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Looking to add to my PC.
Hey,
I'm looking to add to my PC, ATM I have this:
http://www.dealtime.co.uk/xPF-Acer-Aspire-X3200-9650-Phenom-X4-9650-2-3-GHz-4096-Mo-640-GB-DVD-RW-Qwerty-Genuine-Windows-Vista-Ho (scroll down for specs)
It runs most MMO's okay, but I'm just wondering if anyone can give me some info on what to add to make it run better (and pos. some non MMO games)
Thanks alot for any advice,
-mkgdodd.
Comments
The graphics card it really whats holding you back.
Go pick up a EVGA Nvidia 1gb GTS 250 from Newegg.com
They are $134.99 after Mail in rebate right now. Also make sure you have a 500w psu before you but it and a PCIe 2.0x16 slot
Forget old nvidia cards, radeon 5770 is much better investment in that price class.
Right click on my computer and choose properties. Now click where it says: Windows Experience Index. Next click update my score and let windows test your computer. Now post the results of each of your individual component scores so we know where your computer is slacking!
Bingo
This is perfect advice, unless thast too expensive or your willign to spend more.
But the 250 GTs is the best card for the price (and good brand)
take a look
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814125285
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814121333
or whatever something like that, can also get just a 250 gts 512 mb for $99 probley work the money saved.
"Society in every state is a blessing, but government even in its best state is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one ..." - Thomas Paine
The 250 is actually newer than the 280 or 260, it was made to compete with the ATI series.When I bought my 280 last year, the 250 didn't even exist.
I'd pick nVidia over ATI any day of the week.
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Uhm, you realize the 250 is a die shrunk 9800GTX+ with no changes to design, and the 9800GTX+ is an overclocked 8800GTS 512Mb, so the 250 is actually 2 generations old? It wasn't made to do anything with ATI, it just had a new name slapped on it and re-released to market.
Both companies put out solid cards. The premium nVidia charges is for Physx and possibly Stereo 3d. Physx is used in ~2 good games and will most likely be superceded by DX11 through OpenCL/DirectCompute. Stereo 3d does sound cool if you have a 120hz monitor and a game that uses it well though.
Er, that said.. the 250 is at a the optimal price/performance price right now. So yea, GTS250 if you were looking to spend $125, but 4870 at $150 is an even better deal, though I think 5770 at $170 is really the only way to go if you have the cash.
Why limit yourself to a two generation old card and also skip out of future DX11 games just cause someone tells you to go nVidia? I am rather neutral and have owned cards from both companies, but at the moment, ATI is the way to go. 5770 gives you way more for the money than anything nVidia has at the moment.
nvidia and ati both make great hardware so so hardware and crap hardware based on which model youre looking at, the difference lies in the driver support. bottom line nvidias driver support is roughly 27 times better then ati in speed of releases to fix nasty bugs and effectiveness of said fixes. sorry ati fans, your driver support is just inferior, even when you have the better card upper hand ill go with nvidia to avoid the dam driver conflicts.
ATI Driver support has been solid since they merged with AMD. They outpace nVidia driver support currently.
your cpu isn't great either tbh but there isn't much you can do about that, a 5770 would be a cheap gpu upgrade
i7 920@3.6ghz//Titan fenrir//asus p6t se//6gb patriot viper pc3-12800//powercolour hd5970//CM-690// OCZ ModXStream Pro 700w//500gb WD caviar black and 500gb WD caviar blue//3x 24" monitors running in eyefinity
Don't even think of buying cards to play dx 11 games atm, unless you plan on having that card for 5 more years and even then its you just be starting to use dx 11.
"Society in every state is a blessing, but government even in its best state is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one ..." - Thomas Paine
Don't even think of buying cards to play dx 11 games atm, unless you plan on having that card for 5 more years and even then its you just be starting to use dx 11.
dx 11 is actually being used already, dirt 2 uses it and there i think 13 games coming out next year at the least that use it, so it would infact be a smart purchase
i7 920@3.6ghz//Titan fenrir//asus p6t se//6gb patriot viper pc3-12800//powercolour hd5970//CM-690// OCZ ModXStream Pro 700w//500gb WD caviar black and 500gb WD caviar blue//3x 24" monitors running in eyefinity
Don't even think of buying cards to play dx 11 games atm, unless you plan on having that card for 5 more years and even then its you just be starting to use dx 11.
dx 11 is actually being used already, dirt 2 uses it and there i think 13 games coming out next year at the least that use it, so it would infact be a smart purchase
U think so i think time will show otherwise. Unless u want to play dirt 2 (whatever that game is or one of the other few games that will have dx11). Futhermore, dx 11 is a superset of 10.1 so if u have a card that plays 10-.01 you'll play those games just fine, maybe with one less bell or whisle but early implementation of new dx have always been poor anyway.
"Society in every state is a blessing, but government even in its best state is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one ..." - Thomas Paine
Don't even think of buying cards to play dx 11 games atm, unless you plan on having that card for 5 more years and even then its you just be starting to use dx 11.
dx 11 is actually being used already, dirt 2 uses it and there i think 13 games coming out next year at the least that use it, so it would infact be a smart purchase
U think so i think time will show otherwise. Unless u want to play dirt 2 (whatever that game is or one of the other few games that will have dx11). Futhermore, dx 11 is a superset of 10.1 so if u have a card that plays 10-.01 you'll play those games just fine, maybe with one less bell or whisle but early implementation of new dx have always been poor anyway.
Dx11 is much bigger upgrade than dx10.1 ever was. Dirt 2 isn't the only dx11 out atm, at least battleforge is already out with dx11 and dozens of other games are coming out very soon too.
Yea the reason DX10 was such a small upgrade and never got much dev support is because all the features got gutted because nvidia coerced MS into removing them. DX10 was a complete rewrite of Direct3D so that it could support new features, almost none of which made it into DX10 because the new features required a larger redesign of hardware than nVidia was willing to do. It ended up being DX9 functionality with DX10 virtual memory management. Now DX11 has all the features DX10 required a rewrite for, so it should be picked up very quickly, probably faster than DX9 since devs have had DX10 to pave the way for several years.
Also since DX11 is a superset of DX10 this means they can write games for DX11, and flip a few switches and the game steps down graphics to work on DX10 hardware. This encourages games being written for DX11 rather than DX10, because if you write it for DX10 you're ignoring DX11 features, whereas if you write it for DX11 you just wrote it for both sets of hardware.
If you haven't seen what tessellation can do, compare the screenshots here, especially the dragon:
http://www.hardocp.com/article/2009/11/06/unigine_heaven_benchmark_dx11_tessellation/
if you read the other posts and follow their links which tell you a lot of information, you can see that DX11 > DX10. so if you would like to play the new games that come out with purdy graphics, then you should def. get a card to run that even if it is a little more expensive. also, i can't tell you much about ati vs nvidia, but all i know is that ati cards suck up more power and gets hotter than a nvidia card, so if you're looking to save $$ in the long run, you should go with a nvidia card.
If you are a PC or Console Game Developer, you would have to be a complete moron not to use DX11. The transition into DX11 will be a no brainer and I think we will see a HUGE jump into DX11 this year. Its backwards compatible back to DX9 (SM 2.0), it also enables all the possible features of what the card can support. There is no reason the technology should be held back with this iteration. Its like the DX10.1 or DX10 debate. If you are making a DX10 game 2 years ago, you should have went DX10.1 because its backwards compatible with DX10 with no negative impacts.
Better yet, even though nVidia is regarding tesselation as a hardware gimmick, its a simple way to address the hardware differences between an IGP that supports DX10.1 and 4 - HD5870 in Quadfire. You just make a high poly, then make a low poly with the IGP as a base point. You bake out the displacement map, and depending on your hardware setup change the tesselation amount and texture size.
This is why Tesselation was such a breakthrough 2 years ago when the HD3870 shipped with it. It eases the work developers have to do in order to address all pieces of hardware for gaming.
On the DX10 thing. It shouldn't have been bound to Windows Vista. The major point that made it exclusive for Vista was taken out. Even though Microsoft needed DX10 on Vista to sell, it wasn't popular with developers who couldn't use it for Windows XP gamers. Now that the particular thing that was held back is in DX11 and DX10.1, we should see something magical with game development as a result of Virtualization or the ability to run a software package in its own virtual space independant of the OS. It would be far easier to correct bugs that come from outside influences and should increase performance of games.
Ati cards don't use any more power than nvidias, the fan profiles are just made so they run bit hotter.
Just wanted to emphasize this. Cause its true. Nothing more irritating than people who haven't bough an ATI card in years putting down driver support when its been as good as or better than nVidia for awhile now.
Tesselation with dx 11 cuts ur fps in HALF. Look up the benchmarks, and dx 11 w/o tens looks the same (to me) as dx10 (normal implenmentation). And the benches are the same. Maybe there are some more bells and whisles but i have not seen them.
Originally posted by comerb
""Originally posted by Cleffy
ATI Driver support has been solid since they merged with AMD. They outpace nVidia driver support currently."
"Just wanted to emphasize this. Cause its true. Nothing more irritating than people who haven't bough an ATI card in years putting down driver support when its been as good as or better than nVidia for awhile now."
Just looking at recently released mmos.
Aion, champion online, DF ( 48xx newer drivers at df release on vista 64), and i bet if i played more new mmos i could tell you more. Sure anyoen can find one or two talking about driver / card issues but their a quite a few for those games (Not Df as not many people are playing that).
If i look at my dam 12-13 yearsish of mmo playing ati has and still has more driver/hardware issues with games. While they are better now , its still not as good as nvidia.
But ati is usually a better card $ to preformence. and DX11 support is good but i simply do not think its needed atm (because its not, and it will be a while until you feel like ur missing out, unless you play games just for graphics then i suggest watching movies instead).
"Society in every state is a blessing, but government even in its best state is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one ..." - Thomas Paine
There has only been 2 examples of engines using Tesselation, both of them benchmarks meant to bog down your system. Tesselating doesn't have a constant performance impact, it will depend on how the developer utilized it. When you tesselate something you subdivide it, then displace it. So if you have a 100 poly object, you can set the level of tesselation to 1 for 400 poly, 2 for 1600 poly, and 3 for 6400 poly. You can change these levels with a script depending on distance and the detail level selected by the player.
Lets say instead of making something that is a benchmark, they instead made a game with limits that match DX9 hardware which will be substantially lower poly counts. They can keep the limits low, then tesselate to a degree of 4 for modern high end cards making it cover all hardware from 4 years ago to today without much extra work.
Also no reason not to support DX11. Really absolutely NONE. You will only be limiting your market by not utilizing DX11 since its backwards compatible down to DX9. Pretty sure I already mentioned that several times. Looking back 12-13 years in hardware is hardly an effective measure of a companies worth. Things change so fast in only 1.
The benchmarks cut fps in half because they are benchmarks designed to do maximum tessellation, a real game engine is going to be designed to use pragmatic amounts of tessellation to keep fps viable, and tessellation should be completely scalable on the fly.
Instead of having 3 versions of the models (high, medium, low) you can have just 1 version of the model with tessellation defined and the video card puts in as many polygons as the system can handle. Sort of like having a completely modular level of detail (LoD) setting (LoD loads in low quality textures/models at a distance and high quality when near, tessellation should adjust anywhere on the scale from low to highest as needed)
You could design a DX10 game with just as many polygons as the max tessellated DX11 game and be just as slow, the reason this isn't done is very few GPU's can handle that so it's a waste of time designing that model - but if you design it as a tessellated model it can scale all the way from the slowest card to the fastest card with just 1 design.
Games that take advantage of DX11 but still have DX10 graphics are doing so for performance enhancements as DX11 has a more efficient code path requiring less CPU activity to manage memory. (also, LotRO/DDO are suppose to get DX11 in the next couple months)
ok so the majority of us agree that a dx11 gpu would be more beneficial for mkgdodd if not now but in the future at least.
just out of curiosity what system are you running jetrpg?
i7 920@3.6ghz//Titan fenrir//asus p6t se//6gb patriot viper pc3-12800//powercolour hd5970//CM-690// OCZ ModXStream Pro 700w//500gb WD caviar black and 500gb WD caviar blue//3x 24" monitors running in eyefinity
Like i said dx11 support is good just not needed, thats my opinion (based on the fbelieve that i do not think dx 11 show wow result w/o hit to fps. And for the normal user they usually can't afford a fps hit. People show wow dx 11 pics but those make most games unplayable due to fps cut. If you turn 100 polys into 400 polys you are always going to take a fps hit. w/ Tens it may not be as bad as having those 100 polys be 400 off the bat, but still you gonna have a large fps hit. Now 100 to 200 polys your gonna have an fps hit how big is the question.
In my experience i look for one thing mainly fps, read spped, etc. Why? Becuase after you have had a computer for a year, two, 5 years you fps will go down on the newer games being release as they require more everything.so buying the first generation of video cards that can run a new dx doesn't even seem logical becuase by the time it is properly utilized (even more so in and mmo, im sure fps will use them but then agian i want THES BEST FPS i can get in a fps, rofl) I mean i know AoC has dx10 support (it took them a while to gte it working). Eve does but i have not seen much differnce in the video quility (poor utilization), LOTR which looks better with the high res pack that with dx 10, but together i see little video improvment if at all. MMos coming out with dx 10 support, GA (just becuase i look forward to the game it would be nice to turn on dx10, but then agian i d rather have the fps), and stargate worlds.
This after years of dx 10 being out , now i understand dx 11 is wonderful and super great. But that doesn't mean its wonderful and super great features will even be used, even in games that support dx11.
My comp is a intel q6600 @ 3.1Ghz air cooled no voltage step (i got lucky)
gtx 260 OC evga
ASUS P5N-D 750i SLI
Patriot Viper 4GB (2 x 2GB) DDR2 1066 (PC2 8500) (this is how you get your cpu oc /o much voltage bump if any at all).
My rule of thumb is never buy first generation anything, and the history of hardware supports this position. (1 year down the road dx 11.1
maybe not but you never do know). Which makes me think why does ddr3 suck (not realyl sux but if you looked at the stop point of dd2 and were dd3 picked uo they benches are pretty much the same with lower production costs on dd2), I mean one would think that it would really help but the acctual manufaturing or design of it (and ass. hardware) has not caugth up to its potential yet. Basically they need to be faster and we are starting to see that happen now, but they still need some speed on them. I view all band new anythign like this other than sockets (and even these some times, becuase i seen a few sockets be around for but a year or two, seen new ram types last a year [actually had acomputer a long time ago with them]).
That being said cards with dx 11 support are great.
but a 250 gts 1 gb 256 bit off brand is $90 (on brand are 125 and in this case you may want to spend 20 more dollars and hit the 5)
Where as the 5750 128-bit is $145
In almost all reviews the 5770 scorse higher than gts 250 (but not by much at all, where they are 50-300 a part in scoures and 1-2 fps, the 5850, gtx 260, 4870, 4890, etc are 2000-3500 in scoures off and 10-60 fps off ). But they do offer dx 11 support but with cards that are so low on the power range atm dx 11 support shouldn't even be your concern, and that is what i have been trying to communicate. Unless you want to spend a lot of money but the op looked like he could upgrade just one thing and thus was limited on cash.
If he did want to spend more a 5770 is a good option at $165, but i found a few 4870 (xfx) at $150-155 and they are faster than 5770s. No dx 11 support but once again id take the 4870 for the speed (unless you upgrade video cards every two years). But others wouldn't, really its up to what the person wants a bit more power or ability to run new games in a few years with dx 11 (on medium settings, which u may have to due with both cards makeing the 5770 a good choice).
"Society in every state is a blessing, but government even in its best state is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one ..." - Thomas Paine