Jump to content

A Question About Graphic's Card Ratings

Perrie Juran

By Perrie Juran,
in General Discussion Forum

 Share
You are about to reply to a thread that has been inactive for 3632 days.

Please take a moment to consider if this thread is worth bumping.

Recommended Posts

Perrie Juran

Perrie Juran

Posted
Posted

I am currently shopping for a new graphic's card and when I look at card comparrisons I see 4 main things being compared.  One is power consumption which is not a major concern to me.

The other three things are Memory Bandwitdth, Pixel Rate and Texel Rate.  Of these three things, which should I be most concerned about?

An example of a comparison here.

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites
Madelaine McMasters

Madelaine McMasters

Posted
Posted

Teagan Tobias wrote:

I have looked here:

when looking for a video card, lots of information.

Yep Teagan, that's the website I referred Czari to when she was looking for a graphics card for her new PC.

Perrie, it's difficult to say exactly what's important in a video card for SL, because we don't really know what aspects of a video card SL taxes most severely. SL probably isn't wildly different from other PC video games, so the benchmarks on that site should be useful. 

If there is one SL (OpenGL?) related factor, it may be the claim that nVIDIA cards have better drivers.

Beyond the benchmarks, you will want to know that the card you choose will work in your PC. That means you have to know it will not hit something like the CPU heat sink, a hard drive or the PSU. There are also cabling issues, with modern GPU cards using connectors that are not present in older PCs. Czari had to deal with all these issues in selecting and installing her new graphics card. I'm sure you remember that thread!

Link to comment
Share on other sites
Nyll Bergbahn

Nyll Bergbahn

Posted
Posted

Perrie, the August issue of Custom PC (a UK magazine) contains a comprehensive 18-page test of most of the current gaming graphics cards. The cards were tested at 1920 x 1080, 2,560 x 1600 and 5,760 x 1080 and 30fps was considered the key rate to award extra points, this being the minimum for smooth gameplay. The cards were tested in real games, Crysis 3, Skyrim and Red Star Rising as well as Unigine's Valley 1.0 benchmark.

SL's limited use of memory (512MB) makes it a little difficult to directly transfer these scores across as some of them are 2GB cards so they could be a little skewed in places but hope it helps. I did read a thread where the OP reported better performance in SL with a 2GB card than a 1GB one but I don't know how accurate that is.

 I'll just give you the percentages, which also takes value for money into consideration, and brief comments given.

AMD Radeon HD 5750 1GB: 12% (Woefully underpowered and poor choice)

Nvidia GeForce GTX 650 1GB: 10% (Underpowered - spend a little more on the GTX 660 for twice the speed)

AMD Radeon HD 7770 1GB GHz Edition: 20% (Painfully slow and disappointing performance)

Nvidia GeForce GTX 650 Ti 1GB: 44% (Best low price GPU but that's not saying much - spend a little more on the GTX 660)

AMD Radeon HD 7790 1GB: 41% (Mid way card between low and high end AMD cards but not great performance - better to opt for Nvidia GeForce GTX 660 2GB)

AMD Radeon HD 7850 2GB: 56% (Comprehensively outclassed by the Nvidia GeForce 660 2GB  [in actual fact about 10% less] for similar cost)

Nvidia GeForce GTX 650 Ti Boost 2GB: 67% (A weird card in Nvidia's line-up that isn't worth considering)

AMD Radeon HD 7870 2GB: 68% (A great card with high resolution performance that competes with overclocked versions of the GTX 660 2GB but slightly more expensive)

Nvidia GeForce GTX 660 2GB: 73% (Best value sub £200 card on the market considering price and performance but struggles at the highest resolutions)

AMD Radeon 7950 3GB with Boost: 81% (Great performance across the board, capable high-end graphics card, decent value for money)

Nvidia GeForce GTX 660 Ti 2GB: 75% (Second best to the GTX 670 and HD 7950 in a similar price bracket now)

AMD Radeon HD 7970 3GB GHz Edition: 84% (Fantastic performance for the money and little to separate this card and the Nvidia GTX 770 2GB, prices now about the same, slight fps edge to the Nvidia)

Nvidia GeForce GTX 670 2GB: 82% (Superb card with slightly better performance to AMD HD 7950, very little in it and similar prices)

Nvidia GeForce GTX 680 2GB: 80% (Ferociously quick but supplanted by the Nvidia GTX 770 2GB)

Nvidia GeForce GTX 770 2GB: 83% (Slightly better performance than GTX 680 and HD 7970 - best rated card of all and a superb choice)

Nvidia GeForce GTX 780 3GB: 66% (Phenomenally fast for those who want to play everything at very high resolutions but very expensive)

Nvidia GeForce GTX Titan 6GB: 66% (Now a Titanic waste of money in the face of the GTX 780 with only a 10-15% benefit in performance at 5760 x 1080 when overclocked, otherwise little difference)

 

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites
Perrie Juran

Perrie Juran

Posted
  • Author
Posted

Thanks everyone for your replies.

While I'd love to be able to plunk down the money on a top end card I'm not going to do that just for SL.  SL is not the only thing I spend my "disposable income" on.

I was puzzled when I did comparisons on cards in my price range when I would see that one card would have higher bandwidth or pixel rate or texel rate than another card and not necesarily excel in all three.

Link to comment
Share on other sites
Madelaine McMasters

Madelaine McMasters

Posted
Posted

Perrie Juran wrote:

Thanks everyone for your replies.

While I'd love to be able to plunk down the money on a top end card I'm not going to do that just for SL.  SL is not the only thing I spend my "disposable income" on.

I was puzzled when I did comparisons on cards in my price range when I would see that one card would have higher bandwidth or pixel rate or texel rate than another card and not necesarily excel in all three.

I think the reason for that is that memory bandwidth, shaders, mappers, pipelines, and all the other things that make a GPU go, come in chunks. You can't increase memory width a bit at a time, so you'll see 64/128 or 256 bit wide interfaces. Those are big steps. Similarly, it's not practical to produce a family of GPU chips with slightly different numbers of functional units, so you'll get maybe 128 or 512 shaders, 16 or 32 pipes, etc. Different applications might make better/worse use of certain aspects of the GPU architecture, so a saavy user might know that (and I'm making this up) Photoshop effects need lots of raster op units but not much memory bandwidth.

But the rest of us don't know all that stuff, so we're forced to reach into the grab bag and pull something out. And so we must rely on benchmark sites and word of mouth from other SL users. And because the variables that affect benchmark performance are so chunky, it's not uncommon to see a part that excels in one benchmark suffer in another because the GPU manufacturer made certain tradeoffs in those chunky parameters to hit some spot in the marketplace.

Good luck on your choice, Perrie. It'll all be worth it just to see how good I look at 73fps.

Link to comment
Share on other sites
Orca Flotta

Orca Flotta

Posted
Posted

I wouldn't worry too much and just ask for a GTX ?60 card, no matter which fabricate, NVIDIA or any board partner. The 60 series has always been the most sensible choice for performance/cost ratio. 660s are on their way out by now so you should be able to find a good bargain.

Heck, I'm still happy with my seriously old Zotac GTX-260, it handles SL quite well on high to ultra settings. Was the last one my local store had on the shelf so I grabbed it for rather cheap. :smileyvery-happy:

Link to comment
Share on other sites
Perrie Juran

Perrie Juran

Posted
  • Author
Posted

Dillon Levenque wrote:

I shouldn't read threads like this: they keep pushing me toward upgrading. Newegg has an Asus version of the GTX 660 on sale for less than $170 right here:
. That seems like a pretty good deal.

 

If I was going for that I'd pop th eextra $20 and not get an open box.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814121660

Or get this.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814130825

What I am looking at getting is this:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814130909

I didn't state it earlier but I am also looking for a new monitor so I have total cost to consider.

Currently I have a GTS250 which overall I am happy with.  I am not necesarily interested in all the SL bells and whistles but would like a bit better performance.

 

Dillon Levenque wrote:

 

Edit: Had 'Egghead' for 'Newegg'.

Well, who else would be discussing these things?  ;)

 

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites
Dillon Levenque

Dillon Levenque

Posted
Posted

I saw the EVGA card, but I had a terrible time getting through to their support once, so I don't buy that brand anymore. Seems kind of arbitrary, but there are too many more sources to bother trying a second time. I also noticed that the ASUS was an 'out of box' but Newegg's got a good reputation so I could overlook that. I like ASUS products.

I probably won't do anything about the card except look at the picture, but it does seem like a good price for such a highly rated product.

Link to comment
Share on other sites
Bree Giffen

Bree Giffen

Posted
Posted

The thing about getting high performance cards is that when you are playing something like Skryim or some first person shooter, you want the best looking 3d environment at the fastest frame rate. When you play SL, the high performance card will draw... whatever the hell has downloaded from the internet. You get half the objects, with more objects rezzing every second and you get gray walls, gray trees, and gray people that will load after several minutes. Getting these half-loaded 3d environments is unheard of in nearly every game out there. I'm not suggesting you don't get a better card, it does improve frame rates, but the whole performance aspect of cards pretty much goes out the window when it comes to SL.

Link to comment
Share on other sites
Perrie Juran

Perrie Juran

Posted
  • Author
Posted

A3123 wrote:

Dillon Levenque wrote:

Edit: Had 'Egghead' for 'Newegg'.

Who cares why or what you edited? Let it go! You don't owe anyone an explanation!

Maybe Dillon posted it because it was humorous?

I got a good laugh out of it.

Do you not have a sense of humor?

Besides which, if I went to "Egghead.com" instead of "Newegg," I would have wound up on Amazon's website.

Link to comment
Share on other sites
  • 1 year later...
Sassy Romano

Sassy Romano

Posted
Posted

Perrie Juran wrote:

One is power consumption which is not a major concern to me.
 

I have solar panels so could say the same but just as a passing observation for you, I have a GTX 680 and if I let that run unconstrained in a quiet sim with not much to draw, the viewer will quite happily run that into very happy three figure frame rates.

What happens then is that the card is working much harder, the three fans spin up a lot so it becomes a lot noisier and the software that monitors my power supply is happy to inform me that it's now using about 60 Watts more...just for standing on a quiet region with a simple scene.

I use the option in Firestorm to limit the frame rate as this is just unnecessary.

Link to comment
Share on other sites
Perrie Juran

Perrie Juran

Posted
  • Author
Posted

Sassy Romano wrote:

Perrie Juran wrote:

One is power consumption which is not a major concern to me.
 

I have solar panels so could say the same but just as a passing observation for you, I have a GTX 680 and if I let that run unconstrained in a quiet sim with not much to draw, the viewer will quite happily run that into very happy three figure frame rates.

What happens then is that the card is working much harder, the three fans spin up a lot so it becomes a lot noisier and the software that monitors my power supply is happy to inform me that it's now using about 60 Watts more...just for standing on a quiet region with a simple scene.

I use the option in Firestorm to limit the frame rate as this is just unnecessary.

Wow. Old thread bought back to life.

I do remember also back around the time of this thread the discussions on the advantages to throttling FPS. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites
You are about to reply to a thread that has been inactive for 3632 days.

Please take a moment to consider if this thread is worth bumping.

Please sign in to comment

You will be able to leave a comment after signing in



Sign In Now
 Share
Go to topic listing
×
×
  • Create New...