graphics

mav79

Success:D First build went well with a few hiccups but everything sorted now, After 2 hours and 3 times taking everything apart realised the case fans dont get connected to the mobo . Cheers for all the help fellow boardsies.

Now for a new graphics card, any suggestions? monitor has a max resolution of 1280x1024, this will be upgraded eventually and a budget of around the 100 mark.

Effluo

mav79 wrote: »

Success:D First build went well with a few hiccups but everything sorted now, After 2 hours and 3 times taking everything apart realised the case fans dont get connected to the mobo . Cheers for all the help fellow boardsies.

Now for a new graphics card, any suggestions? monitor has a max resolution of 1280x1024, this will be upgraded eventually and a budget of around the 100 mark.

At that resolution... you may want to get a new screen too!

Any gpu for around €60 would may out any game!

DECEiFER

Effluo wrote: »

At that resolution... you may want to get a new screen too!

Any gpu for around €60 would may out any game!

Try playing Crysis at any decent and consistent frame rate with a €60 graphics card.

I recommend going a tad over budget and getting one of these:

http://www.ebuyer.com/product/175914 (DirectX 10.1 support, but proven performance)

or

http://www.ebuyer.com/product/175970 (DirectX 11 support, but I can't speak for its performance - as I've never seen it in action)


I'd say both of these cards will do well on all new games, but they won't perform perfect if you max the settings on the top end of games, especially GTA IV due to its poor code optimization. That's why there's cards out there with faster GPU's for more money. But all that said, I do well in GTA IV and Crysis and I only have a Gainward HD4850 512MB 'Golden Sample'.

Last thing. You can buy from Ebuyer using Google Checkout and if your credit card is billed at the shipping address and it's under the same name as the one on the order. Get that right, and they'll even get it to you by courier for £10 (for all orders under 5KG) and it'll even quicker than an order from Komplett would.

Solitaire

If you'd prefer to keep within budget just pick up a cheap HD4770 for €75-90. Good up to 1650*1080 and very strong at 1280*1024, plus it uses eff-all power even when running at full clip (unlike the HD4850!). No DX11 but the HD5750 is retardedly expensive anyway.

marco_polo

DECEiFER wrote: »

Try playing Crysis at any decent and consistent frame rate with a €60 graphics card.

I recommend going a tad over budget and getting one of these:

http://www.ebuyer.com/product/175914 (DirectX 10.1 support, but proven performance)

or

http://www.ebuyer.com/product/175970 (DirectX 11 support, but I can't speak for its performance - as I've never seen it in action)


I'd say both of these cards will do well on all new games, but they won't perform perfect if you max the settings on the top end of games, especially GTA IV due to its poor code optimization. That's why there's cards out there with faster GPU's for more money. But all that said, I do well in GTA IV and Crysis and I only have a Gainward HD4850 512MB 'Golden Sample'.

Last thing. You can buy from Ebuyer using Google Checkout and if your credit card is billed at the shipping address and it's under the same name as the one on the order. Get that right, and they'll even get it to you by courier for £10 (for all orders under 5KG) and it'll even quicker than an order from Komplett would.

A 60 euro card would cope just fine at 1280X 1024, but it really does depend on what kind of monitor upgrade the OP is going for in the future.

If he does intend on going for Full HD monitor later, then the HD4870 for about 120 - 130 is the minimum entry point for a decent gaming experience.

Effluo

DECEiFER wrote: »

Try playing Crysis at any decent and consistent frame rate with a €60 graphics card.

http://www.guru3d.com/article/ati-radeon-hd-4670-review/9

With this
http://www.komplett.ie/k/ki.aspx?sku=449923

DECEiFER

Effluo wrote: »

http://www.guru3d.com/article/ati-radeon-hd-4670-review/9

With this
http://www.komplett.ie/k/ki.aspx?sku=449923

Never take those review benchmarks as the holy grail. I have a decent 4850 'Golden Sample' and I wouldn't get mine that high on Crysis, but then again, I do use 4x AA. You do need that AA when scoping enemies from a distance. Without it, it really does look pixelated. I also have a 19" monitor that uses 1280x1024 as the maximum resolution. It's really the same story in XP, Vista, or 7. You won't really see more than 30 fps on my enhanced (overclocked) 4850 with 4x AA. If ever you do, it will be short-lived and won't be when there's action/shooting.

Though, a friend of mine has a 4650 and he got Crysis to work, and even though it was slow, it worked well enough to enjoy it slightly. I even got it to work on my old Pentium 4 Prescott 3.2GHz machine (Asus 6800 GE 256MB card), but it was jerky as hell even at the lowest settings.

Solitaire

Did mav79 actually say he'd be playing The World's Most Broken Game at any point? :P

Like I said, HD4670 if on a desperate budget, HD4770 if wanting to play more intensive games below 1080p.

Leman_Russ

Solitaire wrote: »

Did mav79 actually say he'd be playing The World's Most Broken Game at any point? :P

Like I said, HD4670 if on a desperate budget, HD4770 if wanting to play more intensive games below 1080p.

And a 5850 if you are just looking to throw away money.

And a 5870 if you use €500 notes as firestarters :eek:

Solitaire

Let's not get carried away here

DECEiFER

Solitaire wrote: »

Did mav79 actually say he'd be playing The World's Most Broken Game at any point? :P

Like I said, HD4670 if on a desperate budget, HD4770 if wanting to play more intensive games below 1080p.

Fair point. :P

But without spending funny money or claiming to wipe your arse with €500 notes, you could get a half decent one for €100 that would better a 4670. I think it's worth the extra €40 up from €60.

Case and point. If I had spent €20 extra on a motherboard last year, I wouldn't have been stuck with a MSI P43 Neo-F that has pissed me off from the start. I went and bought an ASUS P5Q SE Plus on Thursday night. If only I did that a year ago, I'd have saved a few bob.

Leman_Russ

DECEiFER wrote: »

Case and point. If I had spent €20 extra on a motherboard last year, I wouldn't have been stuck with a MSI P43 Neo-F that has pissed me off from the start. I went and bought an ASUS P5Q SE Plus on Thursday night. If only I did that a year ago, I'd have saved a few bob.

Same here. I saved €20 on my mobo, but now if i plan on going Crossfire in the future, I'll have to buy a new motherboard

DECEiFER

Leman_Russ wrote: »

Same here. I saved €20 on my mobo, but now if i plan on going Crossfire in the future, I'll have to buy a new motherboard

I may have spoken too soon, or I may not have. We'll see on Tuesday or Wednesday when the motherboard actually arrives. But that's a bitch in your case, Leman. We all do it, though. I've never met anyone who has built a system without at least one minor hitch or mistake.

AlmightyCushion

Solitaire wrote: »

Did mav79 actually say he'd be playing The World's Most Broken Game at any point? :P

Like I said, HD4670 if on a desperate budget, HD4770 if wanting to play more intensive games below 1080p.

Worlds most broken game. Are you talking about crysis? If you are you should try and play gta 4. My pc can max out crysis more or less but can't max out gta4 and gta4 looks like **** in comparison. How could rockstar develop such a craply optimised engine.

DECEiFER

AlmightyCushion wrote: »

Worlds most broken game. Are you talking about crysis? If you are you should try and play gta 4. My pc can max out crysis more or less but can't max out gta4 and gta4 looks like **** in comparison. How could rockstar develop such a craply optimised engine.

They did it with them all, really, only GTA IV is more 'cutting-edge', and their worst job out of the lot. Sure it even lagged on the PS3, so I'm told.

The problem as I see it is that the map demands so much rendering that the sheer amount of objects will tire out any low and mid-range card. Then there's the CPU usage. GTA IV uses all four cores, if available. If you dare try to up the vehicle density to any realistic amount, then that's a lot of work for your CPU and yet more rendering for your graphics card. Sounds normal? Yeah, that's what your hardware is designed to do. Bad code optimization added to the massive amount of relevant scope of the map = disaster. GTA IV does rely on CPU a lot, but it helps to have an excellent graphics card. I know a guy with a CPU that should be better than mine, but his card isn't as good as mine. My gameplay fares out better, even though I'm using a Core 2 Duo E8400 and he a Core 2 Quad Q8200.

Crysis looks a hell of a lot better than GTA IV, but when you think about it, Crysis has its relevant scope limited to one scene at a time, and the background (such as the mountain as you look over the river at the beginning) is just given enough detail to make it look good, but nothing more. Designers (in 3ds Max, say) have to take into account the amount of detail required. Too much is just going to K.O. your gaming experience, so it's all balance at the end of the day. If Rockstar were better at optimization, they could have designed the map to look well with less actual detail, and thus less work needed to render it all.


That's my two cents...

Leman_Russ

GTA4 IIRC doesn't use the GPU at all and is all CPU based

mav79

Cheers for the help guys, i don't play crysis or cod, but this card hopefully will last a few years and i don't know what i'll need in the future. is the clock speed the most important thing i should look at?
A card with say 2.4 Ghz with ddr3 256bit
Or 3.2 Ghz with ddr5 128bit
which would be the best

Leman_Russ

I see you are looking at the 57xx series I guess (with the GDDR5 and 128bit memory).

It's a ok choice i guess

The GDDR5 is much better than the GDDR3

Solitaire

Our recommendations :P

The speed of the memory isn't a huge factor, it just has to suit the card. Slow GDDR3 is fine on basic cards, but you'd want fast GDDR3 or even slow GDDR5 on better cards to avoid slowing down the GPU. DDR2 will always drag a card's performance into the gutter Oh, and there's also memory bus width to take into consideration... and all this doesn't make a card faster, it simply prevents it from being slower than it should be :rolleyes:

DECEiFER

Solitaire wrote: »

Our recommendations :P

The speed of the memory isn't a huge factor, it just has to suit the card. Slow GDDR3 is fine on basic cards, but you'd want fast GDDR3 or even slow GDDR5 on better cards to avoid slowing down the GPU. DDR2 will always drag a card's performance into the gutter Oh, and there's also memory bus width to take into consideration... and all this doesn't make a card faster, it simply prevents it from being slower than it should be :rolleyes:

Precisely, in the same manner in which a CPU and system RAM work together. A slow CPU will bottleneck RAM, not to mention the overall performance of any hardware that exceeds it will also suffer. Similarly, a fast CPU is only as good as the RAM that stores processes into memory (RAM amount/size) and access these processes swiftly (RAM clock speed). In the former case, the CPU won't be using the RAM's full potential, which is an awful waste. In the latter case, the CPU will slow down a lot more to allow the small amount of and/or slower RAM to catch up, which means the CPU won't be used to its full potential.