is there a way to get more FPS when the best card isnt enough?

[Perfect_Chaos]

^ short and sweet, basically i think they should make top end cards cheaper.. and release faster cards than they normally do, that way no slowdowns in any newer games.

SLI seems to be a bit pointless, you need to increase resolution a lot for fps to be noticed over a single card. Shame SLI doesnt increase the speed at the resolution you normally play aswell, oh well.

i mean ive never played supreme commander or oblivion, but the benchmarks suggest when games like this appear even a brand new expensive card cant play them enjoyably.. if that isnt a stinker i dont know what is? they should sort this out, im sure it would get more people to upgrade.

Some people say its sloppy programming of the games, if thats the case then why dont they test their engine on current top cards before releasing the damn thing?.

Oh yer, i read about crysis recently. Apparently they are making the game scalable to hardware for the next 1.5 years? wtf are they doing, we want to enjoy the game nwhlen its out not after we have played it to death. In other words i bet it will run like crap on 8800 cards.

 

[Amonlym]

partially its down to coding, partially intentional - the designers program a game so it looks GOOd on current hardware, and can look stunning, on future hardware.

mostly, theres just a limit to what you can do with current tech. im sure ati could get a R600 board running at say 1250mhz core out the door, but no one would buy it as it would just melt the wall behind your pc, or have an excessively powerful (and needed) phase change cooler and dedicated 500w psu :/

theres also a lot of limit on platform

- quadcore is all well and good, but nothing really makes a great deal of use of even 2 cores.. most things are still geared to a single high speed cpu.
hence the facination with "cpu scaling charts" whenever gfx firms bring out a real peach, the cards are so massively limited by cpu's its worth plotting future performance ebcause the cards will last. look at the 9700/9800 pro's. they only realy stopped being "effective" with the current wave of games like SupCom.

 

[ergonomics]

all about the money

 

[fish99]

Based on how SupCom runs on my system (see sig) it must run extremely well on a GTX with 3 GHz intel dual core. Same for Oblivion.

Oblivion was a little sloppily put together though, you've just got to look at how easily it was improved by 3rd party modders. For instance it took Bethesda about a year to get a fix out for the 'pea soup' (blurry textures on distance land) but modders had a fixed out 11 months earlier. Modders also made a grass mod that reduced the poly count on the grass, which doesn't look any worse, and gives you a 25% framerate increase outdoors. And there's another mod that reduces the poly count on loads of objects like boulders, without any visual impact, but which again improves the framerate. Oblivion boulders are something ridiculous like 3,000 polys each. Suggests to me Bethesda just skipped the whole optimization phase and rushed the game out.

Also games like R6:Vegas/Lost Planet are just poorly optimized ports, which sadly we're going to get more and more of on the PC.