best vid card for spring

[Caydr]

I apologize for my previous post, it contained a racially insensitive comparison to the relationship our developers share with ATI users.

In its place, I will try this one. Our developers are Aztecs, and ATI owners are babies. If it was up to our developers, we would all use NV cards and the world would be a better place. Forget about the fact that ATI is responsible for bringing the price of GTX280s down from $700 to $300 almost overnight by simply not being so excessively greedy. Nevermind that NV is all about closed-source implementations of proprietary technology and has been known to force developers to disable features that give ATI an advantage. If it's convenient, all the FOSS hype and transparency can be thrown out the window, I guess.

Unless the Aztecs were right about some very strange things, they should all be dead by now, so no offense taken by anyone. I imagine if there ARE Aztecs alive, we all have some bigger things to worry about in the next couple of years.

Our developers don't have the time of day to offer ATI users, and I've even offered to send one or two of them a free ATI card for the sake of aiding in troubleshooting. Free video card -> denied.

And I'll do it again. Hey, any long-time developer want to volunteer to make sure release versions don't have major ATI bugs and operate as a go-to guy in case of ATI-specific bugs? I will send you a free, modern ATI video card.

[Tribulex]

My advice is best.

or buy 1 295

[Caydr]

Or one 5850 and run it under Windows.

[Tribulex]

ya bigger number is better right? lol


i honestly dont know anything about ati. teach me, so i can save some monies!

[Caydr]

Be educated

5850 faster than 285 in all scenarios, and the 285 itself is a fair bit faster than the 280 (x2) posted in the pic.

5850 $310
285 $370

Prices from NewEgg

5850 also gives you DX11, multi display output, runs cool and quiet as it is manufactured @40nm compared to 285's 55nm and 280's 65nm. And overclocks nicely, especially if you buy an MSI or Asus since these ones will allow you to tweak the card voltage up to an extra 0.25v. Even without adding voltage you can approach the 5870's level of performance by just upping the clocks without touching voltage. Also the 5850 comes with a free game.

5850 will beat 285 in anything you throw at it in any scenario, except that it can't do that proprietary PhysX and CUDA bullshit.

Or if you want to go dual-GPU:

5970 trounces 295

5970: $700 (IIRC what the GTX280 launch price was)
295: $520 (price has dropped just a liiiiiitttle bit lately)

I picked Crysis as the benchmark of choice since it's known to favor Nvidia cards. One that seems to favor ATI more is the Far Cry 2 one, where it's as much as 60% faster.

It would be a good time to get familiar with ATI, Fermi benchmarks are starting to leak and it's not pretty.

[Tribulex]

5970: $600
295: $500

Fixed

[Caydr]

Newegg says $699 though...

edit: They must be old listings since they're out of stock, I can buy a 5970 for $660 CAD from other stores. NVM.

[Scratch]

im told this isn't the best time to buy a GForce card. Radeon 5770 is the one I'm looking at right now.

[Scratch]

If you'd posted this in Off Topic I could've given you a good answer sooner.

For Spring here are your issues:

1) CPU is critical. You need a fast, preferably dual or quad core CPU to get good performance especially as games get bigger/longer. Anything that says "core 2 duo" on the box will be perfectly good. If you don't have something similar or equivalent, it's more than likely that any speed problems you have will be due to the CPU being too slow rather than the GPU. Any Phenom II or even Phenom I should probably be fine.

2) If your main concern is Spring, you don't need a really good GPU and I'd recommend something from Nvidia <Removed Due To Offensive Flaming - Neddiedrow> That said, most people don't have too bad a time, we just can't use silly high-end things like dynamic water for instance (sometimes). So a GT 240 or better would probably be perfectly adequate and more importantly, very cheap. Alternatively, anything at all from the Radeon 5xxx series will run Spring perfectly well, as will a Radeon 4770 or better I'd imagine. A Geforce 9600 or 8600 would be more than adequate if you can pick one up used, IIRC, but these are now quite outdated. Ebay, Kijiji, Craigslist, etc, could be searched to find a bargain 4870 or 4890 card to give you something more modern and powerful without going over $150 or so.

3) This is not an especially good time to buy a graphics card. Wait another month if possible, as Nvidia will have launched the Fermi series (hopefully?) by that date. Unless they miss another deadline. Again. For the eleventeenth time. Fermi's going to be a crock of shit, but it will likely mean price reductions for older Nvidia cards... maybe, which might mean slightly-reduced prices for ATI cards... maybe. The thing is, it really is going to be a crock of shit so there's also a pretty good chance that nothing will happen at all. In any case, a month isn't too long to wait.

4) If you do not have a PCI-Express slot and must use AGP instead, investigate the highest-end Radeon 3xxx series card you can find. Some of these had AGP variants and they were the last, best AGP cards released.

edit: wait a minute, you're bitching about a 4 hour time lag between a post being made and someone giving you a helpful reply? I take it back, you need something by Matrox.

lol

<Removed Due To Offensive Flaming - Neddiedrow>

[aegis]

im told this isn't the best time to buy a GForce card. Radeon 5770 is the one I'm looking at right now.

but you said "for spring"

[zerver]

ATI is fine as long as u don't need shadows and other fancy effects. Also probably gives more FPS per $$$.

[Gota]

ATI is fine as long as u don't need shadows and other fancy effects. Also probably gives more FPS per $$$.

I get shadows with ATI now.
Only thing is still don't have are shore waves i think.

[imbaczek]

10.2 drivers fixed shorewaves on spring 0.81.2 for me - can you confirm that?

[zerver]

I get shadows with ATI now.

Yeah, some shadows. Probably no tree shadows though.

[Tribulex]

Newegg says $699 though...

edit: They must be old listings since they're out of stock, I can buy a 5970 for $660 CAD from other stores. NVM.

Introducing.... GOOGLE!

$600

[Scratch]

most of your advice doesn't mean anything because you are American and American prices DO NOT translate into Canadian dollars.

I understand GeForce is best. However a friend of mine tells me the best bang for buck is a Radeon. So unfortunately I don't know what to do with your advice for that reason and since I've been out of the loop for so many years and I hear that Radeons do work I'm probably going for one.

only b/c no one here has convinced me GeForces are competitively priced to Radeon and really add anything extra of value

[Gota]

If the card is solely for Spring Than get Nvidia...At least for me ATI is buggy.some visual features(even though minor) do not work and i get weird bugs.
For example:
sometimes if I alt tab and Alt tab back i wont see any visual effects.
If a missile is launched I'll see the model but no visuals,and no nano particles.This bug is extremely annoying since you basically cant see what is being targeted what is being shot and where etc..

[Neddie]

Nvidia: Better OGL support, better drivers. These advantages seem to be diminishing, with various bad driver releases over the past year.
ATI: Greater raw power, lower price. These advantages seem to be growing.

A 250 or 260 is an excellent Spring card because it has the OGL support you need and the power to do almost everything, at an acceptable if not ideal price. For the same price you can get a mid-high end ATI card, though.

If you're primarily on Windows, I can't recommend one over the other. If you're on Linux, Nvidia will prove less problematic. I, like Caydr, believe that Nvidia is in a comparative decline - this is worrisome because I doubt this will lead to any improvement in ATI drivers.

[Scratch]

I purchased the 250, jacked up all the settings, and will try running at 1920x1200. (widescreen)

[Argh]

If it was up to our developers, we would all use NV cards and the world would be a better place.

Then why are they spending a considerable amount of their development time on this current cycle working on things that will fix most of the problems with ATi hardware, and make future improvement / maintenance a lot easier?

Basically, all of us who have dealt with the hassles of ATi and OpenGL think that ATi's approach to compatibility is rather awful, because of various things that Just Don't Work under ATi's drivers, not some random prejudice.

This isn't some issue that's been shoved under the rug by any means; it's just very frustrating and confusing, because ATi seems unable to clarify what's broken, therefore a lot of the time, projects like ours are the ones that are smacking into things nobody's even documented, or we're forced to search obscure forum threads looking for clues.

The real issue here is that people like you, who are willing to spend top dollar for the latest hardware, need to write to ATi / AMD and complain about this situation to THEM, not US, so that maybe they'll realize that they have really screwed up and that it costs them credibility with the people who actually build things. Write them a nice, polite letter, tell them that we'll be happy to demonstrate that it's not because we're incompetent, it's because a lot of things in their drivers are just plain broken.