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should I get another card?
I just got done build my first pc with the help of Quizz and others here. So I started playing Rift and maxed all of my settings and now I can't get more than 30fps. I don't know why this is happening but I'm thinking maybe a second card will help do the trick.
CPU: i5 2500k Sandy Bridge
MB: GIGABYTE GA-P67A-UD4 LGA 1155 Intel P67
RAM: G.SKILL 4GB (2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1600
GPU: Sapphire HD 6950 @ 6970
SSD: OCZ Agility 2 64gig
Monitor: ASUS VH242H Black 23.6" 5ms HDMI Full 1080P 1920 x 1080
SC: COOLER MASTER HAF 912 RC-912-KKN1 Black SECC
OS: Win7 x64
I still don't know how to overclock so I didn't try it. in less someone has a really good guide i could use.
Should I get the second card?
Read my blog http://sanmonocobra.blogspot.com/
Comments
ugh, something is wrong. Maybe drivers or something but I have less of a system and I'm doing better fps. I use Nvidia instead of AMD, so there might be something with that but I'm sure we would have heard if there was a specific problem with low fps using the AMD cards.
Are you using the latest video drivers?
All of my posts are either intelligent, thought provoking, funny, satirical, sarcastic or intentionally disrespectful. Take your pick.
I get banned in the forums for games I love, so lets see if I do better in the forums for games I hate.
I enjoy the serenity of not caring what your opinion is.
I don't hate much, but I hate Apple© with a passion. If Steve Jobs was alive, I would punch him in the face.
I'd say no, or at least not yet. I'm not famliar with the precise settings in Rift, but it's possible that max settings could be unreasonably high, and turning some settings down a ways will greatly improve performance without noticeably affecting image quality. Actually, this is true of anti-aliasing in a lot of games: 8x SSAA is simply unreasonably high, and 4x MSAA brings a much smaller performance hit.
It's also possible that Rift will see massive performance gains once Trion optimizes the game client more. Maybe it's drivers that need to be optimized to play nicely with Rift; both AMD and Nvidia have said in recent driver releases that they did things to make Rift in particular work properly. If either of those are the case, then maybe in a month or two, you'd see 60 frames per second at the same settings on the same hardware. For now, make sure you're running Catalyst 11.1a hotfix, not the drivers that came with the card.
And finally, it's also possible that Trion has decided to make Rift the most graphically demanding game on the market, in hopes that they'll get free publicity from being used in all of the video card reviews the way that Crysis used to. Review sites are having a hard time finding games that be used to compare high end video cards. I'd regard this as pretty unlikely, but it's about the only way that you'll see much benefit from adding a second video card.
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Also, the moral of the story is that, no matter how powerful the hardware, sufficiently badly coded software can still bring it to a crawl.
I believe I'm using the latest drivers.
Read my blog http://sanmonocobra.blogspot.com/
I still don't know how to overclock so I didn't try it. in less someone has a really good guide i could use.
Should I get the second card?
https://www.amazonthunder.com/view_articles.php?aID=92
I'd say don't get the second card. For Rift, try messing with video settings a bit. You might find that your card really doesn't like one or two particular settings, and you'll get great performance if you turn those down or off while maxing everything else.
I'd also wait a few months for drivers to mature. There's no sense in paying $300 for a second video card if, a couple of months from now once drivers and the game engine get fixed up, you'd have been at 60 frames per second at max settings with a single card anyway.
alright
Read my blog http://sanmonocobra.blogspot.com/
Hi everyone
Rift uses the GameBryo engine. It is the base Engine used in DAoC except it has been modified heavily to include DirectX9c and more modern day features. In short its been transformed into a proprietary engine through mass-modification.
Unfortunately, a lot of MMORPG Engines are not optimized for gameplay performance. Due to the large populations of MMORPG players in South Korea and Japan, the optimization in programming deals with bandwith and database programming. Developers know gamers will stick around for years so eventually players will upgrade their systems to a level where bruteforcing from video cards and processors will deliver flawless performance.
Their idea of database optimization is to handle as much client-side and then pass through anti-cheat prior to sending to the server directly for processing. This helps the server greatly, but it also means a lot more work is pushed upon the player (Client.)
My advice for you is to play at a lower resolution (or settings) and if you like the game enough to comit yourself to it after the first two patches, then you can spend the extra money on another video card. The engine itself is NOT optimized and its one of the engines where I have a complete copy of the base code of the original engine enough to comment on it. ^_^
MMOs certainly can have a tendancy to be absolutely atrociously coded, graphically. I remember when WoW first introduced dynamic shadows; they choked my 4870 so badly, that the game, with everything turned all the way up and 8x AA, ran more slowly in some of the vegetation-heavy zones (namely, sholazar basin, of course), than Crysis ran with all settings maxed out with 2x AA.
Even with a gap in AA settings, something is just very, very, very, very wrong when World of Warcraft, a game who's client launched being able to run smoothly with reasonable settings on an Ati Radeon 9600, is putting more strain on a system than Crysis.
On the other hand, OP, is you are running 8x super-sampled AA, then that, in itself, can probably explain the slowdown. SSAA is just something that is not worth it, as it gives a completely insignificant improvement in visual quality at an enormous hit in performance. Even if you want to run at 8x AA, I'd say just stick to MSAA, and really, I agree with Quizzical here that 4x MSAA is enough anyways.
On the off chance that somehow you really do notice the difference in image quality from dropping the 8X SSAA, there is another option for you: use edge-detect AA in the Catalyst Control Panel with 4x MSAA in-game, which will effectively give 12x AA. It's something I don't bother doing usually, because while I've seen it look quite nice in a few games, the performance hit is, again, just not worth the incredibly minimal increase in IQ. Still, if we're talking about something as absurd us using SSAA, especially at 8x sampling, then I don't see why edge-detect AA couldn't be an option as well, because it should result in a vastly, vastly smaller hit on performance (accepting that I know fairly little about that particular tech beyond the basics, and it could have drawbacks of which I'm not aware).
There are two cases where SSAA is really nice:
1) when you've got plenty of video card power and nothing else to use it on. For example, I turn on SSAA to play Guild Wars on my Radeon HD 5850.
2) older games that don't support anti-aliasing at all, as SSAA can be done without the card needing to know where the edges between polygons are.
Rift is having issues with ATI boards. Try using catalyst 10.12 that seems to be the popular version for ATI users. Not sure if this will help in FPS issues, but it fixes the display anomolies that the ATI boards have been having so I assume these are the most effecient for the game.
As far as I know, as of yet the game does not support crossfire or ATI's drivers dont support it. Rift is one of the nVidia "how its meant to be played" games and actually supports SLI.
So, SLI = yes
Crossfire = not currently
*edit* I should also add that as I progress through beta and enter new areas my FPS has been taking a hit also. If your getting 30fps with the settings maxed, IMO with your current setup your doing really well and I wouldnt really freak out much about it.
Catalyst 10.12 doesn't support a Radeon HD 6950, so that isn't an option here. Catalyst 11.1 says that Rift should support CrossFire.
The Radeon HD 6950 card is based on the Cayman GPU chip, which is still a pretty new architecture. That risks having driver problems for a while. They'll get fixed, but it might take a few months.
Remember how before FFXIV came out, people with super high end system were like, well, the game runs, kind of all right? And then by the time the game actually launched, the game ran a lot better? Of course, people immediately moved on to, the game is horribly broken because of lots of bugs and weird game design and so forth. But the point is that the frame rates improved greatly as the game engine and drivers matured.
I would like to add to this:
3) If you play a first person shooter or MMORPG as a sniper, the combination of SSAA and x4 - x8 AF becomes really important. It requires you to set the distance view by the configuration files to the maximum. The combination of the three gives you the greatest visual quality over long distances.
Its one of the few settings I can use in a video game (along with many) to work with fast moving characters, snipers, long-range archers and spellcasters.....and it really becomes amazing. Of course you have to solve distance loading and latencies too, but I leave that to you. I've posted my solution before to such issues. ^_^
I still don't know how to overclock so I didn't try it. in less someone has a really good guide i could use.
Should I get the second card?
http://hubpages.com/hub/Acai-Juice---The-Straight-Facts
Catalyst Control Center -> Performance / AMD Overdrive
Enable it, slide the sliders - your overclocking.
No, you shouldn't get a second card - at least for the reasons you list here. The 6950 will perform very well once the drivers all get sorted out for Rift, and nearly every other game out there as well, especially if you are only playing on a single monitor. Adding a second card will do absolutely nothing to help that process. Wait for the game to be released and a driver release after that fpr them to correct any optimization problems before you make major hardware commitments.