GPU Megat[H]read - the cores of wrath grew heavy on the die that day

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > GPU Megat[H]read - the cores of wrath grew heavy on the die that day

kuddles: Jul 16, 2006; Like a fist wrapped in blood...

Yeah, really good OP there. I can't really think of anything to add.

I was skeptical in the AMD thread of the review that made the Asus GTX 670 DirectCU II TOP out be be essentially a cheaper, quieter and cooler 680, but another review came out with the same results. I guess it was a blessing in disguise that I couldn't find a GTX 680 anywhere because now I'm set on picking up one of these beauties.

# ¿ May 11, 2012 16:01

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# ¿ Apr 29, 2024 01:55

kuddles: Jul 16, 2006; Like a fist wrapped in blood...

EVGA usually doesn't come out with a different version of 2-in-1 GPUs other than one pre-designed for water cooling, but ASUS has been coming out with third party cooling solutions on almost every card recently so you might want to wait a bit and see if it's that important to you.

# ¿ May 15, 2012 14:30

kuddles: Jul 16, 2006; Like a fist wrapped in blood...

doomisland posted:

If all your upgrades aren't done on a whim then you're forever disappointed.

Yup. Buy the 660ti now and either a price drop or new card will make you cringe in regret four months from now. With the exception of knowing that a completely new line is coming in just a few weeks, your best bet is always to just go for the best price/performance ratio you can get today and not look back.

# ¿ Aug 1, 2012 15:59

kuddles: Jul 16, 2006; Like a fist wrapped in blood...

Local Resident posted:

Here's a quick link to a slashdot article from yesterday about latency problems in new AMD cards:

http://games.slashdot.org/story/12/12/12/207218/frame-latency-spikes-plague-radeon-graphics-cards

The source article goes into the whole FPS vs. latency thing.

I was going to post that. Of course both the AMD and Nvidia fanboys are going nuts but the real point of the article is that current benchmarking comparisons of just listing the average or maximum FPS don't tell the whole story about how well a card works on particular games.

# ¿ Dec 14, 2012 19:07

kuddles: Jul 16, 2006; Like a fist wrapped in blood...

Navaash posted:

people jumping all over TR (pretty sure the article was only intended to be a "uh, AMD, you need to look into this", but people have been savaging them because they blasted their PR department recently over the Trinity review schedule)

That's the kind of poo poo that really bothers me. It reminds me of back in the day when TR was also dragged through the mud for genuinely pointing out issues with some SSD brands having read times degrade drastically over time, or Consumer Reports also getting a swath of negativity - even from other tech sites - just for pointing out that the next gen of iPads ran significantly warmer. It's kind of sad that people have a vocal hissy-fit if anyone dares question a brand they like, and then turn around and bemoan the state of tech journalism being a bunch of shills.

# ¿ Dec 15, 2012 03:22

kuddles: Jul 16, 2006; Like a fist wrapped in blood...

Yaos posted:

A lot of that are all the optimizations for individual games. A while back somebody was showing a screenshot of the games includes for some reason, and one of the games listed could not even run on modern systems; they never take anything out.

Yeah, not that I think the cases of them having poor driver support is always excusable from them, but when you think about it, practically no other commercial driver is expected to provide optimized performance for new software as soon as possible while at the same time maintaining nearly 100% backwards compatibility with thousands of titles spanning over a decade. I'm sure it's a bitch to work on, as evidenced by the notes on the driver software, which suggests a common issue is fixing an issue with one game under a specific architecture only to have a different game break because of it.

# ¿ Jan 19, 2013 16:45

kuddles: Jul 16, 2006; Like a fist wrapped in blood...

The main reason I never use the SMAA Injector is because you can't use D3DOverrider at the same time with it. Does anyone know if RadeonPro allows you to turn on Triple Buffering and SMAA at the same time? Currently on Nvidia but that might change with a new build in the fall.

# ¿ Apr 19, 2013 17:02

kuddles: Jul 16, 2006; Like a fist wrapped in blood...

uhhhhahhhhohahhh posted:

I used D3DOverrider forever. I switched to Adaptive V-Sync instead, much less hassle and I don't notice a difference at all. I don't see any tearing and I was very sensitive to that poo poo. Putting 'Maximum pre-rendered frames' to 1 will remove any mouse lag, too.

Huh. People keep saying this to me but when I try doing that, the screen still tears like crazy for me.

# ¿ Apr 19, 2013 20:15

kuddles: Jul 16, 2006; Like a fist wrapped in blood...

So my current PC is playing games just fine, but I'm getting the itch. I'm thinking of building a new PC from scratch, with the added intent of moving up to either a 27" or 30" monitor at the same time. I can't decide if I should build a new PC once Haswell comes about (and probably the 700 series of video cards), or hold off another year when both Nvidia and AMD supposedly move to new architectures and we have a better idea of what the next generation of games requires. Anyone in the same boat?

# ¿ Apr 25, 2013 15:27

kuddles: Jul 16, 2006; Like a fist wrapped in blood...

I have to say that I am loving the hell out of the new DSR option in the Nvidia drivers. Long overdue for an incredibly simplistic and dummy-proof way of supersampling without having to fiddle with external software with varying levels of success. Been playing the second season of The Walking Dead on my television and it's like playing an animated series with not a single jagged edge to be seen.

# ¿ Dec 2, 2014 17:09

kuddles: Jul 16, 2006; Like a fist wrapped in blood...

Jago posted:

Far Cry 4 for example is nvidia branded, so presumably they got their optimizations in before the game's release, no? AMD does theirs after the fact. If true, it shows how key that process is.

Not always true. AMD has their own program - I forget what it's called - where they do a similar thing, although obviously not as often. Alien: Isolation and Dragon Age: Inquisition are recently supported titles.

# ¿ Dec 3, 2014 15:38

kuddles: Jul 16, 2006; Like a fist wrapped in blood...

Mikemo Tyson posted:

I recently built a new computer and bought a heatsink that takes up a ton of space. I can't put my graphics card into the x16 slot so I put it in x8. Will this hamstring my gpus performance? I have a gtx970.

Nope. Most of the time video cards don't even need the bandwidth for X8, so it won't be an issue, especially if you're just running one video card at a 1080p screen or whatever.

EDIT: Beaten, but here is a an even more recent article that shows the difference is non-existent.

kuddles fucked around with this message at 20:49 on Dec 4, 2014

# ¿ Dec 4, 2014 20:46

kuddles: Jul 16, 2006; Like a fist wrapped in blood...

Very cool to hear that AMD is bringing their own version of DSR to their drivers. It's already my favourite new (and long overdue) feature to the Nvidia drivers.

# ¿ Dec 5, 2014 17:27

kuddles: Jul 16, 2006; Like a fist wrapped in blood...

DaNzA posted:

Does DSR work in a windowed environment with multi monitor desktop?

It works fine in windows but last time I checked, it doesn't work properly with a multi monitor setup yet.

# ¿ Dec 5, 2014 22:41

kuddles: Jul 16, 2006; Like a fist wrapped in blood...

wolrah posted:

It works fine with multiple monitors. I run anything I can in virtual 4K mode on my 1080p center display with two 1680x1050s on each side.

Huh. Everyone on the other two forums I frequent are bitching about how they can't get it to work, so maybe your mileage will vary.

# ¿ Dec 6, 2014 18:06

kuddles: Jul 16, 2006; Like a fist wrapped in blood...

Yeah, card manufacturers also tend to clearly highlight when something about the card isn't following Nvidia's reference specifications, usually even in the title. I think the chances of it being a mini-port are practically zilch.

# ¿ Dec 10, 2014 19:42

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# ¿ Apr 29, 2024 01:55

kuddles: Jul 16, 2006; Like a fist wrapped in blood...

Speaking of vaporware announcements, whatever happened to that technology that involved putting any two random video cards from any manufacturer into your computer and it would work just like it was a proper SLI/Crossfire configuration?

# ¿ Mar 23, 2016 17:01

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