What gfx card should i get

[Coresair]

I still prefer the stock fermi cooler, i cannot hear my friend's GTX 465 at under 80%, and it stays fairly cool, certainly not in the 90's or 100's like people claim. This combined with the improved temperatures idle lead me to believe that temperature is no issue. Also not all stock fermi coolers vent outside of the case and cool other parts of the card. some aftermarket/custom coolers may not. I for one don't want the hot air being pushed to my mobo/cpu/ram.

Also note the new gtx 460. The 460 is not salvaged junk, it is a WHOLE NEW architecture that trims the polymorph engines out, adds more texture units and reorganized the rest to favor gaming not general parallel computing. Note the gf104 architecture is still better than cypress at general computing and tessellation although emphasis on them has been removed. Also note the fact they draw less power and cost less than the 5830 hd while outperforming it in every aspect, as well as packing the superior drivers and featured of nvidia cards. They also run cooler and quieter than EVEN THE 5770hd!

The gtx 470 is still the card I plan to buy, but now ati really has nothing over nvidia. Yes nvidia has a 200$ card that can overclock to 5850 performance

[Caydr]

1. Fermi never reaches 100degree in idle mode

DUH, and neither does an atomic bomb. Lots of things don't reach 100 degrees at idle. The only idle temperature I mentioned was to say that my card is silent at 60 degrees, which I gave as reference for my following numbers.

2. You can't test ATi's (nor compare them with NVidia ones) with Furmark at all, they auto downclock when tested with it, else they would get burned in seconds!

Regardless of the driver hacks in place to prevent the burnout situation you mention, Furmark is still the best tool to determine what the maximum temperature your GPU could possibly reach is.

If you can't force your card to throttle with Furmark and you get no artifacts, your overclock is probably good.

So, what I was stating was: My 5850, overclocked and overvolted, peaks after 20 minutes or so at 89 degrees on furmark with my fan reaching about 45%. I know this from the logging software I use to overclock/overvolt. This leads into my next point, which is...

3. You can't compare a GTX480/295 with your 5850, those Fermi GPUs are 50% faster. You have to compare them in their classes

I'm comparing my card not to a 480, but a 470, the card which it directly competes with. I'm sorry if I didn't make this clear, I thought I had specified this but clearly I did not. In any case, a 470 is what I meant to compare it to.

A 470 reaches over 100 degrees with the fan running very high during NORMAL gaming situations according to reviews I've read. Any review that gives temperature and noise level results will confirm this.

4. The noise is a problem, but it always was like that with stock designs (series7, series8, series9, ...). Also there are for some time now cards with custom coolers with much less noise.

However, the thrust of my post was not the temperature of the card, but the amount of heat generated. Law of thermodynamics and all that. Heat has to go somewhere. If you get it off the card faster, it's still going into your case and eventually into the room in which you sit, making you a sad, sweaty panda.

And as someone who has sat on a independent product evaluation board during these days for ATI, I can assure they thought Linux was crap and not worth the effort.

Still isn't.

Seriously, who gives a shit about gaming on Linux besides people who won't use Windows on principle, won't put out the cash to buy a copy, or don't know how to pirate it? Anyone who uses Linux is smart enough to know how to dual boot - if you detest Windows and Microsoft so much, don't use it unless you want to play games. There are actually games made for Windows, the sort of thing you would need a high performance video card for. Even modern NV or ATI onboard video handles Linux games like Spring fine.

Give it up, if you want to use Linux exclusively, nobody, nobody with money cares about you. ATI has buggy drivers for an OS that has no games? Tough shit for you then, since there's no reason for you to be in that situation, you could dual boot. ATI at least has a reason.

NV's doing charity work, good for them. Too bad they didn't spend that money on engineers so they'd have a viable product though.

ATI's drivers are notoriously buggy as all hell.

Your friend's roomate installed the year-old custom OEM drivers that came with an X800 he bought at a yardsale and never updated them, and now his hard drive makes a funny clicking sound when he puts cheese in the floppy drive?

NV is notorious for gouging its customers, Americans are notorious for being slavers, Spain is notorious for massacring developing nations, Canada is notorious for burning down American monuments, Microsoft is notorious for releasing products ending in "me", Valve is notorious for releasing sequels too soon... The past is not the present, ATI's drivers are now fine and have been for a while.

Yes nvidia has a 200$ card that can overclock to 5850 performance

But my 5850 is overclocked to better than 470 performance while (I suspect) running cooler and quieter than the $200 card you mention at stock settings.

[CarRepairer]

Dear original poster,

http://springrts.com/phpbb/viewtopic.ph ... 24#p381024

If nvidia have a similarly priced card, and was only rated at half the performance, I'd still buy the nvidia.

I still feel this way and it is my advice to you. Performance is meaningless when other more important factors are lacking.

Good luck.

[echoone]

I like trolling...

In other words, ATI sucks on Linux therefore Linux sucks and therefore Linux isn't worth using. LOL. Yawn! I sincerely hope this is only a troll and you're not as small minded as you insist on showing everyone.

At least people at this point very much understand you contribute little and troll a lot. That pretty well sums it up. At this point, anyone who believes you've contributed little other than trolling...well... isn't likely to ever figure that out.

[echoone]

Dear original poster,

http://springrts.com/phpbb/viewtopic.ph ... 24#p381024

If nvidia have a similarly priced card, and was only rated at half the performance, I'd still buy the nvidia.

I still feel this way and it is my advice to you. Performance is meaningless when other more important factors are lacking.

Good luck.

Well said.

[Jazcash]

At this point, anyone who believes you've contributed little other than trolling...well... isn't likely to ever figure that out.

Are you kidding? Caydr is a contribution in his own right.

[Peet]

At this point, anyone who believes you've contributed little other than trolling...well... isn't likely to ever figure that out.

Are you kidding? Caydr is a contribution in his own right.

Yeah he keeps making these great games

[FLOZi]

At this point, anyone who believes you've contributed little other than trolling...well... isn't likely to ever figure that out.

Are you kidding? Caydr is a contribution in his own right.

Yeah he keeps making these great games

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cXf0yIRcdnI

[Caydr]

My reply last time insinuated things about the most appropriate platforms for Linux to be used on that made Beherith blow a gasket, and for that I apologize sincerely.

Here's my fixed version. Note that I am NOT re-posting something deleted, the entire post is 100% original material and is sparklingly inoffensive. So here we go:

Your posts have now devolved into "ad hominem" attacks, that's where you lose the argument and instead attack the individual behind the argument with the intention of changing the subject. Thank you most gratuitously for validating everything I said.

Let us consider the All-Knowing Hardware Survey:
http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/

You will note that the 4xx series hasn't even made it into the listing as of June. It hasn't had as long as the R5xxx series, true, but you would at least expect it to show up somewhere.

Also, the 4xxx series and 5xxx series are quite high in the rankings, leading me to believe that the horrible driver situation everyone's so worried about is not actually an issue. Many leading stores, such as Newegg for example, offer 30-day money-back returns, no questions asked, if you're not satisfied with the product you buy. A graphics card not working properly due to bad drivers would most certainly qualify for this.

The entire PC gaming population can't be wrong simultaneously: ATI's driver issues are a thing of the past, and the Geforce 4xx series is a stinker.

Dear original poster,

http://springrts.com/phpbb/viewtopic.ph ... 24#p381024

If nvidia have a similarly priced card, and was only rated at half the performance, I'd still buy the nvidia.

I still feel this way and it is my advice to you. Performance is meaningless when other more important factors are lacking.

Good luck.

Think about his statement and consider if the argument is being made rationally. He feels that the gaming performance of a high-end gaming card on an OS with very, very few games which require anything more than integrated graphics, is a much more important factor than price or performance.

In fact, he would buy something that costs twice as much with the same performance solely on this factor, when merely dual-booting would resolve the issue entirely, especially for someone as smart as a Linux user. Is this someone you would trust with critical thinking?

[Caydr]

At this point, anyone who believes you've contributed little other than trolling...well... isn't likely to ever figure that out.

Are you kidding? Caydr is a contribution in his own right.

Yeah he keeps making these great games

aww.png (15.69 KiB) Viewed 1462 times

I'll make sure to make another one when people get tired of the first one.

[FLOZi]

You didn't make BA.

[Beherith]

Your past or present contributions do not exempt you from moderation.

Altored_Divide.smf

[TradeMark]

btw who made that map? "Description: Great Divide ^3, ported from OTA version "

Edit: wtf... this was GFX card thread, now its about mapping/modding

[echoone]

Is this someone you would trust with critical thinking?

Oh please people. Get a grip! I don't know him at all. My comment was contained exclusively to this thread. My statement was not a summarization of his life's work. For all I know he's cured cancer some place. But that doesn't change the fact he did a who lot of ignorant trolling, half truths, and flat out misrepresentations.

And rather than move on, knowing that's exactly what he did, he comes back saying, "see I did all this, so its impossible I could have trolled." Such logic is beyond bizarre. Even worse, he then comes trolling back, accusing others of lacking critical thinking. Irony anyone?

And at the end of the day, why would you go to the mat pushing an alternate product which is well known to be inferior on Linux, which is important to the original poster, unless you have some agenda of your own. It doesn't make sense. So please, get back on topic. This trolling is not helpful at all and is completely off topic.

And in case its not clear, those are rhetorical questions. You don't need to respond. In fact, please don't. And to be clear, the only reason I responded is because people incorrectly believe I casted a much, much broader net than I actually intended; which is exactly the context of this thread before it took a horrible left turn. I can assure you that's not the case.

[aegis]

merely dual-booting would resolve the issue entirely

also running windows won't solve the driver/opengl issues that will still exist in both linux and windows.

[Caydr]

Name an OpenGL game that requires the driver optimization to run at above 60 fps on a 4850. 4850, the one that's two years old and costs nothing.

Nothing I've said in this thread is trolling, I've been 100% serious.

Linux 3D performance is irrelevant, as is OGL performance. If a Radeon runs OGL games at 25% of the speed it would run an equivalent D3D game, the much lower graphical complexity due to being 10 years old still means it's running plenty fast. New OGL games are in the extreme minority.

@Trademark, I made Great Divide ^3 for OTA, which is why I ported it.

It's not entirely accurate to say that I made BA, but I made AA which it is based on. The differences between OTA and AA are massive; the differences between AA and BA are incremental and don't alter the fundamental gameplay. At least, not as of the last time I played it. This isn't a dig at Noize or TFC, they themselves have said (IIRC) that BA isn't meant to be a huge departure from AA. For this reason, I don't think it's unfair to say that BA is "my" mod, even if I haven't been its developer for some time.

Note that I feel like I've already made a post similar to this, it may have been deleted but I'm not 100% sure and I haven't got a PM on the subject so I'm assuming it's my bad memory.

[Peet]

>Linux 3D performance is irrelevant, as is OGL performance.

>forum for an opengl game with a large linux user share

[Caydr]

The location a message is posted is irrelevant in the face of the larger reality in which we all live. A good percentage of users here may use Linux, but I don't think anyone here would argue that the vast majority don't use Windows.

Besides which, unless you're a hardcore irrational MS hater-for-the-sake-of-hate, I'm guessing a fair number of the "linux users" here dual boot so they can play games, or else have Windows on one computer and Linux on another.

[AF]

ATI +Opengl == rubbish

There are a lot of features of OpenGL where nvidia outright trumps Open GL, simply because ATI does not implement those parts of the standard, or doesn't implement them correctly, and it could fix it, but wont.

And this is under windows, on the latest and greatest builds of their drivers, using the flagship and most popular cards, on the most popular well supported versions of windows.

[TradeMark]

@Trademark, I made Great Divide ^3 for OTA, which is why I ported it.

OMG, you my hero.