High end graphics card?

[Rickster71]

Does anyone have a high end graphics card?
Like a GeForce GTX 280, 295 or a Radeon HD 4870. i.e.

I'm wondering how much of a visible difference there would be "if" I upgraded from my GeForce 8800 GT?
I know my power supply won't handle anything more than what I'm using now.
I was thinking more of a card to card comparison.

THANKS,
Rick

 

[Adam]

Rick,

What do you want to do with it? For example, I'm thinking that AH is going to look identical - but Crysis might not.

Adam

 

[Rickster71]

Rick,

What do you want to do with it? For example, I'm thinking that AH is going to look identical - but Crysis might not.

Adam

Hi Adam.
With the change of seasons approaching and it getting dark earlier, I usually get a video game to play.

I picked up a used version of Crysis on Amazon and the game's 'auto graphics' settings set it to medium.
I hoped for a higher setting with my Pentium 4 - 3.46 GHz & 3 GB of RAM and GeForce 8800 GT. ( I know it's not the greatest)
It got me wondering how much a new graphics card would help.

Also really like the Half Life series.

 

[Adam]

Gotcha. Well, to me the two questions are:

1. Would you be limited by your processor once you upgrade the video card?
2. Would it make a difference to you if the game was on max settings?

I think that only you can answer the second question, but others here might be able to help with the first.

If you are only being limited by your graphics card, then getting a better card will undoubtedly improve the graphics if you are limited to medium settings right now. Are you also limited in resolution, as well?

For me, the difference in the settings on COD4 that actually letting me play versus the maxed out settings is significant. I think that the game is beautiful on full settings, but my card can't handle it. I ultimately decided that it wasn't worth another $300 (card plus power supply) to me, though.

 

[Hi Ho]

What is the graphics slot on your motherboard? If it's AGP and not PCI-Ex16 then your options are slim to none in terms up an upgraded card.

I have an 8800 GTS 320MB and I play Crysis with the settings maxed out. It bogs down in snowy parts but it plays very well otherwise and looks beautiful. COD4 is a great game but not a really demanding one. My system doesn't even get warm running that game. Even my old AthlonXP 1800 system (6600 GT) runs it on medium-high settings with little trouble. My next upgrade probably won't be until I do a major overhaul of the system and install a new motherboard, RAM, Core i7, solid state drive, and video card... basically a new PC.

Asus P5B Deluxe
Intel Core2Duo E6600
ZeroTherm 120mm CPU heatsink/fan
4 GB Corsair RAM
GeForce 8800 GTS 320MB
Seagate 250GB 7200.10 (x2)
HT Omega Striker 7.1 Sound Card
FSP 700W PSU
Lian Li Aluminum Mid Tower Case

 

[krzywica]

Does anyone have a high end graphics card?
Like a GeForce GTX 280, 295 or a Radeon HD 4870. i.e.

I'm wondering how much of a visible difference there would be "if" I upgraded from my GeForce 8800 GT?
I know my power supply won't handle anything more than what I'm using now.
I was thinking more of a card to card comparison.

THANKS,
Rick

Biggest things to consider when wanting to upgrade your GPU....

1. What is you screen size and resolution. Think of this like room size when shopping for a subwoofer. You don't need a monster of a card if your running everything at 1024x768. But if its 1920x1080 and upward you will need something really beefy to run at max settings and native resolution.

2. Physical constraints of your case and motherboard. What type and how many GPU expansion slots do you have available. And also consider some of these cards are around a foot long, make sure you have room in your case to accommodate some of the higher end cards.

3.Is you GPU the bottleneck that is holding your system back from higher performance? If you go much higher your single core CPU will be a major concern and will not be able to keep your GPU saturated with data to process.

There are alot of cost effective options right now as the market is extremely competitive at present. I would wait till AMD releases their new line of GPU's in a few weeks or months as prices will plumit even further for both Nvidia and AMD.

 

[Rickster71]

What is the graphics slot on your motherboard? If it's AGP and not PCI-Ex16 then your options are slim to none in terms up an upgraded card.

I have an 8800 GTS 320MB and I play Crysis with the settings maxed out. It bogs down in snowy parts but it plays very well otherwise and looks beautiful. COD4 is a great game but not a really demanding one. My system doesn't even get warm running that game. Even my old AthlonXP 1800 system (6600 GT) runs it on medium-high settings with little trouble. My next upgrade probably won't be until I do a major overhaul of the system and install a new motherboard, RAM, Core i7, solid state drive, and video card... basically a new PC.

Asus P5B Deluxe
Intel Core2Duo E6600
ZeroTherm 120mm CPU heatsink/fan
4 GB Corsair RAM
GeForce 8800 GTS 320MB
Seagate 250GB 7200.10 (x2)
HT Omega Striker 7.1 Sound Card
FSP 700W PSU
Lian Li Aluminum Mid Tower Case

Thanks for the info!
I do have a PCI-EX16 slot.Though my 460w power supply is holding me back too.

I'll have to change the settings manually and see what happens. I used the auto setup in Crysis and it picked medium.


Has anyone seen a high end system & GPU? I've had the impression that it would be very life like, or like a PIXAR movie.

 

[Wafflesomd]

Thanks for the info!
I do have a PCI-EX16 slot.Though my 460w power supply is holding me back too.



Has anyone seen a high end system & GPU? I've had the impression that it would be very life like, or like a PIXAR movie.

Not quite to that point yet.

9800gt's can run on a 460w. Some of them don't require external power. That's considered mid range right now ( despite the fact that it can run every game out maxed not including crysis because that game is awful).

 

[jinjuku]

You are most likely CPU limited...

 

[lsiberian]

Don't by top of the line in computing ever. Go with the step down. Next year top of the line tends to be the middle of the road. I bought a fancy top of the line graphics card once. Now it's worthless.

Save your really money for audio.

Were your going to be less depreciated by our group.

 

[GlocksRock]

For HTPC movie playback only, no gaming, would a higher end card like a Radeon 4850 or even say a 4670 be better than a 4350? And also, how much does ram come into play, would a card with 1 gig of ram be better than a card with only 512 meg?

 

[Wafflesomd]

Don't by top of the line in computing ever. Go with the step down. Next year top of the line tends to be the middle of the road. I bought a fancy top of the line graphics card once. Now it's worthless.

Save your really money for audio.

Were your going to be less depreciated by our group.

So true, never buy top of the line.

 

[Rickster71]

Don't by top of the line in computing ever. Go with the step down. Next year top of the line tends to be the middle of the road. I bought a fancy top of the line graphics card once. Now it's worthless.

Save your really money for audio.

Were your going to be less depreciated by our group.

That's good advice, and how I've always approached buying electronics.
I got the GeForce 8800 when the GeForce 260 and 280 came out.

 

[krzywica]

For HTPC movie playback only, no gaming, would a higher end card like a Radeon 4850 or even say a 4670 be better than a 4350? And also, how much does ram come into play, would a card with 1 gig of ram be better than a card with only 512 meg?

For video playback the 4350 if just fine. The memory comes into play when you start running at 1080p+ resolutions with large amounts of AA and AF.

That's good advice, and how I've always approached buying electronics.
I got the GeForce 8800 when the GeForce 260 and 280 came out.

If you are planning to tune your performance for one game, and that game is Crysis, then get an Nvidia card. Both the Nvidia architecture and the drivers run better on Nvidia than the AMD counterpart. Thats not the case with all games, but certainly is with Nvidia.

Also as jinjuku and myself have stated before you are most likely CPU limited at this point. Especially for a game like Crysis that is multithreaded, which means it will utilize more than one CPU core when available. See if your motherboard would facilitate a CPU upgrade. If you have a newer P4 you may be able to slap a C2D or C2Q in there are save yourself the expense of an entirely new platform. You can start by checking what socket your CPU is.

 

[lsiberian]

For video playback the 4350 if just fine. The memory comes into play when you start running at 1080p+ resolutions with large amounts of AA and AF.



If you are planning to tune your performance for one game, and that game is Crysis, then get an Nvidia card. Both the Nvidia architecture and the drivers run better on Nvidia than the AMD counterpart. Thats not the case with all games, but certainly is with Nvidia.

Also as jinjuku and myself have stated before you are most likely CPU limited at this point. Especially for a game like Crysis that is multithreaded, which means it will utilize more than one CPU core when available. See if your motherboard would facilitate a CPU upgrade. If you have a newer P4 you may be able to slap a C2D or C2Q in there are save yourself the expense of an entirely new platform. You can start by checking what socket your CPU is.

intentional hijack.

Does the crysis game decide which cores the threads run on? I'm having flashes of OS class coming back to me.

Sounds like an intriguing game.

If you want to try tweaking the performance there are various things you can do to tune windows for a program.
These two I've used extensively
1. Set the priority for the program to high.

2. close explorer.exe

You can re-run explorer via task manager to bring it back.

by setting a program to high it gets more slices of the CPU.

 

[krzywica]

intentional hijack.

Does the crysis game decide which cores the threads run on? I'm having flashes of OS class coming back to me.

Sounds like an intriguing game.

If you want to try tweaking the performance there are various things you can do to tune windows for a program.
These two I've used extensively
1. Set the priority for the program to high.

2. close explorer.exe

You can re-run explorer via task manager to bring it back.

by setting a program to high it gets more slices of the CPU.

Yes this might help marginally to kill Windows Explorer, brings me back to XP and my SLI'd 7800GTX's. This would be very marginal though, maybe 1-2 FPS gain. The priority increase however would likely do nothing, this usually only helps when you are multitasking and you have several apps requesting CPU cycles at the same time. With games this is rarely the case. Unless you are running more than one instance of a game at the same time, or running CPU intensive apps at the same time there is no need for CPU prioritization IMO. I do this a lot on my main system and I have tried CPU prioritization and do not notice any difference, granted I don't have any performance issues on the system that I have as I usually overbuild my systems.

 

[strube]

As I mentioned in our previous Crysis discussion, as much as I am down on ATI, I got a 4890 as an upgrade to my 8800 GTS simply because it would fit in my case and the GTX 260/275/285 would not. I would have preferred the NVIDIA product, but the ATI is working out just fine. I chose the XFX version of the HD 4890 because they offer a transferable lifetime warranty.

For what it is worth, I run Fallout 3 on all max settings and 1920x1200 res, and it is a slightly newer game than Crysis, but possibly slightly less of a graphics hog simply because one of Crysis' objective was to be just that.

A few things I have read say that the 4890 is not worth the price difference over a 1GB 4870.

The 4890 ranges from $190 to $240.

The 4870 ranges from $145 to $190.

It was definitely worth the upgrade for me - the improvement in Fallout 3 graphics was night-and-day, IMO.

EDIT: I don't know about how close to the limits my Corsair 620W PSU is (not very close, I suspect), but I haven't had any problems with powering 4 hard drives including 2 10,000 RPM WD Raptors, 1 optical drive, the ATI card (with 2 PCI-E connectors), an HT Omega Claro+ sound card, six 120mm fans, four 80mm fans rolleyes, 4GB of ram, and my X-48 motherboard with an E8400 CPU...

 

[krzywica]

As I mentioned in our previous Crysis discussion, as much as I am down on ATI, I got a 4890 as an upgrade to my 8800 GTS simply because it would fit in my case and the GTX 260/275/285 would not. I would have preferred the NVIDIA product, but the ATI is working out just fine.

For what it is worth, I run Fallout 3 on all max settings, and it is a slightly newer game than Crysis, but possibly slightly less of a graphics hog simply because one of Crysis' objective was to be just that.

A few things I have read say that the 4890 is not worth the price difference over a 1GB 4870.

The 4890 ranges from $190 to $240.

The 4870 ranges from $145 to $190.

It was definitely worth the upgrade for me - the improvement in Fallout 3 graphics was night-and-day, IMO.

I completely agree. I am running a 4870 1GB in my main rig and it is an absolute monster of a card especially for the money. Plays everything maxed out at 1920x1200 except for the few poorly coded games that I play. Such as Crysis, Arma II, and....nope thats it. I can actually run several games at once if I so choose. But of course I have the CPU and system memory to keep the GPU stacked with data to crunch and the OS running smooth.

Decked to the walls with 2 Striped SSD's for the OS only and 8GB of system memory. I have page file disabled completely so the system runs perfect.

Also as far as the Power Supply goes I have several that I have sitting around if you were to want to upgrade. I have a BFG 550w, and a Corsair 750w in particular.

 

[strube]

Decked to the walls with 2 Striped SSD's for the OS only and 8GB of system memory. I have page file disabled completely so the system runs perfect.

Dang, man. I would love to go to RAID SSD's if I had the cash. I am not entirely sure it is fair to compare your system to anyone else's, considering our old school HDDs are the main, and major bottleneck of all of our systems.

 

[lsiberian]

Yes this might help marginally to kill Windows Explorer, brings me back to XP and my SLI'd 7800GTX's. This would be very marginal though, maybe 1-2 FPS gain. The priority increase however would likely do nothing, this usually only helps when you are multitasking and you have several apps requesting CPU cycles at the same time. With games this is rarely the case. Unless you are running more than one instance of a game at the same time, or running CPU intensive apps at the same time there is no need for CPU prioritization IMO. I do this a lot on my main system and I have tried CPU prioritization and do not notice any difference, granted I don't have any performance issues on the system that I have as I usually overbuild my systems.

I used to due it all the time with movie watching on my computer. I'd set the priority to real-time and kill explorer.exe. But I had a laptop with performance issues.