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Advice on choosing a graphics card


Huskan
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I've recently put together a computer that I'm hoping will allow me to use Second Life at its current ultra settings with the, fairly new, lighting and shadows/depth of field settings enabled. I want to use these and still have a very reasonable frame rate.

The last part of my new computer I need to choose is the graphics card. So I was wondering if anyone could give me some advice on what graphics card will allow me to achieve this. I don't want to spend more than £150.

My computer specs are as follows:

Mainboard : Asus M5A78L-M/USB3
Chipset : AMD 780
Processor : AMD FX 4100 @ 3.6GHz
Physical Memory : 16384MB (4 x 4096 DDR3-SDRAM )
Hard Disk : Western Digital WD2000JD-55HBB0 ATA Device (200GB)
Operating System : Windows 7 Ultimate Professional Media Center 6.01.7601 Service Pack 1 (64-bit)
DirectX : Version 11.00

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Well this is the issue I'm having. I understand that AMD CPUs work better with ATI graphics. But I know more of Nvidia than I do ATI. ATI just has lots of confusing numbers. So would love some advice from a ATI expert as to which card to go for. ^^

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Yea same here. But here is the thing I would think about. The FX CPU is optimized for ATI cards and HD. wouldnt that be more for HD video playback and not gaming?.

I would imagine a FX series Nvidia would work just as great. Depending on what you are doing mostly.

I am in the same boat trying to make the same decission on if I should change my video card out or not.  I just got a AMD FX 6100 and a new motherboard. Right now I have a nvidia 9800 gt running with it. And runs awesome. I have 75 FPS right now.

 

So I am looking into it if a FX series nvidia card would work just as good

 

I prefer to use nvidia any day over ATI

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The 6100 is a 6 core, right? I got the 4 core cause I knew I would have no need for 6 cores. I think HD cards just refer to viewing things in HD. So that would apply to gaming too. I was going to go for a Nvidia 560, but now you've just reminded me that it's probably going to be useful to go with an ATI card. Need help!!!! :D

Out of interest, do you use the lighting and shadows settings smoothly with your card and still achieve 75FPS?

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If you decide to get serious abiut nvidia then 1st consider nothing but a GTX series. The GTS is for entry level gaming. 2nd consider the GTX560ti works great and costs $300 while the superior GTX580 is $500. Then the new and very improved GTX680 is only $30 more than a GTX580 because the stores were supposed to drop the prices on the older stuff but they did not. So the best choice for nvidia is now GTX680 if you can find one. If the extra $230 is an issue then you should get decent performance for a while out of a GTX560ti.

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This is how a lowly GT240 worked in July 2010:

Now it can't do shadows at all and struggles. The only thing that changed was LL's code. You buy a 560 now and I lay good odds you will be shelling out again in 2 years because of the decreasing performance of what LL produces. Me? I invested in an antec 650w power supply when i bought that cheap 240 knowing i would have to replace the 240 soon. Now I am going to buy a GTX680 and that should be good until I need to replace the motherboard because of the advances that will surely happen over time.

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Okay, so it's down to how Second Life progresses. I also see evidence of that with my, horribly old, 8600GT. It ran Second Life on Ultra settings 2 years ago with no issues.

 

After some research, I have now figured that I can afford the 560 Ti. But, would this last me only 2 years roughly still?

 

I could see myself upgrading again in 3 years - maybe. But 2 years would be too soon.

 

I too added a 600w power supply to this system. So, it's future proof in that sense at least. The 680 is nearly £400 here in the UK. I'm certainly not in a position to pay that.

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If SL will not run on a 680 then it is unlikely any drastic advances will occur in SL and a 560ti will be good until the lights go out.

 

I asked the 680 compatibility question in the dev list and will see what the answer is. Most likely will be "dunno. ain't got one.".

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I'm not making any commitments. If Kirsten had not quit making clients then sure it would last. maybe. But whether or not a video card will do well over time depends entirely upon what LL decides to do. When LL added mesh and made other changes it killed my card off. We have no control over what LL does and LL erased the client user group so we have no voice in the matter. LL does what LL wants, regardless of customer requirements, and their customers eat the dog food. End of story.

 

It all depends on what LL is planning to do. If LL is not planning to do much more then the diff between the 560ti and 580/680 will likely be frame rates. Important if making movies. Not so if just cruising around looking at stuff.

 

To be clear, If I want shadows and all the bells & whistles then my minimum will be a 560ti. What I have now is unacceptable. If I want to make movies then I need a 580 most likely. $300 vs $500 now and the prices should already have dropped. So I'll just wait a while and see what happens with prices and let others jump in the pool with the 680s (supposedly have twice the shaders etc) and see if they scream.

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Thank you. I think that's easy enough for me to understand. I definitely think I will be going with the 560 Ti. I can't see how far LL could push SL in the next 3 years. TOUCH WOOD.

 

Thanks for all your help! :-)

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For SL one needs good OpenGL support. SL is OpenGL based. So is Blue Mars. I typically got FPS rates 3 times higher in BM. Since then the Lab has been upgrading the render pipeline. Earlier this week I saw that upgrades were made for compatibility with GLSL 1.30.

Apple and AMD/ATI provide lame OpenGL support. NVIDIA provides good OpenGL support. However, nVidia has been having problems with OpenGL for the last couple of months. A couple of LL JIRA items on video problems have been marked 'Won't Fix' because the problem was tracked into the nVidia driver and the problems are the same in some other games. NVIDIA will have to make the fixes.

A couple of months back I asked people what kind of performance they were getting. How Fast is Your Viewer? - Second Life. About the only consistant performance improvement I could see was running Win 7 or Vista 64-bit.

I hear Linux 64-bit runs SL even faster.

That 64-bit would give so much better performance when there are no 64-bit versions of the Lab's viewers, seems odd. There are TPV Dev's working on 64-bit versions. I have no idea when we will see one.

It seems the CPU i5 and i7 chips w/4 and 6 cores, a 64-bit OS, and good OpenGL support give the best performance.

Runitia Linden is upgrading and tweaking the render pipeline and working on speeding things up and solving problems. More features are coming to viewers. Pathfinding is in the works, but it will have little impact on viewer performance. AA has changed to FXAA and is much more efficient. New texture compression code is in place, allowing cards with less VRAM to work better. New shadow code is being tried in some viewers and may end up in the LL viewer. Rumors circulate that a better materials system is coming. That will likely have an impact on performance. But, as OpenGL advances and LL upgrades code to use more of the newer OpenGL the hits from new features will probably be offset.

NVIDIA 8800 and 9800 on Quad cores provide good performance now and have for some time. The 240 and 260 cards currently do a good job with SL. Those using 560's and 580's are seeing only minor improvements over those using 460's. I expect a 560, 580, or 590 will support SL for 2 to 4 years at max settings.

 

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Nalates Urriah wrote:

A couple of months back I asked people what kind of performance they were getting. 
. About the only consistant performance improvement I could see was running Win 7 or Vista 64-bit.

 

 

What would be interesting is when you do this type of benchmark. that everyone benchmarking their performance should benchmark it on the same region. to have the exact same rendering atmosphere aside from network... I am running a 9800GT Nvidia on a 6 core AMD, but not quite the fps I would like in ultra mode.

 

@ Huskan. I put everything on ultra and now only get 20 fps lol and that's without a crowd of people. I am sure I could do a little more tweaking and bring that up a bit. But the goal is to have everything run solid without having to tweak it or lose anything visual for the sake of performance. I wonder if I got another 9800gt and ran on SLI, if it would increase my Performance... and how much

 

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Nalates Urriah wrote:

That 64-bit would give so much better performance when there are no 64-bit versions of the Lab's viewers, seems odd. There are TPV Dev's working on 64-bit versions. I have no idea when we will see one.

 

For a while, I had 32 bit and 64 bit XP installed on the same machine.  Practically everything ran faster on 64 bit.  I doubt any of the programs were 64 bit then.


NVIDIA 8800 and 9800 on Quad cores provide good performance now and have for some time. The 240 and 260 cards currently do a good job with SL. Those using 560's and 580's are seeing only minor improvements over those using 460's. I expect a 560, 580, or 590 will support SL for 2 to 4 years at max settings.

 

I saw a significant improvement from a GTX 470 to a GTX 580.  However, it's hard to attribute it to the graphics card because the GTX 580 is in a new computer with a better CPU and motherboard, more and faster RAM, and an SSD.

 

 

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