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The specifics are generally trade secrets, but in general, it's: 1) GeForces/Radeons have artificial throttling of certain compute types (like double precision float, FP64), except for the GeForce Titan in 100% FP64 mode. 2) Additional driver/firmware features, like 64x MSAA or additional 2D acceleration features that speed up preview views 3) Additional VRAM, often with ECC, to support serious GPGPU use and handle the load of rendering movie frames with 64x MSAA or what have you. 4) Driver optimizations for render accuracy and visual quality rather than render speed. When you're seriously thinking about a Quadro or FirePro, you also probably have the resources to 1) run actual benchmarks to figure out what the appropriate card for your app is, and 2) not care so much about the price difference compared to the cost of the workers to make it dance. All this stuff is lumped on top of architectural differences, so, say, a GK104-based GeForce would be downright abysmal at FP64 CUDA compared to almost any Fermi Quadro, or even a GF110 GeForce. Factory Factory fucked around with this message at 10:38 on Apr 8, 2013 |
# ? Apr 8, 2013 10:35 |
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# ? Jun 5, 2024 19:49 |
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TechPowerUp has a review of the small ASUS 670. Its... beautiful.
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# ? Apr 8, 2013 17:14 |
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Linked last page and 4 days ago
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# ? Apr 8, 2013 17:41 |
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Does anyone have any info on when the tiny ASUS 670 will be released? I am planning a mini Haswell build but might pick up a graphics card earlier since this year is looking pretty boring for graphics cards and I'd like to play Bioshock Infinite on pretty settings.
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# ? Apr 8, 2013 17:45 |
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Factory Factory posted:The specifics are generally trade secrets, but in general, it's: 0. Certification. Apps are tested with specific workstaion cards and workstation drivers, and if you find a bug you can get someone to actually care and probably fix it within a few weeks. That generally will not happen with consumer cards. Essentially, it's insurance. If you're not doing something that gets a huge speedup from workstation functionality that isn't available on consumer cards, workstation cards are worth buying if the cost of having a showstopper driver bug is worth significantly more than the price disparity. Now, if you're doing GPU compute work for any length of time and not using ECC, you're going to have a bad time. But 3D stuff is generally more forgiving.
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# ? Apr 9, 2013 05:44 |
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So, I'm having a little bit of a problem understanding AMD duel graphics. As far as I can tell, the integrated graphics on AMD CPUs can be Crossfired with some ATI cards. It's it worth my time to look at this if I'm making something for playing games on? Does anyone have any more info on this? AMD's site hasn't been a big help beyond "Yes, it's a thing you can do."
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# ? Apr 9, 2013 07:04 |
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Urzza posted:So, I'm having a little bit of a problem understanding AMD duel graphics. As far as I can tell, the integrated graphics on AMD CPUs can be Crossfired with some ATI cards. It's it worth my time to look at this if I'm making something for playing games on? Does anyone have any more info on this? AMD's site hasn't been a big help beyond "Yes, it's a thing you can do." No, it's not worth your time. It only gives you a performance boost with really low-end graphics hardware on both sides of the equation, and you'll get a much bigger boost from a modest GPU upgrade. Also, AMD CPUs aren't a good buy right now for various reasons. See the parts picking thread for more.
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# ? Apr 9, 2013 07:08 |
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Jesus, Crossfire is enough of a pain in the rear end with two cards of identical make and model. I wouldn't touch a heterogeneous xfire with somebody else's money. (Also hey guys! the reason I am not around these days is I'm about to have back surgery and live every day in excruciating pain; only internet is tethered through my phone. Needless to say, probably not gonna be getting a Titan after all. Recent opinion is "wow Intel, dick move with the special instruction sets and gimped super-integrated graphics on upcoming chips, you're segmenting the market in ways that suck rear end for the end user" as far as igpu goes, and "welp tsmc, good luck on this process shrink 'cause I am really looking forward to the next architecture and gigantocard from nVidia!" - pretty boring stuff anyway).
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# ? Apr 9, 2013 07:23 |
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Space Gopher posted:No, it's not worth your time. It only gives you a performance boost with really low-end graphics hardware on both sides of the equation, and you'll get a much bigger boost from a modest GPU upgrade. Cool, thanks for the help. I'm set on an AMD chip however, I got one and a mobo for free from AMD fan day.
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# ? Apr 9, 2013 07:42 |
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Urzza posted:Cool, thanks for the help. I'm set on an AMD chip however, I got one and a mobo for free from AMD fan day. Freeness significantly alters the value for money proposition of an object.
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# ? Apr 9, 2013 08:53 |
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Rashomon posted:Does anyone have any info on when the tiny ASUS 670 will be released? I am planning a mini Haswell build but might pick up a graphics card earlier since this year is looking pretty boring for graphics cards and I'd like to play Bioshock Infinite on pretty settings. Anecdotally, two people I know said they cranked their settings to Ultra presumably at 1920x1080 and it wasn't too heavy on the machine. Midrange cards, older CPUs.
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# ? Apr 9, 2013 11:32 |
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Urzza posted:It's it worth my time to look at this if I'm making something for playing games on? Look at it this way: Crossfire on different cards will always run at the speed and bandwidth of the lowest card. So if you have a fancy HD7990, it will only run as fast as your lovely integrated GPU. Urzza posted:I'm set on an AMD chip however, I got one and a mobo for free from AMD fan day. Your loss. If I want a free turd, I'll just go to the bathroom instead.
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# ? Apr 9, 2013 17:21 |
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I have been considering getting an extra 670 for SLI (I game at 1440p and wanna play Crysis 3 and Metro in all their glory) but it seems the biggest bottleneck will be RAM, so I am wondering if its worth it. The SLI benchmarks that I have seen dont include Crysis 3 since its too new.Agreed posted:Jesus, Crossfire is enough of a pain in the rear end with two cards of identical make and model. I wouldn't touch a heterogeneous xfire with somebody else's money. Get better soon you beautiful, beautiful poster.
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# ? Apr 9, 2013 17:49 |
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Jan posted:Your loss. If I want a free turd, I'll just go to the bathroom instead. Yeah, toss it on Ebay and put the money towards a 1155 based system.
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# ? Apr 9, 2013 18:18 |
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Animal posted:I have been considering getting an extra 670 for SLI (I game at 1440p and wanna play Crysis 3 and Metro in all their glory) but it seems the biggest bottleneck will be RAM, so I am wondering if its worth it. The SLI benchmarks that I have seen dont include Crysis 3 since its too new. The only game right now anyone seems to be complaining about 2 gigs not being enough maybe is Bioshock infinite, from what I have seen. I don't think Crysis 3 is a that demanding in the VRAM department. Who knows what Metro will bring since it is not out yet and runs on their own crazy engine. The real question is will it be more of a problem in a year or two, and if that is worth the price of a 670 now. Also big ups to Agreed, stay strong
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# ? Apr 9, 2013 18:22 |
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They are not doing any free game promos right now so I'll stick to my single 670 unless I can find one used. Bioshock infinite was stutter city, but I am suspecting its more of a driver problem. I would run the benchmark and it would be smooth, run it again at the same settings and stuttering. Totally inconsistent.
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# ? Apr 9, 2013 19:00 |
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Possibly good news on the external GPU front - in 2014, Intel will update Thunderbolt alongside Broadwell with its Falcon Ridge TB controller, doubling the per-lane bandwidth. Right now, Intel is only talking about a two-lane implementation, which means the same bandwidth in half the signalling lines, but theoretically it's only a small jump from that to a four-lane implementation like current TB. A four-lane Falcon Ridge controller would provide bandwidth equivalent to PCIe 2.0 x8. That's fast enough for almost any card up to GTX 580/660 Ti/Radeon 7950 performance to work at practically full performance regardless of screen resolution, and only a relatively minor bottleneck to faster cards at 2560x res. Less exciting but still neat I guess is the 2013 refresh, Redwood Ridge. Same speed as current TB, but with a few upgrades - DP standard from 1.1a to 1.2, some voltage regulation moved onto the controller (reducing BOM and integration costs slightly), and improved idle/disconnected power consumption and hooks for Haswell's platform power management features. Factory Factory fucked around with this message at 13:44 on Apr 10, 2013 |
# ? Apr 10, 2013 13:40 |
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When the next-gen GPUs launch in 2014 will they still be DirectX 11 based or will we see the first generation of DirectX 12 cards?
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# ? Apr 11, 2013 01:09 |
Factory Factory posted:Possibly good news on the external GPU front - in 2014, Intel will update Thunderbolt alongside Broadwell with its Falcon Ridge TB controller, doubling the per-lane bandwidth. Right now, Intel is only talking about a two-lane implementation, which means the same bandwidth in half the signalling lines, but theoretically it's only a small jump from that to a four-lane implementation like current TB. A four-lane Falcon Ridge controller would provide bandwidth equivalent to PCIe 2.0 x8. That's fast enough for almost any card up to GTX 580/660 Ti/Radeon 7950 performance to work at practically full performance regardless of screen resolution, and only a relatively minor bottleneck to faster cards at 2560x res. Is this an update that will be compatible with currently existing TB devices (ie. MacBooks), or is it like USB where the device needs the new standard implemented in the hardware itself? Because if it's the latter, TB is even deader than it has been.
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# ? Apr 11, 2013 01:26 |
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wheez the roux posted:Is this an update that will be compatible with currently existing TB devices (ie. MacBooks), or is it like USB where the device needs the new standard implemented in the hardware itself? Because if it's the latter, TB is even deader than it has been. Almost surely the latter. But it's not like much can saturate 10Gbps anyway, and eGPUs are dumb for a number of reasons
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# ? Apr 11, 2013 01:40 |
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Current 4x10 Gbps lane TB devices will apparently be able to plug into 2x20 Gbps lane TB ports and work no differently than they do currently, but you're not magically going to get your current-gen TB devices going faster with TB 2.0. There's a controller on each end of the cable, and if your device only has a 4-lane PCIe 2.0 controller, replacing the host's controller won't change that. Off the top of my head, I can't think of a peripheral interconnect where a new revision will increase the speeds of old-revision parts.
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# ? Apr 11, 2013 01:50 |
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Thanks very much for the well wishes, gents, you're true forums pals. Quick note, at resolutions 1080p and lower anyway, the performance difference between a 680 or 7970GE at 3.0 16x is extremely slight compared to 2.0 8x. It's the next gen (well, Titan almost certainly counts here) where 2.0 16x/3.0 8x is a must to not gimp the performance. Chalk it up to tight architectural framebuffer access in the current gen, imo (or, put another way, somewhat limited utilization of available bandwidth relative to what they could have done to squeeze a couple extra % outta the relationship between GPU and GDDR5, I guess?). There's a nice relationship between what cards need and what CPUs/chipsets are able to comfortably provide. An every-two-years upgrade path isn't on the right side of the price:performance curve, but it does prevent anything from bottlenecking anything else nicely.
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# ? Apr 11, 2013 03:48 |
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Anyone have experience using both discrete and onboard video to enable 3 monitors? ASUS Motherboard with UEFI BIOS - I tried finding an option in the bios and there is a "iGPU Multi-Monitor" but I still get "This device cannot start. (Code 10)" in device manager. Seems like it should work. Kind of disappointing if I can't get it to work, was hoping to not have another card in the case.
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# ? Apr 12, 2013 05:34 |
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subx posted:Anyone have experience using both discrete and onboard video to enable 3 monitors? ASUS Motherboard with UEFI BIOS - I tried finding an option in the bios and there is a "iGPU Multi-Monitor" but I still get "This device cannot start. (Code 10)" in device manager. I don't remember what the exact option I needed to enable was in UEFI, but when I enabled it, my third monitor wasn't being detected. I went to the ASUS website, installed the proper graphics drivers, and then it was picked up.
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# ? Apr 12, 2013 05:44 |
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unpronounceable posted:I don't remember what the exact option I needed to enable was in UEFI, but when I enabled it, my third monitor wasn't being detected. I went to the ASUS website, installed the proper graphics drivers, and then it was picked up. For whatever reason this worked, which is seems strange. I tried updating through Device Manager before that post, but of course that didn't find anything. You would think the DVD that came with the MOBO would at least have functioning drivers. Thanks!
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# ? Apr 12, 2013 15:53 |
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Looking forward to windows telling me I have plugged in a TB 2.0 compatible keyboard on my TB 1.0 port every loving time I boot.
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# ? Apr 12, 2013 17:13 |
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subx posted:You would think the DVD that came with the MOBO would at least have functioning drivers.
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# ? Apr 12, 2013 17:20 |
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Realtek is hardly the worst offender here. Also this double-sucks when the motherboard manufacturer IS the component manufacturer. (ASmedia ) Fortunately there's things like station-drivers.com and atheros.cz, but they can be hit-or-miss sometimes.
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# ? Apr 12, 2013 18:13 |
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Has anyone else been having trouble with nvidia 314.22 drivers? I get "freezes" for 1-5 seconds every game when playing Starcraft 2 and driver crashes at least once a day. I only play Starcraft 2 right now and last night it caused me to drop out of a game once and then froze my game badly enough that when it recovered all my stuff was dead. Not fun. Anyway I went looking through event viewer and this started on 3/16 which was when I installed 314.21 beta. I recently saw a test on Tom's Hardware where they were using 314.21 and then rolled back to 314.07 drivers instead because they were having problems with weird "pauses" in the game. Last night I rolled back to 314.07 myself and played a few more games and had no problems, but it will take more to be conclusive. I only play a couple hours a day so it's not like I'm asking a lot! I hope they come out with some new ones soon that solve this. I don't like being behind on drivers. Could it be anything other than the drivers? Edit: This is Windows 8 64-bit with a Geforce 660 card. I freshly installed Windows 8 on a new computer build in early March and had no issues at all until 314.21 on 3/16. beejay fucked around with this message at 14:52 on Apr 17, 2013 |
# ? Apr 17, 2013 14:46 |
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I have a friend who was having those freezing issues on 314.22 with his gtx 670 and Battlefield 3. I think Nvidia may have made a few mistakes with 314.22 and a couple games.
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# ? Apr 17, 2013 15:21 |
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beejay posted:Has anyone else been having trouble with nvidia 314.22 drivers? I get "freezes" for 1-5 seconds every game when playing Starcraft 2 and driver crashes at least once a day. I only play Starcraft 2 right now and last night it caused me to drop out of a game once and then froze my game badly enough that when it recovered all my stuff was dead. Not fun. Anyway I went looking through event viewer and this started on 3/16 which was when I installed 314.21 beta. I had some issues with SC2 HOTS with the most recent NV drivers too. I had to scale back the settings and then it was more stable.
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# ? Apr 17, 2013 15:57 |
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Here's an article showing the top 10 most important graphics cards. Some... odd choices. 8800GTX instead of the GT? 5970 instead of 4870? And of course the final one, the GTX Titan
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# ? Apr 17, 2013 18:02 |
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beejay posted:Has anyone else been having trouble with nvidia 314.22 drivers? I get "freezes" for 1-5 seconds every game when playing Starcraft 2 and driver crashes at least once a day. I only play Starcraft 2 right now and last night it caused me to drop out of a game once and then froze my game badly enough that when it recovered all my stuff was dead. Not fun. Anyway I went looking through event viewer and this started on 3/16 which was when I installed 314.21 beta. Yeah, I feel like my secondary monitor performance (two off a GT210) has gone waaaaay downhill after I installed 314.22 for Bioshock Infinite. Hopefully the next release fixes whatever regressions appeared. Endymion FRS MK1 posted:Here's an article showing the top 10 most important graphics cards. Kind of a lovely list; starts off early which is fine, but skips a lot of notable cards like the 9700 that were huge steps up / disrupting forces in the market. But it's PC World, so I think I did a write-up on the Riva 128 or TNT2 earlier in the thread, I was hoping to do a series of "retro" posts, but man, writing words takes time.
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# ? Apr 17, 2013 18:18 |
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mayodreams posted:I had some issues with SC2 HOTS with the most recent NV drivers too. I had to scale back the settings and then it was more stable. Ditto, had the screen freeze until I alt-tab out and back in a few times in single player. I just got back into the game, so I can't say if the issue was present in older drivers.
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# ? Apr 17, 2013 18:18 |
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Oh man my VooDoo 2 was the bees knees
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# ? Apr 17, 2013 18:29 |
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I wouldn't call the 8800 GTX remarkably important but personally I will always remember going from a Geforce4 MX straight to a new PC build with an 8800 GTX. Crysis blew my loving mind all over the walls!
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# ? Apr 17, 2013 19:06 |
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Incredulous Dylan posted:Crysis blew my loving mind all over the walls! Yes... but was your new PC able to actually play Crysis?
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# ? Apr 17, 2013 20:53 |
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Well I'm still getting the hangs even after rolling back to 314.07. The event viewer just says "Display driver nvlddmkm stopped responding and has successfully recovered." Could this be related to my CPU overclock in some way? I am losing my mind.
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# ? Apr 18, 2013 03:21 |
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The PC Specs list for Metro: Last Light has been released: http://www.pcauthority.com.au/News/340240,metro-last-light-pc-specs-revealed.aspx Recommended specs are a gtx580 or 660. Optimum spec is a gtx690 or gtx Titan. Hello Next Gen. You're a tad late.
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# ? Apr 18, 2013 03:21 |
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# ? Jun 5, 2024 19:49 |
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beejay posted:Well I'm still getting the hangs even after rolling back to 314.07. The event viewer just says "Display driver nvlddmkm stopped responding and has successfully recovered." Could this be related to my CPU overclock in some way? I am losing my mind. See if anything funny is running in task manager. Bitcoin miners can cause this.
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# ? Apr 18, 2013 04:03 |