Graphics card question. Should I or shouldn't I?

[misha1967]

Yes, I know, that's a loaded question because we all have our preferences, but I'm asking to hear from people who've done the same as I'm contemplating or something similar. I could have also put it in "General", but really the only reason I'm even thinking about it is because of SH5. It runs just fine on my current setup, but I wouldn't mind a little extra "oomph" to push the FPS up a bit.

My "old" 2 and half year Phenom II X4, 4GB Vista 64 box still runs everything I want quite satisfactorily even though I might not always be able to push it to 8x8 AA (which, at 1920x1080 is a waste if you ask me), and I'm perfectly happy with its 30FPS even when there's a lot going on.

But I was thinking about upgrading my GTX 260 to a GTX 570 since they're so damned cheap and wondering if anybody has done something similar and what their experience was. Yes, I know the GTX 580 is even faster, but then I'd have to get a new PSU due to the power config which, if necessary, I'd be happy to, but I'd rather not if I can avoid it.

And yes, I know that nVidia has a problem with sun flare, I've known that for a decade, but it doesn't really matter all that much to me. What I like about them is that they're generally rock solid out of the box and you don't have to spend a week tweaking and hunting alternate drivers like you have to with a lot of the ATIs, even though I'll be the first to admit that they're bloody awesome GPUs, no fault on that. They kick a certain part of your anatomy once you get them tuned right.

But I know nVidia, I've never been disappointed with them and they're generally quiet, cool and tough.

So, is it worth it? My current 260 runs fine, cool and quiet and the last thing I want is a card that heats up my entire room and sounds like a Boeing wind tunnel.

Oh, my PSU is 800W.

Any thoughts most welcome.

[Herr-Berbunch]

I've recently gone from a GTS 250 to a GTX 560 Ti OC, I'd never played SH5 until I'd got the new card but in other games it's a definate boost. I've been more than happy - and I think you will be too.

[Sepp von Ch.]

I had nVIDIA 9800GTX and now I have GTX 560 Ti. Is absolutely great for all modded SH sims. SH5 works now very well by me (and with 64 bit system).

[TheDarkWraith]

any 500 series GTX card you'll be happy with. Just look at the specs of the 200 series compared to the 500 series...it's a no brainer!

[misha1967]

Thanks! I appreciate it

Always nice to hear from somebody who's tried already

[TheDarkWraith]

Originally Posted by misha1967

Thanks! I appreciate it

Always nice to hear from somebody who's tried already

I upgraded from GTX280 to GTX480 then to GTX590. The leap from GTX280 to GTX480 was night and day difference. The next leap to GTX590 was incredible

[misha1967]

Originally Posted by TheDarkWraith

I upgraded from GTX280 to GTX480 then to GTX590. The leap from GTX280 to GTX480 was night and day difference. The next leap to GTX590 was incredible

I've heard good things about the 590, yes.

And I'm fairly certain, just from the numbers alone, that I'll be quite happy going from my old 260 (which still, today, is a pretty damn good card I might add. Churning out 30-35 FPS leaving Kiel with everything but "shadows" cranked up to pretty and OHII installed isn't bad for a three year old card ) to a spanking new 570

But numbers are one thing, Liking the card is quite another and, as I'm sure you know, when you research a card on the web reviews go from "hate it" to "best thing since sliced bread". Researching the 500 series alone I had everything from "awesome, runs cool, quiet and beats the snot out of every game I throw at it" to "stuttery, unreliable, hot as an oven, sounds like a jet turbine even at moderate load."

Sometimes I wonder if they're talking about the same card

So that's why I asked the family here at SubSim because I know that we have quite a bit in common and I'd much rather hear from somebody I know who is actually using the thing than some snooty reviewer who just plugged it in and ran it for two hours so he could write a 300 word review. I'd rather ask my friends

I settled on the 570 because it wouldn't require anything from me other than unplugging the old and plugging in the new. I'll rebuild completely one day anyway, and then I'll take it all from top to bottom, but right now I just want better performance with a minimum of hassle, and the 570 is a bloody steal at the price.

So it's in the mail even as we speak. Can't wait

[TheDarkWraith]

I think you'll be happy. The only 'problem' I've ever had with nVidia cards was the GTX480. That thing ran hot and the fan was loud as hell. The GTX590 is quiet, runs cool, and is a monster of a card.

I was a ATI user before buying my first nVidia card (a 100 series card). After that first nVidia card I've been with nVidia ever since. You just can't beat nVidia. The company I always bought my cards from was BFGTech because they gave lifetime warranty on them. Since they went out of business I now buy all my cards from EVGA since they give a lifetime warrantly with their cards. Warranty is something I consider when I put down large $ on these video cards

[0rpheus]

I upgraded to a slightly overclocked, extra cooled 570 a month or so ago and love it - you won't be disappointed

[misha1967]

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

[Bothersome]

Well, it all got a good chuckle out of me.

Glad you're happy with it. I run my 2 GTX 470 cards in SLI for everything 3D.

I've got my setting turned up to max also, Now, all you need is some mods to make use of all the capabilities that card can crunch.

Real Environment is the prettiest. But Dynamic Environment will make just about any card heat up. NVidia uses variable speed fans on their good cards. So if you want to hear that hair dryer blowing... Put on DE.

DE makes the view distance further out. And other things too I suppose. Drawing a million waves to glitter off the sunlight is gonna create some heat.

My two cards ran so hot, I had to add active cooling to my system.

[misha1967]

Originally Posted by Bothersome

Well, it all got a good chuckle out of me.

Glad you're happy with it. I run my 2 GTX 470 cards in SLI for everything 3D.

I've got my setting turned up to max also, Now, all you need is some mods to make use of all the capabilities that card can crunch.

Real Environment is the prettiest. But Dynamic Environment will make just about any card heat up. NVidia uses variable speed fans on their good cards. So if you want to hear that hair dryer blowing... Put on DE.

DE makes the view distance further out. And other things too I suppose. Drawing a million waves to glitter off the sunlight is gonna create some heat.

My two cards ran so hot, I had to add active cooling to my system.

Glad you liked it

I do tend to get a little bit long-winded, but I try to make up for it by being light-hearted as well. And, besides, if I'm boring myself just typing it, it's a pretty sure sign that it's not in any way fit for public consumption.

Two 470s in SLI? Is there anything that rig won't run? I'm impressed.

I'm not too concerned about the fan as I would never leave port without DynEnv, and even when the old 260 was struggling, and I do mean struggling, to keep it at 30 with everything on, it still wouldn't as much as whisper. It's a damn good card and now I have one for people looking for an entry card. And the solo 570, even when I deliberately tried to punish it for no good reason other than to prove that I am a bloody sadist, only barely made a hum.

[Bothersome]

Actually, there is one program I've been unable to get this computer to run at all.... Entropia Universe. It will not get to the login screen. But, I don't think it is video card related though.

My brother has the 560, and I was very impressed with it.

I have recently went from a GTX 465 to 2x GTX 560's in SLI and I have to say i'm extremely happy with the performance and the graphics! I was advised to get 2x GTX 560's instead of the one GTX 570 by a friend of mine who has been working with computers for most of his life so he knew his stuff and i'm happy I took his advice. For the 2 GTX 560's it was only about £10 more than one GTX 570.

[misha1967]

Not to obsessively keep this thread alive, but I've made some interesting observations after the upgrade and I was wondering if anybody else has seen the same.

Like I said, the new card obviously kicks some serious behind compared to the old one, I won't go further into that. My observations are about the reliability of the internal FPS function in the sim itself.

I first had a "what?" moment when I returned to Wilhelmshaven and noticed a "drop" to about 30 fps while seeing nothing that would indicate such a drop when looking around, panning, zooming, doing anything I could think of that would normally (with the old 260) make things slow down and become a bit "jerky." This was still with everything cranked up which I never could with the old one.

I thought nothing of it initially, docked, saved, did the usual in between patrol things, then shut down. Then I loaded it back up and saw that the sim was reporting 28-32 fps in the bunker. That's fine, but it was no better than what I got with the 260 and, even more interesting, my mouse lag was gone and everything was smooth as silk, even though the sim insisted that I was doing no better than before. Oh well, I thought, who cares as long as it play well, but I was still mystified. So I started out a new patrol, left the pen and, once I'd gotten over how beautiful everything looked with everything turned up to max (which is something considering how beautiful this sim looks at the moderate settings I was using before), I noted that it was still reporting "low" fps in the 30 range. I left the pen and it dropped even lower, but performance wise it was perfect. Everything smooth, no tears when panning, no problems at all and the mouse was moving swiftly without lag. Now believe me, I KNOW the difference between 25 and 60 fps, but it was behaving like 60 while reporting 25. Later on, it "dropped even lower, all the way down to 20, but it was still behaving as if it was really running 60-70.

So now I was REALLY curious. I went into the settings and turned off everything, everything that you can turn off and on on the fly without a restart, anyway, particularly the shadows which is a REAL fps killer. It didn't register at all on the internal CTRL+F8 fps counter. Still "stuck at 20-25" with behavior like I was running more like 70.

So I cranked up the setting even further. Everything that I could turn on, shadows cranked to max, every single environmental effect there, and the only effect on the sim was that I almost fainted with admiration at how beautiful it looked but the fps didn't budge an inch even though everything was still running as smooth as silk.

So I'm wondering if that internal fps thingy is really reporting what you're seeing. Funny thing is, when I was on the old 260, I could see the result of my changes immediately. Now I can't.

It's not a "problem", as such, far from it, who cares about the number that the sim churns out as long as everything works like a wonder? I'm just curious and wondering if anybody has seen anything like it. The only thing that I changed other than the card was finally going from VGA to DVI when I put the new card in. I'm wondering if that messes up the way the sim "measures" fps. I know that when the new card went in nVidia Control Panel has it set to HD instead of just the plain old PC 1920x1080. I suppose I could try to switch back to the old DVI to VGA adapter and set the resolution to the old option, but really, why do so? It's working perfectly, I'm just curious is all.

And now I'll stop babbling about my silly card

Bottom line is I'm happy, very happy, I'm just wondering if anybody has seen anything like this just to confirm that I'm not going completely and utterly crazy which, knowing me, is a distinct possibility.

EDIT: And as a reassurance to people who upgrade like I did but take their data from the internal fps counter and might think that they just blew a chunk load of money on nothing at all. It's a field of interest of mine too, which is why I've wasted time on finding out how our eyes and brains process images and, combined with my passion for computers, made me interested in just where the "cut-off point" is where further improvements really don't matter because our brains don't notice anyway, such as the "30 fps" rule. If you see a difference between, say, 40 and 90 fps it's not because you're actually seeing it because your brain can't process the difference (much like going to 16.7 million colors on your computer display quality is pointless as your brain can't tell the difference between that many colors anyway), it's because your eyes and brains pick up on the brief drop below 30 fps while you're panning or zooming, even though you may not pick up on it by looking at the fps counter.