Prices coming down for Christmas...

[solofly]

http://lenzfire.com/2011/11/nvidia-i...ristmas-96476/

[ExodusC]

Hmm, maybe I'll grab another GTX 570 if prices drop enough.

Though I should probably get some games that can utilize that kind of power first!

[solofly]

You're not playing the right games then...

[ExodusC]

From what I understand, if I got another GTX 570, it would not be limited by the PCI-E x8 bus on my motherboard. The benchmarks I saw showed something like a 1-2 FPS difference, which was negligible. Can anyone confirm?

Sent from my Droid 2 Global via Tapatalk.

[Boulard83]

Yeah, x8 is way enough for GTX570 and GTX580.

I score top30 VS similar setup with my SLI at 3Dmark11 and my first card run x8.

[Ket]

I'll wait to see if the prices do actually start to come down before I start thinking about a GPU upgrade.. or I might just wait till the new cards hit and grab a non ref 570 for a steal.

[Sentential]

I think the real news here is not the "sale" thats going to take place, but if they are doing a fire sale of their old parts that must be an indication that Kepler is off to a very very good start and they will have mass availability.

Or that they are deathly afraid of what the 7000 series can do. I guess time will tell.

[Ket]

Hardware is nothing without equally good software to match, and unfortunately thats where AMD have fell down for a long time at. In fact, that is the sole reason why I bought a GTX460 in the first place I was sick of the crappy drivers and my system BSODing because of it.

[ExodusC]

I think the real news here is not the "sale" thats going to take place, but if they are doing a fire sale of their old parts that must be an indication that Kepler is off to a very very good start and they will have mass availability.

Or that they are deathly afraid of what the 7000 series can do. I guess time will tell.

Either one of those would be a very interesting scenario, given how the last couple of generations on both sides have launched. Before I decide on grabbing another 570, sticking with one, or upgrading at all, I want to see how Kepler performs.

Hardware is nothing without equally good software to match, and unfortunately thats where AMD have fell down for a long time at. In fact, that is the sole reason why I bought a GTX460 in the first place I was sick of the crappy drivers and my system BSODing because of it.

I don't like bashing on AMD's drivers, because I have owned various AMD/ATI cards in my day, and I know that many people have zero problems (and that many people report driver problems on NVIDIA's side), but honestly I was disappointed with the drivers for my HD 4870. The performance was wonderful for what I paid, but various monthly releases would consistently break features in CCC, such as locking aspect ratio scaling. I also had argued at one point that NVIDIA's anti-aliasing implementations at the time were superior, but I later discovered the quality issues were just due to the various engines game developers are using nowadays. I preferred the days of no deferred rendering, where you knew that when you enabled anti-aliasing that every visible polygon was going to get anti-aliased, rather than the strange effects in current gen games where none, few, or only some edges are smoothed.

That's why I used the FXAAInject hack when playing new games. I went a bit off topic there, but anyways, I ended up on NVIDIA for this generation, we'll see what comes next.

[Ket]

I used to love ATI, driver problems I only started experiencing a while after AMD bought them. I always knew AMD buying ATI would spell bad things for the drivers because AMD have always sucked at drivers. Personally though, I don't think AMD would be that bad at driver writing if they actually focused on fixing the reported problems rather than spending most of their time blogging on twitter

[Jodiuh]

I preferred the days of no deferred rendering, where you knew that when you enabled anti-aliasing that every visible polygon was going to get anti-aliased, rather than the strange effects in current gen games where none, few, or only some edges are smoothed.

BF3 on Ultra preset w/ FXAA set to high and MSAA set to 4x STILL shows jaggies BEYOND BELIEF! 1/2 the time, I can't tell if I'm shooting a person or a moving fence.

Oh, and don't forget about Nvidia's issues!



Buddy of mine lost his 8800 GTX for that reason and switched to a 5870. Of course, he has "no issues" w/ his "new" Radeon. For me, it's things like [H]'s claim of lag on the 6870/6950/6970 cards in BF3 whenever any explosions, lots of debris, or a nade goes off that keep me away. Too bad, cause I've been eyeballing that $240AR Sapphire Dirt 3 6950 for awhile now...EVGA lost my 560 Ti...spare card's a 4350 and doing anything in the control panel makes me wanna ralph all over the screen. Not only are their heatsink fan team members deaf, but their driver team's blind! It's worse than a flash based webpage menu system!

[Ket]

I think the issue you describe is more to do with the engine than the drivers, and as always its up to the driver team to hack-fix something the devs of the game should be fixing with a patch.

and lol at the pic, right-click..save as

[z3d.]

Nice news to hear! Do you think the price drop will affect even the price of custom solutions like DCII, Matrix, Lightning and Classified?

[Jodiuh]

I think the issue you describe is more to do with the engine than the drivers, and as always its up to the driver team to hack-fix something the devs of the game should be fixing with a patch.

I'm sure transparency super sampling would probably go a long way to fixing it, but the performance cost is HUGEEEEE.

[Ket]

If its massive like that, I'd say NV have some optimising to do and the devs need to look at their code.

[Jodiuh]

It was the same way with BC2. TSAA has always been pretty rough on Battlefield games. You needed a then brand new 7800 GTX just to have the feature available in BF2. But OH WHAT PRETTY FENCES U COULD HAVE!

[Cold Fussion]

It was the same way with BC2. TSAA has always been pretty rough on Battlefield games. You needed a then brand new 7800 GTX just to have the feature available in BF2. But OH WHAT PRETTY FENCES U COULD HAVE!

I don't think a 7800 GTX would have been able to handle TSAA in BF2. I ran a 7800gt sli system back then and If I remember correctly I couldn't use TSAA because the hit was just to much, I either used TMAA or had transparency aa turned off all together.

[Jodiuh]

The option became available w/ 7800GTX release. IIRC, 6800 GT's did not have TSAA as an option. I thought I used it w/ my 7800 GTX SLI rig, but I was only @ 1280x1024 too.

More recently, I flipped 8x SS on w/ Bad Company 2 and watched my framerate get in half...more than half actually. I went from 60~70 to under 30!!