's easy to explain the problems with EQ2.  The game engine was single-threaded, and meant to take advantage of supremely powerful single-core processors that would come out in the future.  Then physics intervened, and made such processors impossible.  If you could overclock a modern processor to 10 GHz, it would probably run EQ2 well on max settings.  But you can't.

When EQ2 launched (not just early design decisions, when there was still time to change things, but launch day), Intel was promising to hit such clock speeds within a few years, so this assumption wasn't just a case of SOE being stupid.  SOE wanted a game that wouldn't just look nice for its day, but would scale up on future hardware to still look nice by the standards of several years later.  They simply guessed wrong about where hardware was headed, and put too many functions on the processor rather than offloading them to the video card, and with a single-threaded engine that couldn't put several cores to good use.

More generally, EQ2 illustrates the general principle that no matter how powerful your hardware is, poorly-coded software can still manage to run badly.