GPU for 120FPS Gaming.

Twirlywoos · 21 Aug 2012 at 14:24

I guess it's my turn now for help

. I had 7850's in xfire and wasn't happy with the GPU utalisation from AMD's drivers. So I've decided to flog them.

Currently I have the SA700 23" 120hz Samsung 3D monitor, but will be upgrading next year to a 27" IPS 120hz when it becomes more affordable so I need to consider this when choosing a GPU.

I like gaming in 3D and playing games like BF3 in Ultra 64 Player servers at close to my monitors refresh rate. I'd also like the GPU to be quiet and a good overcloker (I know OC speeds isn't a guarantee, but would want one which is considered the best overclocker and best bang for buck)

Which GPU do you think I should get? I'm drawn between SLI'ing two GTX670's but don't know which one I should get, whether 4Gb vs 2Gb VRAM or the Windforce or MSI TF3 Power Edition or any other you may suggest.

I don't mind going back to AMD but at this moment it would have to be a single card. Maybe a 7950 and overcloking it???

Finally I'd need a PSU to power them both.

They will be going in a Corsair 650D, Sabertooth Z77 and Intel 3750k Ivy Bridge.

Thanks

Rusty0611 · 21 Aug 2012 at 14:46

Hi there,

You won't need 4GB 670's first of all.

Even SLI 670's won't hit 120FPS in BF3 constantly. No dual card set up can consistently.

670 Windforce is a good option although bear in mind of you have two in SLI you need very good case cooling to remove the hot air that the cards circulate.

750W good quality PSU will serve you fine. Go for 850W if you can get a good deal and that should future proof you if more power hungry stuff comes out in the future.

Rusty0611 · 21 Aug 2012 at 14:54

I'm not sure if nVidia cards work with 3D with your monitor....

Twirlywoos · 21 Aug 2012 at 15:12

Does the Gigabyte not exhaust the hot air out the back of the case?

There are Nvidia 3D emulators to get cards to work with non Nvidia monitors - it takes some faffing about but it does work.

So 2Gb VRAM is plenty for a 27" Monitor?

Where can I find respectable and trust worthy benches for SLI 670's running various games inc BF3?

Thanks

kitch9 · 21 Aug 2012 at 15:36

When you say you weren't happy with GPU utilisation you didn't have V Sync on did you?

With V Sync on the less utilization the better if the FPS is maxed out....

tommybhoy · 21 Aug 2012 at 15:44

What's the rest of your current specs manju?

Your 7850's scaling could be getting held back, may not need to change gfx.

Afaik, the emulator hack using the Sammy's glasses is a nogo now with newer 6 series drivers, Nvidia put a stop to it.

Rusty0611 · 21 Aug 2012 at 16:07

majnu said:
Does the Gigabyte not exhaust the hot air out the back of the case?

There are Nvidia 3D emulators to get cards to work with non Nvidia monitors - it takes some faffing about but it does work.

So 2Gb VRAM is plenty for a 27" Monitor?

Where can I find respectable and trust worthy benches for SLI 670's running various games inc BF3?

Thanks

No. The Windforce blows it all in your case. As do most non-reference cards.

Yeah 2GB will be fine. The only thing that does hurt 2GB is modded Skyrim.

People like to quote this game a lot but it must be said that it does require a lot of mods to push over 2GB. That said if you play Skyrim modded you should consider something higher but on other game it will in effect be useless to have greater than 2GB.

Zeed · 21 Aug 2012 at 17:19

majnu Wassup mate. I play BF3 3d Ultra no AA on my setup.
If you can live with drops to minimum 30fps on caspian 64 with disco on.
One good 7970 would work
If u need max drops to 50 2x7950 will do you good

So if you want NV then:
1x680 for drops to 30fps
2x670 for drops to 50fps

Thats from my point. I dont know how good NVs 3d software is. But to not get any bottlenecks on TriDef you need at least 4.5ghz Sandy or 4.3 Ivy. I had [email protected] and i could not wait to get my 5ghz sandy back from RMA

Anyway Those figures come from person that swapped 3 month old [email protected] for 5ghz sandy cos of 3d gaming

How good is NVs compared to TriDef i would love to know

Tridef uses 2 cores so you need as much IOPS out of cpu as you can get

Twirlywoos · 21 Aug 2012 at 21:36

kitch9 said:
When you say you weren't happy with GPU utilisation you didn't have V Sync on did you?

With V Sync on the less utilization the better if the FPS is maxed out....

I played with Vsync off.

tommybhoy said:
What's the rest of your current specs manju?

Your 7850's scaling could be getting held back, may not need to change gfx.

Afaik, the emulator hack using the Sammy's glasses is a nogo now with newer 6 series drivers, Nvidia put a stop to it.

Twirlywoos · 21 Aug 2012 at 21:42

Rusty0611 said:
No. The Windforce blows it all in your case. As do most non-reference cards.

Yeah 2GB will be fine. The only thing that does hurt 2GB is modded Skyrim.

People like to quote this game a lot but it must be said that it does require a lot of mods to push over 2GB. That said if you play Skyrim modded you should consider something higher but on other game it will in effect be useless to have greater than 2GB.

Lord_ZED said:
majnu Wassup mate. I play BF3 3d Ultra no AA on my setup.
If you can live with drops to minimum 30fps on caspian 64 with disco on.
One good 7970 would work
If u need max drops to 50 2x7950 will do you good

So if you want NV then:
1x680 for drops to 30fps
2x670 for drops to 50fps

Thats from my point. I dont know how good NVs 3d software is. But to not get any bottlenecks on TriDef you need at least 4.5ghz Sandy or 4.3 Ivy. I had [email protected] and i could not wait to get my 5ghz sandy back from RMA
Anyway Those figures come from person that swapped 3 month old [email protected] for 5ghz sandy cos of 3d gaming
How good is NVs compared to TriDef i would love to know Tridef uses 2 cores so you need as much IOPS out of cpu as you can get

I don't play Skyrim, but Metro Last Light is something I want to max out when it's out next year.

@Lord Zed - I've not overclocked my CPU, don't know how and it's daunting to me when I read how people overclock theirs. Those figures are interesting. But after hearing that 3D won't work with a non Nvidia ready monitor has really put a spanner in the works now.

tommybhoy · 22 Aug 2012 at 00:56

majnu said:
I've not overclocked my CPU, don't know how and it's daunting to me when I read how people overclock theirs.

I had an Z68A-GD55, that could get to 4.7GHz(with a huge amount of tweaking and patience), I thought it failed(turned out to be n M4 SSD with a 7 month firmware bug :mad:

).

You have a cracking oc'ing board in the Sabertooth Z77, I got one to replace the non-faulty MSI(the SSD was the only thing I didn't check***multiple facepalms to self at the time***).

Anyway It's this easy:

2500K, Sabertooth Z77, boot into bios>Advanced Mode>Ai Tweaker and press just TWO buttons, after a few seconds-Boom! 4.7GHz 100% stable!:

Don't know what clocks you'll get, but after doing the OC tuner, I can enter 49(where it says 46 in the pic) and it's stable@~5GHz, although I just [email protected].

Along with my 6950>70's@950/1300, scaling is top notch.

Then try out your 78's before you sell them on and see what happens with the scaling, CrossFire/Sli is cpu dependant, running@stock is why your 'GPU utalisation from AMD's drivers' isn't that great.

Don't tell me you never clocked those 78's too?

If you try it out(it's criminal not too

), let me know how you get on, as when everythings oc'ed, you are probably sitting on a faster setup than a single oc'ed 680/7970.

Twirlywoos · 22 Aug 2012 at 02:22

I'll give that a try, just when people oc they go through many procedures and runs with Prime on here and on overclock.net.

Yeh I had my gpu overclocked at 1200/1450 at 1.17V. However, it's too late, I've sold one card and playing BF3 on a single card today I didn't have a single crash which was great for the first time in weeks.

tommybhoy · 22 Aug 2012 at 02:58

If you just do the two clicks above, then you won't need to do prime or anything, it's Asus oc'ing to safe specs, it will just work.

As you sold one, and presuming your selling the other one, this is what your looking for:

YOUR BASKET
1 x HIS HD 7970 IceQ X² 3072MB GDDR5 PCI-Express Graphics Card (H797QM3G2M) £323.99
Total : £323.99 (includes shipping : FREE).

Offer finishes [email protected], but there will probably be another 7970 on offer instead.

Can't believe you go 3DBF3 online, I thought it would be too hard for kills, as I'm crap on foot as it is, I'm in it for the tanks.

BTW, what games do you play on Tridef?

Here's some of mine:

tommybhoy said:
I found some of my posts and despite being messy, here is some info about various titles I've played in 3D(Tridef) with 6950>70 CrossFire:

1. BF3(not launched via tridef, 3D applied directly within the game), very disappointing, thought it would be much, much better, especially compared with the effects on other titles, quite a performance hit too!

edit***BF3 looks much better using Tridef than the in game setting that I used above and Crysis shimmering was caused by a setting in Tridef that you can switch off, was a bit of a 3D noob back then.***

2. L4D2, incredible 3D effect, the best use of 3D of all the games I tried, imo the overall depth, looking into the distance is incredible.

3. Skyrim, stunning 2nd best looking title for me absolutely fantastic.

4. Deuss Ex(not launched via tridef, 3D applied directly within the game), it's ok, but nothing special.

edit***bit better using Tridef as well***

5. BAC, fantastic, not much of a performance hit and Bats looks incredible when you pan the camera around him it has to be seen to take it in.

6. Dead Space 2, fantastic.

7. Bulletstorm, very immersive.

8. ME3, good looking and lots of depth.

9. F3 NV, great looking.

10. Dirt 3, (not launched via tridef, 3D applied directly within the game) disappointing as I heard it was very impressive, maybe expected too much.

edit***between going in the cockpit and using Tridef it's much better***

11. Portal 2, looks great but I was getting a huge performance hit.

edit***Switched off CrossFire, fps literally went through the roof***

12. Crysis 2, fantastic, not much of a hit.

edit***you can edit the config to enable ingame SBS 3D, it doesn't look as good as Tridef, but performance goes up***

13. Crysis, sore on the senses, it looks great, but I was getting a shimmering effect, maybe have to play about with the settings and there is a considerable performance hit too.

edit***fixed the shimmering by disabling power 3D in Tridef and fps increased too, now I know what I'm doing with Tridef, I was a Tridef noob back then***

14. Alan Wake/American Nightmare is absolutely stunning in all the fog, what's surprising though for me is AW needs CrossFire disabled to get good performance, where as AM has mental CrossFire performance in 3D despite both using the same CrossFire/Tridef profiles.

15. NFS the run better than Dirt 3's built in 3D(but again like BF3, Dirt 3 looks better using Tridef).

16. BAA, much the same as BAA.

17. MP3 is not too shabby but the colours look a bit washed out for me, you should get a better result on Nvidia I imagine as it's only running on the Beta Tridef.

18. The Darkness 2 gets the thumbs up as well.

19. Diablo 3 looks fantastic, but it's not my cup of tea.

20. Trine is magical.

21. DAII, not too shabby either.

Generally, Unreal Engine games look the part in 3D.

Bulletstorm(very surprisingly) really blew me away in 3D tbh, played it for a level or two in 2D, put it down and walked away but it really comes into it's own in 3D, felt like a kid again, ducking out the road of stuff and actually trying to peek round corners(obviously you can't, but your brain tells you otherwise), really can't rate it enough in 3D.

If you are into Skyrim, well it's in a different league folks, especially highly moded with various texture packs, walking about in a snow storm is something else.

MeMeMeMe · 22 Aug 2012 at 11:34

tommybhoy said:
If you just do the two clicks above, then you won't need to do prime or anything, it's Asus oc'ing to safe specs, it will just work.

I wish, the three times I have tried their OC Tuner utility, it has sent my system into a boot-reboot spiral that i've only been able to stop by getting into BIOS again and click restore optimal defaults.

So, usually it works, but for some people it is a disaster. I don't have the sabertooth, i have the WS Revolution.

Twirlywoos · 22 Aug 2012 at 11:51

I tried it and it didn't work.

J.D · 22 Aug 2012 at 12:25

majnu said:
I tried it and it didn't work.

That will be because of speedstep/C1E. Fire up a program to utilise your CPU and watch the your speeds jump up when in use. It's a power saving feature so you don't unnecessarily waste electricity, refrain from excessive heat when not needed etc...

Madeddie · 22 Aug 2012 at 12:26

Just to add Witcher 2 is very good in 3D as is Guild Wars 2 and apparently MechWarrior online.

In terms of fps with 3D, When 3D vision is enabled does it not combine the fps and divide by 2 (per eye)? So if your hitting 60 FPS it's actual 120 in total.

I run with 2 670's overclocked jetstream cards and so far i've not found a 3D SLI game yet that is unplayable in 3D even Witcher 2 in full Ultra.

I've not tried BF3 yet in 3D Ultra so that may be an exception.

Prior to that running with one 670 some games could not handle ultra in 3D and were unplayable, bear in mind not every game utilises SLI.

Twirlywoos · 27 Aug 2012 at 01:38

I'm just running on one 7850 and I'm going to wait it out until there is an offer too good to refuse. My card runs fine atm, and there are newer revisions coming out from AMD all the time.

chipachap · 27 Aug 2012 at 09:14

MeMeMeMe said:
I wish, the three times I have tried their OC Tuner utility, it has sent my system into a boot-reboot spiral that i've only been able to stop by getting into BIOS again and click restore optimal defaults.

So, usually it works, but for some people it is a disaster. I don't have the sabertooth, i have the WS Revolution.

+1. Using the turbo boost function on my board was some disaster. Really unstable and temps/voltage was all over the place.

You're much better off just spending 30 mins to program it manually in the BIOS.

Turn off all that turbo boost crap and just set it manually.

Follow one of the guides in the CPU section.