My disappointment with the 4870

[gareth170]

Stopped reading there... with only 512mb of ram your gonna really struggle in any game at that res with bells and whistles on. 1gb is the standard for high res gaming. clearly you havent done much research into ur gfx card and performance your likely to get. (echoing lunarwolf's comments).

i disagree, i game at 1920x1200 with a 4850 512mb and it run's all my games very well with max settings. crysis and warhead runs fine without AA..

 

[gurusan]

yeah that statement was basically retarded

 

[95thrifles]

I done the exact same as him. Stop being such an insulting fanboy, kid. Charts and numbers dont tell you everything. The 9800GX2 was also faster than a 280 in lots of benchmarks, but from owning that card aswell, it's total cr*p compared to a 280.

Hold on a sec, people were complaining about the ATI cards suffering low frame rates, I provide an independent comparison of multiple gfx cards in same system to illustrate the actual difference in frame rates and you then say "charts and numbers dont tell you everything". I think youre right btw (though they are a good guide when compared properly), but I was responding to peoples arguments re frame rates, just because one persons set up their system wrong and their card gave poor performance doesnt mean that that card is crap. Theres too many people who make an error in their system set up and get poor results then go blame it on their hardware when in reality 95% of the time its user error. If I set up a system with a 280 and its crap cos Ive made a **** up in my set up does that mean all 280's or even all NVidia cards are crap? No it doesnt, it just means I've set up my system wrong

 

[lunarwolf]

Dont be ridiculous!
A 3GHz dual-core and a high end card will run that game fine at 1680x1050.
Most of the time that game dont even use 20% of my i7 CPU usage. GPU power matters far more with that game, or just about any game for that matter.
With my i7 at 2.66GHz or 4.15GHz it makes little difference to Crysis, and i play it at 1920x1200 on highest with a 295.

+1

tested e6600 and e8600 up to 4.7ghz. 0 difference . If you have a dual or quad @3ghz-3.3ghz then you are fine with latest demanding games. any extra ghz is useless in games. GPU will make a difference

to the guy saying the 9800x2 beats the 280, could you post the the link, coz i read many and don't remember ever seeing that. I could be wrong, so please link.

 

[95thrifles]

It was in the link I provided which was looking at the new 285's and 295's and comparing them to other cards available at moment, here, tbh I expect its merely as the game was being developed it was coded for the 9800 as thats was the latest card out at the time, Im sure when new drivers for card/patches for game get released that allow it to make the most of the newer 280 it'll knock spots off it

 

[MR.B]

Hold on a sec, people were complaining about the ATI cards suffering low frame rates, I provide an independent comparison of multiple gfx cards in same system to illustrate the actual difference in frame rates and you then say "charts and numbers dont tell you everything". I think youre right btw (though they are a good guide when compared properly), but I was responding to peoples arguments re frame rates, just because one persons set up their system wrong and their card gave poor performance doesnt mean that that card is crap. Theres too many people who make an error in their system set up and get poor results then go blame it on their hardware when in reality 95% of the time its user error. If I set up a system with a 280 and its crap cos Ive made a **** up in my set up does that mean all 280's or even all NVidia cards are crap? No it doesnt, it just means I've set up my system wrong

I admit my reply was a little over the top, so apologies.
Do we know he set it up wrong though? i dont know if the OP said, i've not read every reply in here... but too many people blame this sort of thing on user error, like it's hard to install a graphics card and drivers.

 

[lunarwolf]

hehe, was mr B I was refering to, but I learned something. looks like the 9800x2 has still some legs in it, except far cry2, it seems to be slightly better than 280/285 according to this review. not many reviews use the 9800x2 in tests with current cards

 

[wombraider]

Thats funny because in the review where they ran multiple test runs on various games and compared both the average frame rates and minimum frame rates the 4870X2 left the 280 standing in all but dead space (obviously coded for Nvidia), the other games tested were left 4 dead, COD:WaW, fallout3, Crysis:Warhead. And this is at every resolution upto 2560*1600, so a pretty thorough comprehensive test set up.
So stop trolling and go bury your head in some sand, do us a favour

It wasnt fps that made me change back to the GTX280 it was the consistancy
The gameplay was smoother with the GTX280 and more stuttery with the 4870x2

Reviews are ok as a rough guide , but playing the games you are used to playing yourself is the best way to work out which is best.

Your experiences of the 2 cards might be different to mine , so we will have to agree to disagree.

FYI: I would generally prefer to buy ATI than nvidia , but at then end of the day I will pick the best for the job.

 

[Peter Tsang]

Talking about if CPU is a deciding factor, I tend to believe it is not for games which have been released for the last 18 months or so.

Perhaps, the most CPU demanding games are flight simulations. Take Falcon 4 which is now modified as F4 Allied Forces. As opposed to First Person Shooter games which only demands the CPU for calculations of bolts' movements and decisions like shoot or search following a defined script, a flight simulation has to calculate flight physics, atmospheric conditions, ground objects relative to a flight, and we are not talking about 1 plane but more than 2 planes at the very least. Then the game engine has to take care of other AI calculations like if a Surface to Air missile is to lock on to either th eplayer plane (human plane) or and AI plane then project the trajectory of the missile and determine if it has to fire upon the target, and at the same time, this target might be deciding if it has to launch countermeasure or if the missile is within range and yet has to evade or fire upon the player's aircraft....imagine in an air war scenario where there are over 10 planes in the same screen, we are talking about trillion computations and thousands of inter process messages exchange between process..and after all these are done...it passes the graphics rendering to the GPU.

I can hardly think of any FPS games which has so many computational jobs to do than a flight simulation and to that end, the Framerates Per Second of any FPS games in the last 18 months should be throwing more jobs to the GPU than to the CPU.

Therefore, a higher clocked CPU is only waste of money in my opinion.

 

[95thrifles]

I admit my reply was a little over the top, so apologies.
Do we know he set it up wrong though? i dont know if the OP said, i've not read every reply in here... but too many people blame this sort of thing on user error, like it's hard to install a graphics card and drivers.

No worries, me too, sry
I wasnt saying his set up is wrong, just saying it could be, and highlighting that because one has a bad experience with a card doesnt mean all those cards are bad. I still maintain theres far too many people bashing cards because of one bad experience though
Peace

 

[wombraider]

No worries, me too, sry
I wasnt saying his set up is wrong, just saying it could be, and highlighting that because one has a bad experience with a card doesnt mean all those cards are bad. I still maintain theres far too many people bashing cards because of one bad experience though
Peace

My set-up was correctly done ( brand new fresh install for the new shiney 4870x2 ) , it still didnt stop it from being crap tho

 

[regulus]

Yeah you can....

I'm curious, what type of FPS get do you get playing Crysis, what settings and what resolution?