PC games that actually push the latest hardware at 1080p?

Soldato
Joined
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I was just pondering, as a part of my upgrade bug for my rig, there hasn't really been anything that my 5870 has struggled to handle that I've thrown at it, and given this I can't help but think that unless you're including 1440p and up in resolution or 3D setups etc. there can't be that much more to gain from the newest high end cards?

BF3 ran pretty flawlessly on a mixture of high/ultra, Far Cry 3 maxed out, F1 2012 maxed out, Skyrim mixture of high/ultra, project Cars maxed out etc. all running at 1080p. The only thing it's struggled with was Planetside off the top of my head. Perhaps it's because I only properly got into PC gaming around the time of the first Crysis so it was a case of you needed certain gear to play certain games at all, but I can't help but wonder where all the grunt of modern cards is going?

I guess it might be testament to how strong the 5870 was when it came out but a 3 year old card single GPU card shouldn't be able to run the latest titles just shy of absolutely maxed out at 1080p surely? I'd expect more advancement in terms of graphical quality than seems to have happened, or is it just a case of the consoles holding back the PC - no point building an engine that requires a £2k PC to run for most console developers, and it's a matter of waiting until the next gen of consoles comes out for PCs to start stretching their legs again?
 
Your 5870 didn't run FC3 maxed out at anything like 60FPS mate. I've played it on my 7970 and I just about got away with it.

To answer your question though: FC3, Crysis 3, BF3, Metro, Arma III.
 
Witcher 2 with that ubersampling setting that turns fps to poo.

My eyesight sucks so bad that I can't tell the difference between high and ultra settings in most games these days... except for the fps drops.
 
Must admit, I've just upgraded from a 5850 1GB to a 7850 2GB and am now running considerably cooler with less fan input and able to max the settings on most games out.
Trouble is, it hasn't seemed to make a ton of difference to my eyes! Must need an optical interface upgrade as well. I.e. better glasses. :D
 
Yeah...

I am running an overclocked 7970 in my desktop

Far Cry, I can max at 60FPS, just, but turn off in game AA and force SMAA through radeonpro instead.

BF3, multiplayer is the same story, but again, no in game MSAA, but injecting SMAA.

Crysis 3, Got to turn shaders down from Very High/Ultra (wotever it is) to just 'High' to hit the steady 60FPS sweetspot.

With a 5870, you will be falling substantially short of the required standard for the above games at the highest settings....unless you are happy with ~30FPS in your gaming.

A 7970 would be a worthwhile upgrade from a 5870. Also, the latest AMD drivers have greatly improved the performance of the card and the thing is a beast of an overclocker. I push my GPU to 1125 MHz on stock volts.

With updated drivers and a beefy overclock, I would imagine that the 7970 outperforms a similarly updated and overclocked GTX 680.

If however you are genuinely happy with what u get from your 5870, then just keep it and wait until the next generation of GPU's come out, which of course looks to be some time away.

Must admit, I've just upgraded from a 5850 1GB to a 7850 2GB and am now running considerably cooler with less fan input and able to max the settings on most games out.
Trouble is, it hasn't seemed to make a ton of difference to my eyes! Must need an optical interface upgrade as well. I.e. better glasses. :D

You have fallen victim to AMD's numbers rejigging excercise. The appropriate graded upgrade from a 5850 would have been to a 7950, which is the second top single GPU in the 7xxx series just as the 5850 was with the 5xxx series.
 
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You have fallen victim to AMD's numbers rejigging excercise. The appropriate graded upgrade from a 5850 would have been to a 7950, which is the second top single GPU in the 7xxx series just as the 5850 was with the 5xxx series.

Nope, a 7850 is about 30-50% faster on average than a 5850 depending on how shader intensive the game is.

Give a 7850 a good overclock, and an overclocked 5850 is going to be blown away.
 
If you can play most of those games maxed then I'm gona upgrade to your card from my 680.:)

You can't possibly be getting 60+
 
Witcher 2 with that ubersampling setting that turns fps to poo.

My eyesight sucks so bad that I can't tell the difference between high and ultra settings in most games these days... except for the fps drops.

Witcher 2 again ran surprisngly well, perfectly playable just short of maxed out at 1080p, that was the one I was expecting to cripple it other than Planetside. Can't remember if I turned off ubersampling though, I probably did.
 
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They're generally very smooth I haven't run benches on many of them though. F1 2012 is the only one that I have done benchmarks on recently because obviously fps is very important for racing games, and that absolutely maxed out was running at 70fps average, 60fps minimum. Mafia 2 ran at 60fps maxed out with no drops. GTA4 Lost and Damned slowed down a bit but I think there was a bug (no amount of dropping setting recovered frame rates and I had no issues running vanilla or BoGT). Other games are certainly not running at 30fps because I used to hop back and forth a bit for Bad Company 2 between PC and console and felt almost sick going back to the Xbox version of BC2. It might be closer to 45 fps than 60fps but I'll run benches this weekend when I get home and see what I get.

I'll check through my settings again on other games but other than AA I don't think I've consciously dropped any settings on any games.
 
5870 is about equal to a 560TI no (whether the same gen or not)? I'm currently running a 560TI...

With some tweaking most games do seem to run ok @1080p with mostly high/ultra settings for me too... But I think it's about right, most of the more intensive games are starting to dip to around 30 - 45 fps but most of the games noted above require some medium settings or some compromise.

There are plenty of game settings that will drop the FPS pretty low, like everything ultra in Crysis 2 or even some medium settings in metro 2033 not to mention GTA4 lol

I do feel like although my card is adequate that it's starting to push the boundaries, but obviously still pushing out much more than any current console.
 
They're generally very smooth I haven't run benches on many of them though. F1 2012 is the only one that I have done benchmarks on recently because obviously fps is very important for racing games, and that absolutely maxed out was running at 70fps average, 60fps minimum. Mafia 2 ran at 60fps maxed out with no drops. GTA4 Lost and Damned slowed down a bit but I think there was a bug (no amount of dropping setting recovered frame rates and I had no issues running vanilla or BoGT). Other games are certainly not running at 30fps because I used to hop back and forth a bit for Bad Company 2 between PC and console and felt almost sick going back to the Xbox version of BC2. It might be closer to 45 fps than 60fps but I'll run benches this weekend when I get home and see what I get.

70FPS!? What sort of monitor are you using? Or do you play racing games with v-sync disabled?

I used to have the exact same card as you got so I know very well how it performs. BC2, it can more or less max. BF3, and you will get drops into 30's-40's very often. This will still be a hell of a lot smoother than the console versions that suffer from gimped textures, screen tearing (no v-sync) and will suffer drops into the sub 20's when the **** hits the fan in the game.
 
i dont care what fps i get as long as the game feels smooth, and my 6950 which is basically the same as a 5870 with more vram, still allows me to pretty much max everything while feeling smooth, i have to put tesselation to 16x in ccc as anymore and games slow down a lot with tesselation.

im ok with 30+ fps, 3rd person action games like tomb raider and gtaiv can get away with a bit less than that.
 
i dont care what fps i get as long as the game feels smooth, and my 6950 which is basically the same as a 5870 with more vram, still allows me to pretty much max everything while feeling smooth, i have to put tesselation to 16x in ccc as anymore and games slow down a lot with tesselation.

im ok with 30+ fps, 3rd person action games like tomb raider and gtaiv can get away with a bit less than that.

The 6950 is a fair bit more powerful than the 5870 plus has a lot of headroom.
 
5870 is about equal to a 560TI no (whether the same gen or not)? I'm currently running a 560TI...

With some tweaking most games do seem to run ok @1080p with mostly high/ultra settings for me too... But I think it's about right, most of the more intensive games are starting to dip to around 30 - 45 fps but most of the games noted above require some medium settings or some compromise.

There are plenty of game settings that will drop the FPS pretty low, like everything ultra in Crysis 2 or even some medium settings in metro 2033 not to mention GTA4 lol

I do feel like although my card is adequate that it's starting to push the boundaries, but obviously still pushing out much more than any current console.

I'm in exactly the same situation as you with my 560Ti. However, I opted for a 2GB card, so have a bit of extra leeway.

I might just hold on to it until the 7 series. Any idea on a release date?
 
Crysis 3 is pretty demanding. I'm playing on an overclocked 7950 and only getting 50-110 fps, and that is with some settings turned down. Turn them up and it will drop to 35fps in places, even with FXAA. To run it maxed out at high framerate I think you need GTX680 SLI at the bare minimum.
 
Tomb Raider, set everything to ultra make sure SSAA is set to 4x and TressFX is on, sit back and enjoy the slideshow. Btw SSAA has to be set whilst actually in game or it just reverts to FXAA and you wont be anywhere near max settings.

As HangTime suggests above Crysis 3 cranked up can bring virtually any system to it's knee's.

Metro Lastlight is also just around the corner and if what i've been reading is true then this is gonna be another system killer.
 
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