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Disappointing GPU upgrade.

Will82

Will82

Will82

Associate
Joined
14 Jan 2013
Posts
33
I recently upgraded a PowerColor HD 4850 to a Sapphire HD 7850 but I'm not really seeing much improvement visually. There is a huge increase in terms of frame rate and smoothness, which I expected, but graphically almost every game looks exactly the same. Anti aliasing is the most disappointing thing. It works a bit better in some games, such as the new Tomb Raider, but in others, like Far Cry 3, it barely works at all and is visually indistinguishable from my old cards performance, despite maxing most of the settings. What I really wanted in my upgrade was to eliminate jaggies as much as possible, but there are just as many with my new card.

I'm using an old Dell monitor at a measly resolution of 1280 x 1024 and my main question would be, if I were to get a 1080P (minimum) screen, would that help to eliminate jaggies?
 
Cheers for the advice everyone. I was planning to upgrade the monitor at some point anyway. My current one is VGA only so I have to use the cards adapter, which is giving me horizontal lines in some games. I may try fiddling with forcing AA through CCC to see if I can get an improvement, particularly for Far Cry 3, which looks great at night but in daytime the trees are fuzzy and there's jaggies everywhere. I tried to take a screenshot to show what I mean but they all come out blurred for some reason.
 
Yeah, I've fully upgraded my system to a budget gaming one and just didn't think about the monitor, which is now the thing holding me back. Fortunately I should be able to afford one next month. I've had to put of with bad jaggies for way too long.
 
The card is great so far. I've maxed out the CCC sliders (1050/1450) and it idles at 25c. It's also quiet as a whisper even when gaming. I'm not even using any kind of special cooling either. Stock Intel cooler and two case fans. In fact, just using this card has dropped overall temps a few degrees centigrade.

It's really just my monitor that's the issue now. Has anyone else experienced these horizontal flickering lines in some games using the cards VGA adapter? Google tells me it's a common issue and can solved by using HDMI or DVI instead, so hopefully that's the case. Weirdly, I own some of the games where the issue is mentioned but don't have the problem. Of the titles tested so far, it's only Far Cry 3 and GTA: EFLB where they appear, making 'em both unplayable, but I struggle to play those particular games anyway because of the jaggies at 720p.
 
I always use vsync but still get these lines in those two games. I looked it up and other people have mentioned the issue when using a VGA adapter with the Sapphire HD 7850, and that using DVI or HDMI solves it, which I plan to do anyway.
 
My system is an i3 2120, Sapphire HD 7850 OC, 8GB TeamGroup Elite RAM and an OCZ ModXStream Pro 500W PSU - basically a budget gaming PC. I sourced it so I shouldn't have any bottlenecks. I thought the 7850 and i3 was known to be a good match up.

I mean it must just be the monitor because it's nearly ten years old. I just didn't realise when putting together the system that it could be held back by it.

Am I correct in saying that just upgrading to a 1080 one will equate to twice as many pixels on screen? That's surely gonna make a big difference visually if that's the case.
 
It's definitely the monitor then. Some games such as BF3 look much better but it's open world titles such as Far Cry 3 that look bad, particularly trees and anything with thin wires like pylons.
 
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