Spring RTS Engine

i would not touch ati. I made the mistake of buying a 4870 and thank god i got it sold and bought this incredible gtx 285 !

The atis have glitches, especially in spring. And they dont come with physx either. And the nvidia ones are more silent. And are more power efficient (draws less at idle)

And nvidia drivers are rock solid.

reivanen wrote:The atis have glitches, especially in spring.

I have no issues with ATI in Spring anymore - well maybe except for some NVIDIA exclusive LUPS stuff but that's not a problem of ATI in the first place...

reivanen wrote:And the nvidia ones are more silent.

That's a plain nope. At least when you're talking about both reference designs - some 3rd party solutions which are supposed to be "better" in fact are the better "coolers" but noisy as hell. Especially idling is a weakness of the newer NVIDIA cards (proof)...

reivanen wrote:And nvidia drivers are rock solid.

I didn't have an "unstable" ATI driver or something like that since I started using ATI GPUs with a X800XL back in 2005. Apart from that NVIDIA drivers also are not bug free at all...

Nvidia drivers aren't any better than ATI drivers with the exception that they run OpenGL better.

physx is overrated and pointless, will be completely replaced by OpenCL by this time next year IMHO.

imbaczek wrote:physx is overrated and pointless, will be completely replaced by OpenCL by this time next year IMHO.

Although that's a bit of a misinterpretation. PhysX has nothing to do with OpenCL - it's more of CUDA that'll have to face OpenCL...

case in point: havok will support both CUDA and Stream, or whatever is the ATI counterpart called. physx will be completely irrelevant when that happens; OpenCL will only be the final nail in the coffin (it'll be easier to make cross-GPU accelerated physics.)

Hmm - well imo it's a kinda overdone prediction to say Havoc will wipe out PhysX. As you said with OpenCL both physics engines will run on all hardware in the end. So why should there be no room for two different engines on the market?

Also with the UT3 engine featuring PhysX we're gonna see new titles with that physics engine for quite a while. On the other hand PhysX has some disadvantages but well - as long as there are going to be TWIMTBP titles there also will be the PhysX engine...

imbaczek wrote:case in point: havok will support both CUDA and Stream, or whatever is the ATI counterpart called. physx will be completely irrelevant when that happens; OpenCL will only be the final nail in the coffin (it'll be easier to make cross-GPU accelerated physics.)

Except havok is still shart that makes objects merge into the ground, gain infinite amounts of energy, and than explode skywards nonsensically.

maybe that new version will use a better integrator, i dunno. it's just an example of physx' irrelevance due to being (unnecessarily!) constrained to a single hardware platform.

For the MT Spring version, I'd say 2-3 cores is fine. A quad will make your pathing faster though.

Like I wrote in some other thread, I'd recommend waiting for a GFX card based on 40-45nm technology because they will run cooler and perform better.

Protip: 2XX GTX is ALOT more silent than the 48XX series. End of discussion. I've had BOTH cards. 2XX is ALOT more fucking silent. Bloody end of it. Both are FINE in spring.

Muzic wrote:Protip: 2XX GTX is ALOT more silent than the 48XX series. End of discussion. I've had BOTH cards. 2XX is ALOT more fucking silent. Bloody end of it. Both are FINE in spring.

It's still a simple no. Reasons:

1.)
Reviews (I gave one, don't let me look up more)...

2.)
People ragequitting their GTX 280 when it was quite new switching to the HD4870 because of its noise (the 285er is a bit better now but still not as good as the HD series - it has more performance though so a more aggressive cooling is sort of understandable)...

Again you probably had a card with 3rd party cooler crafted towards cooling performance like Asus Top series or Sapphires Toxic series or a card from a brand which tends to use their cooler no matter if they're better or not (or just modifying 2slot cooled cards into 1 slot cooled cards). Those in fact can be even more noisy than the GeForce series. At the same time there exist some pretty good pre-modified cards like the Play! or PCS+ series from Powercolor which come with a Zerotherm cooler for nearly no increased price. They're a pretty good deal (still not enough for a really silent system but I guess you can spend the money for an Accelero)...

I've also been thinking about a pc upgrade, since my compy died on me. My problem is, an e8400 with a gtx+ 9800 would eat a shitload of power, no? So I guess I need a good quality 600-700 watt psu... and one of those cost almost as much as the vid. card

side note : ram seems so cheep nowdays, i could get 8 gigs of good ram and it would still be the cheapest part of the pc. Is it worth going 64 bit xp for the added ram fun?

BaNa wrote:My problem is, an e8400 with a gtx+ 9800 would eat a shitload of power, no?

That's a widespread myth and wrong. You could run that system with a PSU around 350 watts. Those "You need a 500 watts PSU!" specs you see sometimes just is about preventing people to think that their 300 watts 6 year old PSU might work with the latest hardware. There has been quite an evolution concerning the PSUs and so e.g. the 12V rail is very important nowadays and your PSU should provide multiple of em. The actual power consumption isn't as high as it may look like (although it's quite immense when comparing to older systems) but as long as you stay with a single GPU you won't really need more than 450 watts...

BaNa wrote:side note : ram seems so cheep nowdays, i could get 8 gigs of good ram and it would still be the cheapest part of the pc. Is it worth going 64 bit xp for the added ram fun?

Don't touch XP's 64Bit version! At least not until you've made sure there exist drivers for all the stuff you want to use with it. XP 64-bit was kinda ignored by the vendors and so you have just a small bunch of hardware that supports it. It may be fine for things like graphics cards but other stuff like printers, scanners and so on often don't have drivers and will not get any...

So if you want 64Bit I'd go for Vista...

[Krogoth86] wrote: So if you want 64Bit I'd go for Vista...

Ok, so my question is: would i get a performance boost from going vista ultimate 64 bit with 8 gigs of ram as compared to xp 32 bit with 4 gigs (well i guess it uses only 3.5 gigs)?

re power: there's a lot of FUD on the net about it.

I've got an 500VA (300W) UPS which can report it's real load. My whole box (420W PSU, E8400, ATI 4850, 2GB RAM, 2xHDD, 20" S-IPS display) eats 270-280W under 100% load and much less than that on idle (around 180W). Remember that's counting the display, which has its own PSU, so 350W should be enough in a middle class setup.

BaNa wrote:Ok, so my question is: would i get a performance boost from going vista ultimate 64 bit with 8 gigs of ram as compared to xp 32 bit with 4 gigs (well i guess it uses only 3.5 gigs)?

The question is rather what you use your PC for. If it's just about gaming & whatever everyday-jobs a PC can do then 4GB is totally sufficent right now. If you're doing extensive rendering and stuff like that the additional four gigs might come in handy...

[Krogoth86] wrote:

Muzic wrote:Protip: 2XX GTX is ALOT more silent than the 48XX series. End of discussion. I've had BOTH cards. 2XX is ALOT more fucking silent. Bloody end of it. Both are FINE in spring.

It's still a simple no. Reasons:

1.)
Reviews (I gave one, don't let me look up more)...

2.)
People ragequitting their GTX 280 when it was quite new switching to the HD4870 because of its noise (the 285er is a bit better now but still not as good as the HD series - it has more performance though so a more aggressive cooling is sort of understandable)...

Again you probably had a card with 3rd party cooler crafted towards cooling performance like Asus Top series or Sapphires Toxic series or a card from a brand which tends to use their cooler no matter if they're better or not (or just modifying 2slot cooled cards into 1 slot cooled cards). Those in fact can be even more noisy than the GeForce series. At the same time there exist some pretty good pre-modified cards like the Play! or PCS+ series from Powercolor which come with a Zerotherm cooler for nearly no increased price. They're a pretty good deal (still not enough for a really silent system but I guess you can spend the money for an Accelero)...

Yeah so buddy after owning a 260 AND a 4870, i can pretty fucking give you 100% ensured clearnace that my simple visiontek was ALOT fucker louder. Not to mention to proerply cool a 4870, stock fans had to be atleast at 35% which was LOUD jesus christ. 260 temps are alot nicer and it's 40% is alot damn quiter than a 4870. So maybe i'll take back my 2XX, but the 260>4870.

there's a difference between average power and peak wattage.

your UPS reported the system's constant draw, whereas power supplies advertise their peak wattage.
a low-quality 500w power supply can't maintain 500w - it can only provide it in bursts.

yeah, the UPS probably reports RMS wattage (which is cool nevertheless.) anyway, going for 500W just to have a 300W peak average load is pointless, unless you plan to do crossfire/sli in the future (god help your ears, though.)