What gfx card should i get

[AF]

Ati is a development obstacle, it's not so much that there are features in spring that don't work on Ati cards, it's that those features never made it into a release precisely because they didn't work on ATI cards. it's also a development hassle that discourages, I remember it being a pain in the arse for jcnossen when developing SM3

[Coresair]

Thats funny, I run 2024x2024 shadows (or what ever the resolution is) and dynamic water on my 9500gt......I never drop below 30fps. I certainly cannot wait to see full resolution shadows and 8x+ aa in action with my new card

[Neddie]

My geforce8800 couldnt even handle the new water effect, it started running on >90 celsius and screaming for me to shut it off. (it honestly screamed at me!).

Interesting. My 8800 can still handle all of the effects, as long as I'm not running them all together at maximum. As for the screaming, it does that in pretty much all games - the fan is simply too small.

[aegis]

there was an issue with some cards having empty space that made noise when heat escaped from it or sth, a kind of squealing sound

[TradeMark]

My geforce8800 couldnt even handle the new water effect, it started running on >90 celsius and screaming for me to shut it off. (it honestly screamed at me!).

Interesting. My 8800 can still handle all of the effects, as long as I'm not running them all together at maximum. As for the screaming, it does that in pretty much all games - the fan is simply too small.

Do you also get the low FPS at beginning of game until you zoom in/out few times? I noticed this happens if your graphic settings are too low So when i gave more load to the GPU, it wake it up and started getting higher FPS again. I changed the terrain view radius higher, so it uses more power on rendering, fixes it most of the times without need to zoom in/out.

My geforce8800 is dead now btw... died twice. dunno will i rez it again... probably get better card with 50Ôé¼

[Neddie]

My geforce8800 couldnt even handle the new water effect, it started running on >90 celsius and screaming for me to shut it off. (it honestly screamed at me!).

Interesting. My 8800 can still handle all of the effects, as long as I'm not running them all together at maximum. As for the screaming, it does that in pretty much all games - the fan is simply too small.

Do you also get the low FPS at beginning of game until you zoom in/out few times?

I don't believe so. I mostly don't play on it these days, it is in my secondary desktop.

[Caydr]

After some reading, I agree that 460 seems to be good value as long as you can find it for $200 or so.

From a technical standpoint I'm not sure how they can sell it for that price. It's a larger chip with a lower yield than 48xx, selling for $100 less, and made at the same factory (TSMC) on the same process.

I'm guessing availability will be very low, TSMC is overwhelmed with demand for 40nm parts. ATI won't be dropping their prices even if 460 makes their parts start to look bad, since they're selling as many parts as TSMC can deliver.

The only thing that will bring down ATI's prices significantly in the near future will be the 6xxx series when it becomes available somewhere around September-November, and even then it will just be a case of them dumping old stock and quickly running out of inventory.

So for that reason alone I'd say that if you're building a computer that you absolutely must have in the next 3 months and you can get your hands on a 460, it's probably worth it. The heat output and noise may still be an issue though, it would be wise to investigate this.

However, if you CAN wait, obviously 6xxx and any upcoming 460 derivatives will get you significantly better value, regardless of which vendor or product line you choose to buy from. (newer chips = lower cost on older chips)

FYI, 6xxx series = fail, brought on by distant after-effects of the recession. 7xxx series will be the actual next-generation chip and will come out relatively quickly afterwards. I'm hoping they just call the 6xxx series 5790/5890/5990 cards since they will only be a relatively minor improvement, but marketing people will probably queer things up as you'd expect.

many of the compatibility options are worked around by developers who get complaints, an easy fix is hardcoded "this doesn't work for ati so we'll disable it"

Exactly. Caydr doesn't even know what devs have to go through just so his game doesn't crash. Talk about lack of appreciation.

I appreciate the effort but I don't think that the problem is as severe as all that, when commercial developers don't seem to complain about ATI being a problem.

This is probably because they just don't use OGL, but my earlier stance on this remains: ATI's concern is gaming. Gaming takes place predominantly in Windows, and so uses DirectX, which is why ATI is most concerned with it. It would be nice if ATI supported OGL better, especially on Linux, but it would also be nice if someone invented a cure for whatever's wrong with Glenn Beck. Alas...

Perhaps with the new line of CPU/GPU "Fusion" chips coming in early 2011 it will be something they finally decide to address. It's just not something that's a relevant market segment to them right now, and in any case it just seems to be a futile gesture for someone to use Linux exclusively when dual-booting is a perfectly viable alternative that you can use as much or as little as you want.

[Coresair]

Well, my GTX 460 and 400w corsair power supply arrived yesterday evening (225$ total before 30$ corsair rebate, I saved a few newegg coupons for the order ). Before I start talking about temperature I must tell you what kind of an enclosure it resides in now. It is a small dell case, not sure what atx compliant form factor it is, but a lot smaller than midtower. This case has one exhaust fan (two if you count the psu) and no intake. Also not my job of cable management with the long thick and numerous corsair cables was not the best.

Now that that is out of the way let me tell you a little about the temperature of this thing. When it idles, it powers down to 405mhz core, 900mhz shader and I cant recall the memory clock. This creates superb idling temperature, they stay within the range of 30-40C (I will update image when it is done cooling off, It just got done folding). Under load things are even more Impressive.




Be sure to enlarge imaged so you can see the numbers


As you can see, it will never reach or get over 70C. These tests are at auto-fan settings and were both at 40% fan speed. I can turn the fan up to 60% without hearing it, but why bother? this card runs cool on its own. bear in mind that this is at the core clock of 900mhz, and shader clock of 1800mhz. This is a 33% overclock on stock voltage, and i could go higher if I had the patience too, but again, i see no reason to. I can only imagine how high it could get with a simple voltage increase.

Performance wise I am seeing >30fps in most of my modern games completely maxed including 4x aa, such as battle forge, I have been able to go up to 16x AA (too lazy to force 32aa in drivers) in all the older games suck as bioshock and COD4. The only two games that i cannot get maxed are crysis and metro 2033, but they run fine on high settings (and 2xaa). I have yet to test spring yet, unfortunately. Folding at home is seeing 11-12k PPD coming from this gpu, so its certainly a superb folding purchase (low cost, low heat, low power and high PPD).

Did i mention that it is COMPLETELY silent below 65% fan which it never even need to approach? or that it cost me 195$ TOTAL for a psu and gpu upgrade.....or that or that or that......

The list goes on, this is a superb gpu in EVERY way. It gets my recommendation easily. A low cost, and low heat/power gpu that performs better than the closest ati competitor (5830hd) and still gets perks like physX, CUDA, good gpgpu performance and the option to go 3d.

edit: added idle temperature image.

[TradeMark]

Why does my folding look like shite? maybe buggy ATI drivers?