Compare my graphics card to modern cards

SeanW

Apologies in advance for the somewhat n00biness of this post.

My current rig is a couple of years old, a Socket 939 system with a Point Of View GeForce 6800GS (PCI Express). One of the few things I don't pay much attention to is the graphics side: the gfx card is one of the few components I haven't changed or tweaked at some point, and while I have a rough idea how my dual core opteron compares to modern Intel Quads and whatnot, I have absolutley no idea how my graphics card compares with its modern counterparts, primarily because I play mostly old games (Deus Ex, SimCity 4, Hitman series) on a relatively small display, and the current setup handles even STALKER, my newest high end game, very well.

Just out of sheer curiousity, would anyone care to give me a rough guesstimation of how my current card stacks up against those in for example the GeForce 8, 9, and GTX range as well as the newest Radeon 4XXXs? By that I mean in terms of energy use, graphics capability etc.

Thanks in advance.

Blazer

hmm..you could apply a similar logic to your video card except I would compare it to as a single cpu to a quad-core.
For instance I'm playing COD4 mutliplayer at 1920x1200 at 4xAA,8xAF with everything completed maxed out and getting between an average of 93fps.
Your card would probably get about 5fps at this stage.
Energy usage I would say my card consumes about 3-4 times the amount of what your card does.
On average the top end GTX280+4870X2 are about 10 times more powerful than your card.

this is one site although it only compares specs.

http://www.gpureview.com/show_cards.php?card1=185&card2=567

PogMoThoin

6800GS was the dogs gonads bout 4 yrs ago, had one myself, it would play older steam games fairly well @ 1280x1024 but it doesn't have shader model 3 for newer games which is why it copes with the newer games like STALKER. I've gone thru 3 gpu's since the 6800, if you've lasted this long with one then it owes you nothing.

jonny72

Mathew Reilly wrote: »

hmm..you could apply a similar logic to your video card except I would compare it to as a single cpu to a quad-core.
For instance I'm playing COD4 mutliplayer at 1920x1200 at 4xAA,8xAF with everything completed maxed out and getting between an average of 93fps.
Your card would probably get about 5fps at this stage.
Energy usage I would say my card consumes about 3-4 times the amount of what your card does.
On average the top end GTX280+4870X2 are about 10 times more powerful than your card.

this is one site although it only compares specs.

http://www.gpureview.com/show_cards.php?card1=185&card2=567

http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/charts/gaming-graphics-charts-q3-2008/Sum-of-FPS-Benchmarks-Totals,795.html

Not entirely accurate but good for comparing expensive old cards vs cheap new ones

Dartz

Stalker is not the best example of a *modern* game considering the game engine itself is around 4 years old... with a bit of DX10 shiny bolted on top of it.

If you're playing STALKER on a 6800 then you might be in DX8 mode. the Xray engine scales down to that alright on static lighting and runs pretty quick. Gets between 30 and 60 on a pisspoor Radeon X1300 in my older PC. Switching to DX9 mode though with dynamic lightning makes my laptop's 8600 GT struggle occasionally... and DX10 mode is absolute murder.

That said, the XRay engine on it's own will judder and stutter and crash on it's own quite happily regardless of what you use it on.

SeanW

Update: I am now considering components for a final, end-of-life overhaul for my rig (i.e. new monitor, Blu Ray recorder, new hard drive) and I'm considering getting a midrange graphics card for as part of this. However, my PSU is only 430W with 348W available to +12v devices over 2 rails, 14 and 15Amps respectively. It has no PCI-E connectors and requires a molex/PCI-E converter. At present I'm using a 1 Molex/1 PCIE concverter no prob even though the card I have came with a 2 Molex/1 PCIE converter.

I am wondering what kind of graphics card I can get away with in this setup. I have my eye on the Radeon HD 4850 range, I had been concerned by some of the stats I saw putting a 4850s power draw at ~180W fully loaded (versus 75W for some 6800s), but then I see other stats such as on TomsHardware where a test system using a 4850 pulled only 237W on a full load.

My full system specifications are thus:
Antec P180 miditower.
Seasonic S12 430W power supply, 2x +12V rails, 14A and 15A each, total of 348W available to all +12V devices. (Volts X Amps = Watts)
AMD Opteron 180, 2.4Ghz dual core, Socket 939
MSI K8N Neo4F mainboard, nForce Ultra (non-SLi) chipset.
Thermaltake Blue Orb II cooler for the CPU.
2GB RAM, 2x1GB dual channel.
3X DVD RW drives (will replace one with BD-R)
1X Serial ATA Transcend SLC SSD, 16GB
1X Maxtor 80GB PATA hard drive
2X Western Digital 250GB SATA hard drives.
Point Of View nVidia GeForce 6800GS.
1x Generic 7-in-1 (floppy + 6 card types) reader
Extra 10/100 LAN card
TV Tuner
56k modem (for backup thank fupp I'm not using day-to-day)

No components overclocked.
Bold items are considered for replacement in final overhaul
Italicised item needs to go, but will have to stay until my next Windows reinstall.

Considering also the fact that capacitors can degrade over years, make a 10% allowance for that as I was advised to by one of those online PSU calculators, I'm looking at 300W available to all +12V devices on my rig.

Estimating what the other devices might be taking from the 12V rails, what kind of headroom do I have to add meaner graphics hardware, and can I assume that I'd need to draw power from both rails?

TerrorFirmer

I wouldn't go throwing that much money into such an old machine and if you've lasted this long with that 6800 relic (:p), I would just get something like this and leave it at that - PSU will be fine. No point getting anything better really, in fact you'd even be OK with something like this, which doesn't need a 6-pin and is 2-3 times faster then the old 6800 at least. Your CPU is old and slow, and in newer games up to 50% slower then the equivalent Core 2 - and that's based on reviews I've seen of it against the older 2mb l2 cache Core 2's, any of the newer 45nm cpu's would absolutely demolish it stone dead. Why need to consider this a last upgrade? Chances are if you lasted this long with that setup, a new, cheap board/cpu and graphics card would see you through another few years. It wouldn't be overly expensive to pick up a cheap but decent board (80), E7200 (110), 4gb ram (40), 4830(100), and then you'd have a killer machine.....not to mention you'd be making some of that money back on the old mobo, cpu, cooler, ram, and card. These 'final overhauls' never really work out that well and you don't get out what you might think you will....

uberpixie

TerrorFirmer wrote: »

I wouldn't go throwing that much money into such an old machine and if you've lasted this long with that 6800 relic (:p), I would just get something like this and leave it at that - PSU will be fine. No point getting anything better really, in fact you'd even be OK with something like this, which doesn't need a 6-pin and is 2-3 times faster then the old 6800 at least. Your CPU is old and slow, and in newer games up to 50% slower then the equivalent Core 2 - and that's based on reviews I've seen of it against the older 2mb l2 cache Core 2's, any of the newer 45nm cpu's would absolutely demolish it stone dead. Why need to consider this a last upgrade? Chances are if you lasted this long with that setup, a new, cheap board/cpu and graphics card would see you through another few years. It wouldn't be overly expensive to pick up a cheap but decent board (80), E7200 (110), 4gb ram (40), 4830(100), and then you'd have a killer machine.....not to mention you'd be making some of that money back on the old mobo, cpu, cooler, ram, and card. These 'final overhauls' never really work out that well and you don't get out what you might think you will....

+1.

playing a modern game without atleast a dualcore is madness.
You have a good case and powersupply, get a new mobo, cpu, ram and gfx card.

You don't have to blow a huge amount of money and its money well spent considering the huge performance boost you will get in games moving to a core2duo or a core2quad.

Your CPU and your gfx card are your biggest bottlenecks. Get new ones.

SeanW

Thanks for your inputs For various reasons, a final overhaul for this computer is somewhat unavoidable. I will certainly take the above posts into consideration when picking my new graphics card.
Thanks left for both posts.

SeanW

Ok, slight update, I went ahead and bought a few components to modernise my rig, and to say the least it hasn't gone according to plan.

The overhaul consisted largely of 3 components, a new monitor, a Radeon HD4670 and a Western Digital Green Power Caviar 750GB.

Firstly the monitor (an expensive UXGA 20" job) has a stuck pixel near the centre which will only go from white to medium-red Not sure what to do there.
And to top it off, the first (and my favourite) game that I tested the new setup with, the year 2000/2001 game Deus Ex, performed abysmally, with temporary freezes (1/2 to 1 second) and deplorable FPS rates. Reinstalling it from the new GP Caviar onto my Solid State hard drive took care of the freezes, but FPS performace was abysmal (went down to sub 10-FPS in multiplayer and was borderline in single player. Seriously, my old Dell with its single core Pentium 4 and GeForce 2 did better.

I've temporarily reinstalled my 6800GS and that game is working perfectly now. Since I don't think the card is faulty, I am left to wonder just what in blazes is going on? I wonder if the new card could be maladjusted in some way?

AlmightyCushion

Did you uninstall the old graphics drivers and install the new ones?

As for your stuck pixel, try running this (http://www.jscreenfix.com/basic.php) on it for a while.

SeanW

Actually, I had to reinstall Windows because of changes to the hard drive arrangment. At that point I changed the graphics card to the Radeon - this most recent attempt to diagnose my problem, is the first time this installation has seen a GeForce 6800GS.

TY for the link, I will definately try that for the stuck pixel.