Just to close this one out, I would like to annoy everybody by posting my initial impressions of the 570 that I just got today. I like closure. If it's irrelevant to this forum, please accept my apologies and feel free to lock, move or do whatever you want to this thread.
As I said, it arrived today. Now, since my old card was a 260, I wasn't surprised by the heft and size of the 570. Particularly not the size as I have made a habit of checking the physical dimensions before I order anything for my home-rolled rigs. Nothing sucks worse than having spent days or longer looking forward to plugging a new piece of hardware in, only to find out that it doesn't fit your box. Which is why every box I've built over the last several years (taught by bitter experience) has had the biggest tower I could find without having to tell the family to give up a room of the house. The size of the tower is the least of your expenses. Go for plenty of space. You may need it later. Plus, PCs really like lots of air circulating around their components. But I digress.
I do that a lot. For instance, just the other day as I was driving to work... OK, that's enough. Stop it, Misha! Sorry about that. Voices in my head and all that...
Actually the main reason for settling on the 570 instead of the 580 or 590 was that, physically speaking, it's almost identical to the 260. When I have to build a new rig, I'm upgrading
everything. I always do that. Push it until it can be pushed no further, then I build a new one from the bottom up with all the bells and whistles.
Anyway, as you kind people of my Subsim family had told me, I wouldn't be unhappy with upgrading from the 260 to the 570. No brainer, to be sure, but it helps hearing from people you actually
trust.
So I pulled the old one out, put the new one in and turned it on. I'll be gracious and skip the boring wait while my system recognized the new card and the fact that I'd finally moved into the 21st century and started
using DVI instead of the VGA adapter. I'll skip it mostly because of what I did while waiting. It involves Malaysian midgets, questionable substances and other stuff that is entirely improper for this family-oriented forum. What? You think I'm kidding?
I'll post pictures later.
Then it was time for the field test. Start up SH5 and find out if I'd just burned another part of the kids' college fund for nothing.
Holy, merciful, sweet... I mean... Really?
To provide you with my frame of (highly unstable) mind, I generally say that anything that can push 30 fps reliably is good. That's about the speed that the human brain processes pictures and it has worked and still works fine for the movies, so anything above 30 is just gravy. Dips during high intensity sessions to 20-25 are acceptable to me, provided that it's temporary. It doesn't "ruin" anything. That's my floor level. I
like things higher, but that's as far as I will go into the low numbers before starting to get mildly annoyed.
My 260 did that just fine, which isn't bad for a card I've had for two and a half years. Actually, SH5 was the first bit of software to push it down close to the floor, although I've had to push graphics setting down below "Saints preserve us, this is beautiful!" to "good looking" for a year or so.
This baby clocked out a minimum of 80 without me even tweaking it on my previous settings, which weren't bad at all. I found it slightly amusing, though, that my FPS increased when going into the sub as opposed to outside, as the 260 dropped to a quite acceptable 35 below decks but could easily run 50-60 above. I was running 90 below with the 570.
"Alright", I thought to myself, "these are baby settings for a card due to be replaced, let's see how you handle a challenge."
So I started out increasing particles. Not a move in the FPS. Then I yanked the AA up to 4x4. Not as much as a stutter. Now, 4x4 is, in my opinion, as far as you ever need to go if your screen is true HD. Above that, you're just wasting GPU cycles. It's worth it to go to 2x2, even 1x1 will look prettier if your card can handle it and I
hate "jaggies", nothing ruins my fun more than zig-zagging lines, but beyond that it's cheaper to blur your vision by putting on your old glasses or buying a pair with the wrong strength at the grocery store. But, undeterred, I kicked it up to 8x8. The card just yawned at me as if to say "is that the best you can do?"
So I turned on the dynamic shadows, the one thing I
know will suck up resources in this sim, but it barely made a difference either. Increasingly desperate to prove that I could make this card beg for mercy, I added every single one of the environmental options too. Terrain object density, the sun's flickering on the sub's hull, transparent waves, accurate modeling of the sun's reflection in the drops when Bernard takes a leak over the side of the Wintergarden, anything that damn sim would let me do and I
still couldn't get it, even while pushing it above what I even
wanted, get it to drop any further than 50, and that was in brief spurts of about a fraction of a second duration. I even tried turning on vsync to deliberately sabotage it for no good reason and it
still wouldn't cry uncle and surrender.
All of this just to confirm that what y'all said about me being happy with it was absolutely true. I can't even begin to imagine what two of these things in SLI would do and, really, I have no need to find out.
My only thing is that I can actually hear the fan. Actually hear it as in "if somebody is breathing anywhere near me, I can't hear it anymore", which is a far cry from what some people said in their reviews that it sounded like a wind turbine. But I couldn't hear the 260 at all. Many's the time I thought it was dead. But that's actually an advantage. I can hear that the fan on the 570 is running if I listen really, really closely. And who has time for that with Grossdeutscher Rundfunk running and Bernard farting like he's been eating nothing but bean burritos for a month?
Anyway, this is not really a review, it's just a way of me thanking all of you for chiming in and encouraging an upgrade that I am really, really happy with
