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It seems really hard to find a vanilla 280x card. It seems like most are overclocked, which I have had no luck with ever.
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Sep 7, 2014 19:21
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I opted for the Matrox G200 because I bought into the 32-bit gaming concept, and lived with terrible performance. I should have gone with the TNT. Before that, I went with some PowerVR card instead of the Voodoo (1) because it was supposed to have better image quality and no pass-thru. It resulted in only a couple games being able to run in 3d, and even then, intermittently. What a headache.
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Sep 7, 2014 20:14
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Torpor posted:It seems really hard to find a vanilla 280x card. It seems like most are overclocked, which I have had no luck with ever. It doesn't impact reliability when a graphics card gets a factory overclock. It just means they binned (tested and sorted) the GPU chips they got, and the ones that can run at higher speeds with stability are put out as factory overclock models, sometimes with better coolers. You could buy an overclocked card and then underclock it to stock speeds in software if it makes you feel better about it, then it'd be identical to a stock model and save you a small bit of heat/electricity.
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Sep 7, 2014 20:20
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Godawful PowerVR. Had the brilliant idea of rendering the video straight to the host video card's VRAM. Across the PCI bus. 
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Sep 7, 2014 20:32
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Civil posted:Before that, I went with some PowerVR card instead of the Voodoo (1) because it was supposed to have better image quality and no pass-thru. It resulted in only a couple games being able to run in 3d, and even then, intermittently. What a headache. kode54 posted:Godawful PowerVR. Had the brilliant idea of rendering the video straight to the host video card's VRAM. Across the PCI bus. What's up PowerVR buddies.  That card was so awesome for the games that were packed in with it and so completely useless for everything else.I remember years later after 3Dfx was defunct I picked up a Quantum Obsidian2 X24 off of eBay and played some old 3Dfx compatible games just to see what I had been missing (a lot).
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Sep 7, 2014 21:28
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I took back my Permedia 2 and bought a PowerVR instead. It disabled my inboard video anyway. So I returned it and repurchased my Permedia 2. Thus, I never actually got to try the PowerVR.  Fake edit: I never had the funds to buy more than one card back then, either. 
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Sep 7, 2014 21:30
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Feel like a total scrub for having a RIVA TNT2 (possibly a pro) as my first GPU (TwiN Texel!). I remember it not being able to render the ground textures in Sacrifice properly, allowing me to see through hills and mountains. Possible I had something else before that one, but my first computer was some black and white DOS machine (my fathers RED and black "laptop" was even more amazing though).
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Sep 7, 2014 21:44
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First was an ATI RAGE something or other, second was a VooDoo 3, hopped on the nVidia train some time around the GeForce 4 as I recall and never looked back. Even when I should have. Owned an FX 5700! Even refreshing and trying to fix the architectural gently caress-up that would have made it basically a disaster for DX9 did approximately jack poo poo, and the image quality was just garbage. Their AA back then was balls, too, ATI was cleaning UP in the press 'til the 6800GT hit and then it was just a slugfest over price, less performance, going by recollection... I really admired ATI back then, and I still do, I just wish they weren't attached at the intestines to a very, very troubled company.
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Sep 7, 2014 22:01
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Heh, first graphics card I recall having was a 1MB Trident ISA card. What a beast! I had that for ages, honestly, but I then remember having an S3 ViRGE 4MB PCI. Oh god what a terrible card, Half-Life would fall back on software rendering. I actually managed to sell it, and got a Voodoo3 3000 AGP. Holy poo poo, it was a real step up. A while later I borrowed a Geforce 2 Ultra. Some time after that I bought an ATI Radeon 8500 All-in-Wonder. Ah, it had a remote control and everything. I could hook up my consoles and view TV on my goddamn PC. What's not to like? Then my main card was an ATI Radeon 9600, which I pretty quickly upgraded to a Radeon 9800, then (too much money, no outgoings) I bought a Radeon 9800 Pro. I think somewhere around this time I sold that card and used a borrowed Geforce 6800. I eventually bought a Geforce 7800 GT AGP 256MB, which took a Pentium 4 AGP system to its logical conclusion. Then, as if I hadn't spent enough on loving graphics cards already, I bought a Radeon 2900 XT. God that thing ran hot, and was AMD's largest chip until the Radeon 290! After the 2900 XT, I bought a Radeon 4890, then, the card I have today, a Radeon 6950 2GB that happily unlocked to a 6970. I'm sure someone else has an even more ridiculous and long winded history of cards. If you made it this far, you've wasted your time and I'm sorry. HalloKitty fucked around with this message at 23:29 on Sep 7, 2014 |
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Sep 7, 2014 23:27
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My first GPU was on some kind of early PowerMac, I think it was an ATI rage. I ran Unreal Tournament on it for about a month in software rendering thinking it was supposed to look like it did (i.e. lowest settings lowest resolution) until one day I'm like "hey it says here there's drivers I can download for Rage, wonder what this will do Oh Holy poo poo!"
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Sep 7, 2014 23:46
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I can't remember the first video card that was ever "mine". I was probably 8 years old though. First card I ever bought was a Viper (or viper ii?) with allowance money To the borderlands question before I have a MSI 780ti as well (at 1440p) and everything is set to as high as it can possibly go. The only time I ever drop below 60 is some of the really excessive physx particle effects from certain guns, typically with other people playing. I turn that down to medium sometimes Something is plain wrong getting into the teens. That game seems fairly easy on the GPU. I am overclocked but not much, its still at air overclock settings.
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Sep 7, 2014 23:46
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Aw poo poo.. lets see here, dating back to 1997: Some Diamond 4MB card that didn't even have 3d ATI Rage Fury Pro 32 MB ATI Radeon 7500 Pro ATI Radeon 9600 Pro ATI Radeon 9800 Pro (this one made my poo poo PSU catch fire, no joke) ATI Radeon X800 AIW (AGP, severely bottlenecked by my ancient mobo/CPU but the card was free) ATI Radeon X850XT (PCI-E) Radeon 4870 Radeon 6870 (crossfired later) Radeon 270X 4GB (current)
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Sep 8, 2014 03:58
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Our first computer in 1997 had some 4mb thing. I doubt it was any good, since it was an OEM PC. Dad had no tolerance for gaming, and he kept that thing till 2003. It was below the minimum spec for Diablo 2 but I just barely managed to get the game running. It was replaced by an Acer Machine, with integrated graphics. I remember turning Neverwinter Nights 1 down to the lowest settings just to get it working. My dad would go on to keep that horrible thing (p4, 512mb ram) till 2012, but he got me another Acer in 06 to help with study. I saved up and stuck my very first real graphics card in there, an Nvidia 8800GTS 640. This was a revelation, and I was finally able to play all the games that had been denied me. Unfortunately back then I was completely ignorant about computers, and I relied on friend Travis, who insisted I didn't need one of those expensive brand name power supplies for my 8800GTS, instead encouraging me to buy 'generic quality 400w power supply'. Unsurprisingly, this lead to the death of that PC in mid 2007. By that stage I was horribly addicted to World of Warcraft, and spent every free moment (and every free dollar) at a gaming cafe playing WoW. By the end of that year I'd dropped out of Law School, as it was taking up too much time that I prefered to spend on WoW. In early 2008 I'd managed to move into a full time job, and I had a credit card. I was still an idiot, however, so my first act with my newfound fiscal liberty and ridiculous 10k credit limit was to buy myself a sweet gaming rig, so that I could finally game in the comfort of my own home. I was determined that I would never again be required to turn a graphic setting down from max; so I blew 8k on a ridiculous computer featuring Quad SLi 9800GX2s in a giant wind tunnel disco led gamer case. I also spent $2k on 8gb of shiny just released DDR3 ram, and a ridiculous 700 dollar motherboard for it all. The ridiculous motherboard died in mid 2010, leaving me unable to source another socket 775 mobo that supported both quad SLi and DDR3 RAM. So it was time once more for a new PC. I was far better educated by now, but still not quite up to goon standards, so I bought a phenom IIx6, silly Raptor hard drive, and most importantly to this thread, a radeon 5970, who's two gpus managed to outperform the 4 in my previous setup. This lasted me till this past march, although my 5970 died in 2012, so I returned it for a refund and bought a GTX680, taking the opportunity to also move to 1440p. This past march I finally let that PC pass into a graceful retirement, living with a friend of mine who only plays DOTA. I was in full possession of my goon pc sense by then, so I bought a proper, well thought out PC, featuring a gtx780ti.
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Sep 8, 2014 04:52
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HalloKitty posted:Some time after that I bought an ATI Radeon 8500 All-in-Wonder. Ah, it had a remote control and everything. I could hook up my consoles and view TV on my goddamn PC. What's not to like? My litany of upgrades isn't anything special until I started horse-trading cards. Looking for an upgrade to my venerable 4870, I found a strapping young lad on a forum offering to sell me a 5850 for $100. At the time, a great upgrade at a fantastic price. Only, when he went to look in his case to pull the card out, he found it wasn't actually a 5850. It was a 5970. Did I still want it? gently caress yeah I did. Oh, and it turns out there's a second one. Want that one, too? Of course I did! At that point I felt a little bad, so I chipped in a few extra bucks and ended up with a pair of 5970's for $225.  I played with those babies until I discovered that Skyrim actually had a negative performance modifier for Crossfire (ATI drivers!  ), so I sold one of the cards. For $450. Later on down the line I sold the other one for another $400 and used the proceeds to pick up a 7950 at a normalish price of about $450. Ran that card until a year ago when I was gearing up to deploy, and managed to sell it at close to the peak of buttcoin-mining frenzy, for $400. Got back in May and promptly went on the search for a new card, eventually settling on a Sapphire Tri-X R290 as the best bang for my buck, and as we were now on the back side of the mining frenzy, I picked up a 2 month old card with warranty for $350. Except the box it arrived in was strange. It said R290X on the outside. Sure enough, whoever it was I bought it off of had mislabeled it on Amazon, and I ended up with a card that should have sold for ~$500 for $350.Sum total over the various trades over the last 3 or so years, I have moved from a 4870 to a R290X and profited $225 in the process.
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Sep 8, 2014 06:13
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After reading all that history, I feel like a goddamned scrub. The first bonafide PC video card I've ever bought? My R9-270X  Up until then, I exclusively used laptops for my computing needs: first a 2003 HP with a 128MB ATI Mobility Radeon, then a 2007 Acer Aspire with a nVidia GeForce 7600GS and finally a 2010 Gateway with glorious Intel HD graphics.  At least the GeForce let me play GTA: San Andreas at reasonably high quality, plus it could handle plenty of SNES emulated games and a few PS1 ones pretty well. Then I managed to gently caress up said GeForce through attempted overclocking and wound up buying the Gateway instead of replacing the mobo on the Acer.Before all that, my first PC I could call my own was a Dell Dimension with a 166 Mhz Pentium. That was back in 2001-2002. And I still can't remember what kind of graphics it had. All I could remember was that using Photoshop was an exercise in monk-like patience. 90s Solo Cup fucked around with this message at 06:28 on Sep 8, 2014 |
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Sep 8, 2014 06:23
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Sup, R9 270x and Intel HD Graphics buddy.
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Sep 8, 2014 06:25
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The Lord Bude posted:I blew 8k on a ridiculous computer featuring Quad SLi 9800GX2s in a giant wind tunnel disco led gamer case. I also spent $2k on 8gb of shiny just released DDR3 ram, and a ridiculous 700 dollar motherboard for it all. Sweet Jesus. I'm glad I've never had this amount of money or credit. I'm a little more fiscally responsible now than I was at the time of the Voodoo fiasco (and several years after) but I can just see being bored one day and saying,"I know just what I need!!!" 
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Sep 8, 2014 07:27
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Panty Saluter posted:Sweet Jesus. I'm glad I've never had this amount of money or credit. Oh it was all credit. Quite the idiot was I. As soon as I got full time work I went a little crazy.
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Sep 8, 2014 07:35
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First GPU I had was a FX 5200. Didn't play Tribes Vengeance all that well. When I finally built my first computer, AMD Athlon X2 5200 system, I went all out with SLI 7600 GT's. Not even a year later, the, GTX 8800 came out. I bought one from my local PC shop for $600.
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Sep 8, 2014 07:40
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My first card was some AGP card wayyyy past when those would still be acceptable to use (like 2006), then I moved onto a Athlon X2 4850e (the cpu/motherboard were free) + 9800GTX(it won like 3 newegg awards!!!) and used that up until late last year. Moving from that to a 4670k + GTX770 has been one hell of a swing.
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Sep 8, 2014 07:51
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I'll never forget when I ordered a 7600GS and the company shipped me two. I tried so hard to get both running at once in my old 2003 Dell. I went from ancient laptops ---> onboard lovely graphics on a P4 ---> 7600GS x2 (could only use one) ---> 9800GTX+ (shame I didn't know about my 5 years coverage under Aussie consumer law when that died) ---> GTX570 ---> GTX570 x2 (jesus christ I needed earmuffs when using my computer) ---> 780ti. Pretty short history really.
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Sep 8, 2014 08:32
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BurritoJustice posted:I'll never forget when I ordered a 7600GS and the company shipped me two. I tried so hard to get both running at once in my old 2003 Dell. You think you needed earmuffs? try a pair of 9800GX2s in an Antec900. Turning my PC on sounded like a sports car revving its engine. Those things would hit 100 degrees C.
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Sep 8, 2014 08:54
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First PC was CGA, when CPU speeds were measured in single digit megahertz. CGA is the only PC colour graphics card that made Hercules Monochrome look good. For those unfamiliar the wiki article has some nice screenshots: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_Graphics_Adapter Followed by a procession of Trident or Tseng Labs cards, until the dawn of 3D, in where someone convinced me to buy an S3 Virge - which I contend is the worst video card ever made. It's totally OpenGL, except Quake showed me it wasn't. I don't even think it met the first DirectX spec. Most of the time you'd give up and just use the very lovely software renderer. If you were lucky the game may have had a driver to support it, but odds on the effects were worse than software. Hooking a Voodoo 2 SLI setup to the S3 was a moment of pure joy, as I finally realised what the hell I'd been missing out on. TNT2m64 followed and since then it has all become a bit ho-hum compared to those older days. I wonder what the effective difference in processing power of a GPU is between now and 25 years ago? I don't know if a comparison could really be made because by my understanding until 3D, all graphics cards were essentially glorified frame buffers?
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Sep 8, 2014 10:37
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The Lord Bude posted:You think you needed earmuffs? try a pair of 9800GX2s in an Antec900. Turning my PC on sounded like a sports car revving its engine. Those things would hit 100 degrees C. Man my PC around that time was the little brother to yours. Single 9800GTX+, Q6700, Antec 300. All died when the Huntkey VPower 500 died in 2011 (hah). Spent like, 2200AUD on it too.
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Sep 8, 2014 11:09
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BurritoJustice posted:Man my PC around that time was the little brother to yours. Single 9800GTX+, Q6700, Antec 300. All died when the Huntkey VPower 500 died in 2011 (hah). Spent like, 2200AUD on it too. For some weird reason I only put a dual core in mine - E8500. I had no idea what power supply to get so I went with a 1500w Thermaltake. Honestly I don't regret the Quad SLi but I do regret the RAM. I could have bought DDR2 ram for maybe a 2% performance loss at best, and saved like 200 to 300 dollars on my motherboard and probably 1500 in RAM - 8gb of DDR2 would probably have been what, 300-500 around then? Certainly less than the 2K I spent on DDR3.
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Sep 8, 2014 11:13
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All this nostalgia has me wondering what exactly I played wolfenstein 3d on when I was like... 4. Were video cards even a thing in ... 386's? Turbo!
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Sep 8, 2014 11:20
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The Lord Bude posted:For some weird reason I only put a dual core in mine - E8500. I had no idea what power supply to get so I went with a 1500w Thermaltake. Honestly I don't regret the Quad SLi but I do regret the RAM. I could have bought DDR2 ram for maybe a 2% performance loss at best, and saved like 200 to 300 dollars on my motherboard and probably 1500 in RAM - 8gb of DDR2 would probably have been what, 300-500 around then? Certainly less than the 2K I spent on DDR3. Jesus Christ I just checked and my CPU cost $851 USD on launch (when I got it). That would've been over 1000AUD. I don't remember it being that silly.
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Sep 8, 2014 11:22
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Nothing at AnandTech, TechReport, or PCPer yet today. I'm betting the GeForce 980/970 veil lifts at noon Eastern. This is not an Official Rumor, just my gut.
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Sep 8, 2014 14:32
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http://videocardz.com/52166/nvidia-geforce-gtx-980-gtx-970-gtx-980m-gtx-970m-3dmark-performance Might be something worth a read, they had info early on the 290x when it first released, too.
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Sep 8, 2014 16:02
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Atreus posted:http://videocardz.com/52166/nvidia-geforce-gtx-980-gtx-970-gtx-980m-gtx-970m-3dmark-performance If there's any truth to that, we're seeing the same pattern for GPUs as we have for CPUs - namely that enthusiasts with desktops will glaze over and be uninterested, but the power savings bring large gains on the mobile side. I have to be honest, if that's genuine, it's disappointing. HalloKitty fucked around with this message at 16:55 on Sep 8, 2014 |
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Sep 8, 2014 16:52
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if a 970 outperforms a 290, then thats about in line with what I was hoping for based on the earlier number leaks
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Sep 8, 2014 16:53
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I wish the 295x2 promo had been available in Canada.
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Sep 8, 2014 17:24
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Nvidia seems to be taking a number out of Intels playbook and going for efficiency. Keep in mind that those benches are synthetic.
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Sep 8, 2014 17:27
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nVidia and Intel had no choice in the matter. Moore's Law is dead and buried, at least for silicon. There are plenty of tweaks left, but few remaining chances for performance doublings, and they won't be happening on as short a time scale as previously. We all have to accept that those days are behind us until the cycle starts all over on the next technology.
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Sep 8, 2014 17:34
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I've been in and out of the game countless times but I've never expected the next gen to be much better than the previous higher model from the last year (for gpus, as opposed to cpus). I'm holding my tongue though until there are real numbers. Frankly I wouldn't mind lower wattage and efficiency but that's more or less due to my SLI heat woes more than anything. Which isn't a very big deal.
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Sep 8, 2014 17:43
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1gnoirents posted:I've been in and out of the game countless times but I've never expected the next gen to be much better than the previous higher model from the last year (for gpus, as opposed to cpus). I'm holding my tongue though until there are real numbers. I remember things moving much, much faster from say, 7850GT -> 8800GTS, or TNT2 -> Geforce. All I know is that I used to be pretty much required to upgrade GPUs every 3 years or games wouldn't even boot because of how fast hardware features were moving. I remember going from a Geforce 2 Ti, and then HL2 wouldn't work so an X800 XT, then Bioshock wouldn't even launch so an 8800GTS. Now I'm coasting on a 5 year old 5870 and everything seems to be running acceptably, even well.
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Sep 8, 2014 17:55
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Factory Factory posted:Nothing at AnandTech, TechReport, or PCPer yet today. I'm betting the GeForce 980/970 veil lifts at noon Eastern. This is not an Official Rumor, just my gut. 
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Sep 8, 2014 17:57
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Rastor posted:nVidia and Intel had no choice in the matter. Moore's Law is dead and buried, at least for silicon. There are plenty of tweaks left, but few remaining chances for performance doublings, and they won't be happening on as short a time scale as previously. We all have to accept that those days are behind us until the cycle starts all over on the next technology. Moore's law isn't dead and buried. It's an economic rule - the number of transistors that can be economically placed on a chip doubles every 24 months (with a different executive saying chip performance doubles every 18). Scaling with new processes is important to this, but it's not all there is to it. A number of times in the past, new nodes have taken more than two years, yet Moore's Law has held up regardless. Look at the Radeon R9-285 - 16% increase in transistors in the same die area on the same process, sold for about the same price. Because the process is mature, yields are better, heat is better, clocks are better... It's still a 28nm planar process, yet there are fewer wasted dollars per wafer, so the per-productizable-die cost is down. The same dollar goes a lot further with the process now than it did two years ago. Another case in point: GK110 trickling down from $6k Tesla cards to $500 GeForces after a year. Meanwhile, 14nm FinFET is about to be productized by Intel, Samsung has their own version cooking, and 10nm is still in the works. There's still plenty of Moore's Law scaling to go in silicon before it's done. Though that said, it doesn't mean we'll exhaust silicon before we're done with it if, say, carbon nanotube processes work well soon enough. Star War Sex Parrot posted:That's the last time I listen to you! Sorry geez! Maybe it's noon Pacific instead. 
Factory Factory fucked around with this message at 18:03 on Sep 8, 2014 |
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Sep 8, 2014 17:58
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Factory Factory posted:Sorry geez! Maybe it's noon Pacific instead. Wasn't it the 19th for the actual NDA lift/paper launch, and today some general Maxwell stuff? Or was that just rumours?
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Sep 8, 2014 18:05
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Oh, maybe. I can't keep track of these rumors. But among them I'd heard 8th or 9th for details. Apple is doing something big tomorrow, maybe that's why things are quiet right now.
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Sep 8, 2014 18:08
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