Gwx 2 and Graphic cards.

[TheDarkWraith]

Originally Posted by Mush Martin

Yeah I need advice on this too.......
dollars in to performance out what is the
consensus recomendation????????

(blew my card an hour after loading 2.0)

I was a die hard ATI guy until I found a really good deal on an 8800 GTX from newegg.com (under $550!). I have to say it's been a night and day difference and I kick myself for not doing it sooner.

from NVidia's website on the 8800 GT series of video cards:

NVIDIA® unified architecture:
Fully unified shader core dynamically allocates processing power to geometry, vertex, physics, or pixel shading operations, delivering up to 2x the gaming performance of prior generation GPUs.

This was big point for me. Most cards have dedicated shaders, dedicated vertex, etc. These series of cards can dynamically allocate what is needed. If at the moment it's doing a massive amount of pixel shading operations it can set it's stream processors to all be shaders. If it's doing a lot of physics calculations it can allocate of them to do physics. With dedicated shaders, vertex, etc. you can get lag because those are the only 'processors' that can do the work for that type. Dynamically allocating is a

Full Microsoft® DirectX® 10 Support:
DirectX 10 GPU with full Shader Model 4.0 support delivers unparalleled levels of graphics realism and film-quality effects.

This speaks for itself BUT will only apply if you run Vista. Vista has DX 10, Windows XP can not run DX 10. Microsoft didn't even make it for XP or prior OSs (Bad, bad microsoft ). Basically, they are forcing you to run Vista if you want to run games based on DX 10. So this feature is a toss up.

Overclocking ability was also something I looked into and the ease with which you can do it. NVidia's drivers include software for letting you OC your card (both core and memory clocks). This was also a with me. Make sure your moving some serious air in your case though if you do this (I have 6 fans in my Antec 900).

Your power supply is really going to dictate what you can and can't run. Always add up the power requirements of your system to see if your power supply is adequate. I went the easy route, bought a 1KW enermax (1000W) and therefore I shouldn't have to worry about power requirements for awhile. Research your video card, it will recommend a basic power supply wattage necessary or they will give you their power requirement.

bus type - PCIexpress x16 will give higher bandwidth (data transfer to and from the video card) and thus theoretically higher performance. The 8800 GTX is a PCIexpress x16 card. Be warned that it's physically the size of two slots though and quite long. Some people have trouble installing them into their cases.

[kenijaru]

will a nvidia geforce 6600 GT run GWX 2 without exploding and bursting into flames?

[Jimbuna]

It should work fine, alittle limited in fps whilst in harbours and alongside convoys, but it'll manage.
When I first started off, I had an ATI Radeon 9250

[iambecomelife]

Originally Posted by Contact

640 MB ? what a hell were u thinking when u bought this card dude I bet no game will ever use as much as 260 MB of video card in the near future.. MB is useless unless bits - grapchical speed is low.. Just imagine what a wild animal would be the video card with 640 Bits

Well, maybe I bought it because reviews showed that some games benefited from the extra memory. Also, it was only a little bit more expensive than the 320 MB variety.

[iambecomelife]

Originally Posted by Thunder

Iambecomelife, are you running with the rez fix(1280x1024)?

No. I used to use it but I had problems alt-tabbing out of the game.

[stabiz]

The video-ram is not useless, try firing up a fairly recent game in higher resulutions with little video ram. Yeah, thats right ... stuttering.

As for the 640MB`s in the 8800GTS, yeah its useless if you play in 1024x768, but lots of people have huge wide screens now.

[Mush Martin]

Originally Posted by Racerboy

I was a die hard ATI guy until I found a really good deal on an 8800 GTX from newegg.com (under $550!). I have to say it's been a night and day difference and I kick myself for not doing it sooner.

from NVidia's website on the 8800 GT series of video cards:

NVIDIA® unified architecture:
Fully unified shader core dynamically allocates processing power to geometry, vertex, physics, or pixel shading operations, delivering up to 2x the gaming performance of prior generation GPUs.

This was big point for me. Most cards have dedicated shaders, dedicated vertex, etc. These series of cards can dynamically allocate what is needed. If at the moment it's doing a massive amount of pixel shading operations it can set it's stream processors to all be shaders. If it's doing a lot of physics calculations it can allocate of them to do physics. With dedicated shaders, vertex, etc. you can get lag because those are the only 'processors' that can do the work for that type. Dynamically allocating is a

Full Microsoft® DirectX® 10 Support:
DirectX 10 GPU with full Shader Model 4.0 support delivers unparalleled levels of graphics realism and film-quality effects.

This speaks for itself BUT will only apply if you run Vista. Vista has DX 10, Windows XP can not run DX 10. Microsoft didn't even make it for XP or prior OSs (Bad, bad microsoft ). Basically, they are forcing you to run Vista if you want to run games based on DX 10. So this feature is a toss up.

Overclocking ability was also something I looked into and the ease with which you can do it. NVidia's drivers include software for letting you OC your card (both core and memory clocks). This was also a with me. Make sure your moving some serious air in your case though if you do this (I have 6 fans in my Antec 900).

Your power supply is really going to dictate what you can and can't run. Always add up the power requirements of your system to see if your power supply is adequate. I went the easy route, bought a 1KW enermax (1000W) and therefore I shouldn't have to worry about power requirements for awhile. Research your video card, it will recommend a basic power supply wattage necessary or they will give you their power requirement.

bus type - PCIexpress x16 will give higher bandwidth (data transfer to and from the video card) and thus theoretically higher performance. The 8800 GTX is a PCIexpress x16 card. Be warned that it's physically the size of two slots though and quite long. Some people have trouble installing them into their cases.

Thanx Rcrby good report.
M

[skwasjer]

Originally Posted by stabiz

The video-ram is not useless, try firing up a fairly recent game in higher resulutions with little video ram. Yeah, thats right ... stuttering.

As for the 640MB`s in the 8800GTS, yeah its useless if you play in 1024x768, but lots of people have huge wide screens now.

Even this does not impact the required memory much. Most games use a frame buffer, a backbuffer and a zbuffer. The amount of memory required for these buffers are equal to resolution (width * height) * color depth (4 bytes for 32-bit).

When I take 1600x1200, this equates to roughly 7.5 MB per buffer. For full HD (1920x1080) this would be around 8.2MB. Times 3 (for easy calculation, zbuffers are actually smaller), this would theoretically fit on a 32 MB card just fine.

Other data that is stored/cached in gpu memory are (optimized) shader/vertex programs but they are generally quite small.

So why 640MB/768MB ram?

Well, two things:

• geometry
• textures

Geometry data are the meshes/polygons that make up the scene (static or animations). The more memory available, the more can be cached (for reuse or precache), the less CPU/main memory/disk time required to fetch it. A single ship will take up around 1-2MB of vertex data. Your sub (especially the interior) many times more.

Ditto for textures, they eat alot of memory. For example, if you have a convoy of 10 unique ships, and each ship uses a single texture, on high res quality you have 10 textures resulting in roughly 40 MB data (1024x1024x4). (In SH4 there are even 3 textures per ship!) Add to that: the GUI, water, sky, sun/moon, your sub, torpedo's, planes, explosions, smoke, fire, watersplash, particles, bodies, and what not (I can go on) that all use one or more textures. This eats memory!

Now, when you swap around periscope/interior or even exterior, move your camera around, if most of this data is available on gpu ram, you'll be having a much smoother game than if it would have to be loaded from your cpu ram.

As a side note, I must add that more RAM indeed does not mean a better card. It depends on alot of other things (Racerboy already mentioned a few). But saying a 640MB/768MB is overkill isn't entirely true either. There are many (new/upcoming) games that will push todays latest cards in the next year (and possibly GWX 2 does so too, I can't tell because I don't play/have it), and then everybody will want one and cry overkill at >1GB cards...

[The Munster]

Originally Posted by kenijaru

will a nvidia geforce 6600 GT run GWX 2 without exploding and bursting into flames?

I have a 6800 and runs it; only glitch I get is frame rate stutter leaving harbour [but doesn't seem as bad with 2.0 :hmm: and ships exploding] so you should be fine.
Wish people wouldn't keep writing about 8800, Santa doesn't know where I live , wrote to him asking for a 8800; 'Santa Claus, South Pole, World' but no reply.

[Claudius]

I use EVGA 8600GTS

[Furia]

Originally Posted by CCIP

Both my desktop GeForce 8600 GTS and laptop 8600M GS are running it excellently! There's a bit of a stutter on the laptop sometimes, though I'm not even sure that's video-related. Otherwise both put out a steady 60fps; port/convoys more like 30!

I was just trying to PM to you this message but seems you have your PM mailbox full so I am posting it here.
Of course anyone that could help me would be most welcomed as well.
Thanks a lot!

I have just bought a laptop with this card, Nvidia 8600M GS and it comes with specific HP drivers for it.
However despite being a more powerful card that the one I have on my old PC, I got a not so good quality graphics with it. I guess it is about the settings on the Nvidia Panel.
However this is not my expertise area so I would really appreciate if you can let me know what are the specific settings you are using on your nvidia pannel for SHIII as well as the monitor ressolution and any other info you think would help me to be able to run SHIII nicely on my new laptop.

Thanks a lot in advance!!

[Webchessie]

Still runs well with my "old" Dell Dimension 8400 (3.4 GHz) , but I did upgrade it to 2 Megs RAM and a newer XFX GeForce 7950 GT 512MB DDR3 HDCP ExTreme.