What graphics card do you use for Spring RTS? Looking to buy one.

What graphics card do you use for Spring RTS? Looking to buy one.

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builderror
Posts: 12
Joined: 04 May 2020, 01:47

What graphics card do you use for Spring RTS? Looking to buy one.

Post by builderror »

I've never had a good graphics card, ever.

The only time I bought one was 3-4 years ago when I bought a 27" View Sonic (one of those ones that also handles 4k really well according to some people) and Windows 10 wouldn't let me run the native 2560x1440 res even with me searching for the drivers. In the end I capitulated and bought a budget card that was only slightly better than my integrated graphics! The graphics card driver worked for the higher resolution, but in Linux the integrated sensed my res without problem.

The card was an awful nvidia gt 710 for those wondering (it gets defeated by AMD A10 APU)

So now, I've just finished up with a full time job that didn't go very well and I have some money to spend. What kind of graphics card do you have and what would you recommend? I game mostly on console so I won't be going for high end, but anything in the mid range I will consider.

I'll run your suggestions through my local computer shop, maybe my purchase will help them stay in business for another year or two.
ivand
Posts: 310
Joined: 27 Jun 2007, 17:05

Re: What graphics card do you use for Spring RTS? Looking to buy one.

Post by ivand »

The best cards are made by NVIDIA. AMD might have edge in raw power, but their drivers are horrible, especially for OpenGL and especially on Linux.
So pick any 30xx card for your budget. Should provide you enough value for coming years.
raaar
Metal Factions Developer
Posts: 1094
Joined: 20 Feb 2010, 12:17

Re: What graphics card do you use for Spring RTS? Looking to buy one.

Post by raaar »

Use this site to compare various GPUs
https://www.videocardbenchmark.net/

example
https://www.videocardbenchmark.net/comp ... 1432vs4167

to play spring games comfortably, I wouldn't use any GPU with an average G3D Mark below 5K.

With 2K or less you'll get below 60 fps on many maps right from the start and will probably have trouble keeping 30fps late game.
Last edited by raaar on 23 Apr 2021, 12:34, edited 2 times in total.
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Silentwings
Posts: 3720
Joined: 25 Oct 2008, 00:23

Re: What graphics card do you use for Spring RTS? Looking to buy one.

Post by Silentwings »

I'm still on a 1060 3Gb (with 8700k), which seemed more than enough for Spring when I last played a year or two ago.
builderror
Posts: 12
Joined: 04 May 2020, 01:47

Re: What graphics card do you use for Spring RTS? Looking to buy one.

Post by builderror »

Due to covid 19 restrictions the computer shop can't get any 4gb cards, they only have 6gb cards that are beyond what I want to pay.
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Teifion
Posts: 22
Joined: 10 Mar 2021, 00:10

Re: What graphics card do you use for Spring RTS? Looking to buy one.

Post by Teifion »

970 here, looking to upgrade it when I get a chance but it's powering my two 1440p monitors fine.
Master-Athmos
Posts: 916
Joined: 27 Jun 2009, 01:32

Re: What graphics card do you use for Spring RTS? Looking to buy one.

Post by Master-Athmos »

ivand wrote: 22 Apr 2021, 23:26 The best cards are made by NVIDIA. AMD might have edge in raw power, but their drivers are horrible, especially for OpenGL and especially on Linux.
That's actually a quite outdated point of view back from the old days when it still was ATI and not AMD. Especially on Linux things have turned around as NVIDIA only delivers proprietary drivers while AMD delivers open source drivers. Especially on rolling release distributions NVIDIA can be a pain in the butt when the drivers mismatch the kernel. From what I've heard people also weren't that fond of NVIDIAs Wayland support. The raw power problem also isn't the case anymore since the RDNA architecture which is when it showed that AMD started seriously investing in improving their GPUs after they had to clear the disaster with their Bulldozer CPU architecture - actually it now rather is NVIDIAs Ampere which has a bit of such a problem as they drain a bit more power than the respective AMD counterparts...

Generally speaking both vendors are fine nowadays on the driver side though and in this generation performance is pretty much identical and depends on how much money you want to spend. Only on the Raytracing performance NVIDIA has the upper hand but you have to invest in the very strong cards to get reasonable raytracing performance anyway and it as of right now is a niche feature only very few games offer with even less where it actually makes a noticeable difference besides some tame improvements in the reflections and so on that hardly a difference when actually gaming...
What kind of graphics card do you have and what would you recommend?
Now coming to the crux of the topic. You've chosen pretty much the worst situation to buy a new graphics card. Pretty much the entire market has been bought empty and the cards you get easily sell for twice the price that they should cost - if they are available at all. The problem is basically everything as of now. The biggest problem is the surge of cryptocurrencies which can be created via graphics cards which is why mining farm operators came like locusts and bought everything the market had - no matter the price. They even started buying notebooks which have decent GPUs. By the way - if you plan on buying additional hard drives you'd better do this now too as a new Chinese cryptocurrency is coming which isn't so much about computing power but about space on your hard disk and you can already see companies in China preparing for this as they start buying more and more HDDs/SDDs - so if you plan for additional disk space you better buy now. Then you of course have the pandemic situation where the chip manufacturers had some problems keeping the production chains intact plus with more people staying at home the general demand of course went up too...

The bottom line is this: If you don't want to pay ludicrous prices right now you have to wait until at least next year or you try to grab some used cards sold by someone who isn't a scalper via Ebay and sorts. Apart from there it's not so much about NVIDIA vs AMD but rather get what you can get a hold of no matter what it is. There are some shops which still try to sell at reasonable prices and some of them have established a lottery system where it's random who of those who pre-ordered will get the card. Maybe you can get lucky there... :wink:

It's simply the worst time to try to get a decent GPU right now...
The only other hope that comes to my mind would be Intel GPUs. They are trying to get a piece of the GPU market and will release their first GPUs with serious performance this year. Not too much is known about this and I don't know about the planned release date right now. It's a bit of buying the cat in the bag but you could try to wait for this and grab a card immediately once you can order them. Nobody really can tell you if that's a good idea or not though as these Intel cards still have to prove themselves in terms of performance, drivers and so on...
ivand
Posts: 310
Joined: 27 Jun 2007, 17:05

Re: What graphics card do you use for Spring RTS? Looking to buy one.

Post by ivand »

Master-Athmos wrote: 23 Apr 2021, 11:34 That's actually a quite outdated point of view back from the old days when it still was ATI and not AMD. Especially on Linux things have turned around as NVIDIA only delivers proprietary drivers while AMD delivers open source drivers.
I respectfully disagree. I deal with AMD OpenGL bugs for the last 3-4 years in various OpenGL widgets I've made. Recently I hit with a quite a few of them in my journey to migrate the engine to GL4. To underline how bad AMD implementation is I'll note that it's the only GPU that has special path inside spring, dedicated to working around their bugs and odd behaviors. Some of them might be historical, some are still there. The most recent bug I can name is total system crash on Linux AMD driver when one tries to define Clip Distance and write to it from the shader. Don't let "open-source driver" and bla-bla fog your mind. The fact it's open source doesn't make it any better and by comparison their drivers are horrible. I recently talked to a few guys very proficient with Vulkan and they confirmed AMD has tons of bugs there as well.
Master-Athmos wrote: 23 Apr 2021, 11:34 The raw power problem also isn't the case anymore
I meant raw horsepower. For the money AMD has the edge: they can crunch numbers a bit faster than NVidia and thus provide better value for crypto miners. Also AMD has async compute engines, something NVidia doesn't have.

That said it's almost doesn't matter in the real CG application. The past two years all advancements there are about ray tracing and AI inferencing to show more while doing less. That's why what matters is maturity of hardware acceleration in these areas, where Tensor cores and RT cores of 30xx series have no match.
Master-Athmos
Posts: 916
Joined: 27 Jun 2009, 01:32

Re: What graphics card do you use for Spring RTS? Looking to buy one.

Post by Master-Athmos »

ivand wrote: 23 Apr 2021, 15:06To underline how bad AMD implementation is I'll note that it's the only GPU that has special path inside spring, dedicated to working around their bugs and odd behaviors. Some of them might be historical, some are still there.
Yeah - that's a historical ATI thing from the OpenGL2/3 times. Things basically went overboard when the Khronos Group fucked up OpenGL3 big time. As things went more and more haywire in OpenGL2 with every vendor having its own extension which lead to a chaos OpenGL3 was supposed to restructure certain things to improve the situation. Things even went so far that ATI halted some OpenGL driver work awaiting the soon to some 3.0 revision of the API in order to do things clean from the ground up instead of continuing the GL2 mess. Well as we know things came different as Khronos silently decided to do a 180° turn and baffled everyone when they actually released OpenGL3 which had removed most of the structural changes which would have made some adaptions mandatory. The official explanation was that they didn't want to anger the CAD crowd which had a substantial saying in what should happen to the API and which obviously weren't fond of needing to adapt to OpenGL3 so most of the betterment of the situation was gone and well - that basically initiated the downfall of OpenGL which never really recovered from being held back and nowadays got replaced by AMD's Mantle API successor Vulkan...

You have my full respect for dealing with the old OpenGL stuff as why I never touched it in any serious way I know it's not nice, some things might indeed still be buggy while other problems simply evolved from NVIDIA and ATI doing things differently which leads to a certain code that runs on NVIDIA being faulty on ATI/AMD cards which isn't so much about bugs though but stems from different architecture approaches from the time...
ivand wrote: 23 Apr 2021, 15:06
Master-Athmos wrote: 23 Apr 2021, 11:34 The raw power problem also isn't the case anymore
I meant raw horsepower. For the money AMD has the edge: they can crunch numbers a bit faster than NVidia and thus provide better value for crypto miners. Also AMD has async compute engines, something NVidia doesn't have.
Yeah - that's why I mentioned the RDNA architecture AMD offers since 2019. This fundamentally changed certain things as the old GCN architecture always had to do a split between gaming and computing performance and with a tight budget AMD had to deal with due to their CPU blunders, there wasn't much room for optimizations for gaming. With RDNA there now is a seperate design which aims at just gaming while the GCN architecture which indeed was extraordinarily strong on the computing side will be advanced in the CDNA line. That doesn't mean RDNA is bad at compute heavy workloads but the initial powerhorse went down the CDNA road while for gamers the way more efficient RDNA line, which manages to transfer its flops into fps very well, was introduced which now with RDNA actually managed to catch up with NVIDIA after for quite some long years being attractive solely on the price/performance ratio...

On a sidenote it will be interesting to see how the current situation evolves. There's a high probability that NVIDIA will disappear as a GPU manufacturer as at a certain point CPU+GPU bundles probably will emerge and here NVIDIA is unlikely being able to compete with Intel and AMD with their strong x86 CPU products. This year's GTC pretty much showed this too with Bluefield, Atlan, autonomous driving and so on but nearly no gaming focus. But oh well - as of right now NVIDIA is still at the top of their game and one of the best choices one can make when buying a new graphics card. If buying one would be possible that is... :mrgreen:
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Beherith
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Joined: 26 Oct 2007, 16:21

Re: What graphics card do you use for Spring RTS? Looking to buy one.

Post by Beherith »

I would also agree that while amd is a little bit cheaper for same perf in most titles, their drivers still suck, especially for opengl
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