Make up my mind - X1900XT-X or 7900GTX

Richdog · 18 Apr 2006 at 15:32

speeduk said:
Have you tried tweaking the ini? I gained 15fps overall from tweaking the settings which made up for high res texture mods and HDR+AA.

Can you please post or host a link to that .ini mate or send a copy of it to my email in sig for me? Do the tweaks affect visual quality in any way?

easyrider · 18 Apr 2006 at 15:41

Mercutio said:
The point is it's not £350 its £380, you seem to have mis-placed a good £30 somewhere there. It IS a difference of around £70/80 between the 2 cards, (thats around 20% extra) the stock cooler isnt an issue unless you really are used to almost complete silence (ala big box ibm/dell/compaq etc silent).
The option is there to add a silent cooler if needed. The 2 sites on the net that are generally viewed as being the most "fair" in reviews (anandtech and firing squad) both have the X1900XT in a fair lead.
We have a thread of around 20 people giving good fair reasons why the X1900XT is a better purchase but of course their all wrong because of a few fairly pitiful reasons you give.
We know you LOVE nvidia with the zeal only a true fanboi can have but take a slightly more reasonable view when people come wanting to spend money wisely.

If you want to spend around an extra 25% of the X1900XT's price on a card that is at best on par with the only difference being the retail cooler and higher power consumption by all means, go right ahead.

If you play doom/quake engine games the nvidias are ahead.
If you play COD/source based games or oblivion ATI is the way forward.

The point is the cheapest x1900 xtx here at overclock is PowerColor ATI Radeon X1900 XT-X 512MB coming in at £352 add £25 for the zalman and you can get a 7900 GTX for the same money.

Without voiding warranty.

I have never said that getting an x1900 xtx is wrong.And if I have please quote me on it.

I'm just stating facts about the 7900 GTX sorry if some people don't like it but what I have stated is fact.

Now if the x1900xtx offered me the same options I would have one in my pc unfortunately they dont so I won't.

Whats not reasonable about wanting a cooler quiter pc BTW? :confused:

I dont care about who makes it why should I?
It seems people do, and call others fanboys when one only makes observations about the pros and cons of the two top end cards.

egt · 18 Apr 2006 at 16:21

speeduk said:
Have you tried tweaking the ini? I gained 15fps overall from tweaking the settings which made up for high res texture mods and HDR+AA.

Hi, no i haven't changed any of the ini file settings, i'm too worried about losing any of that beautifull IQ. But maybe i'll have a scout around the Oblivion forums

The texture mods are definitely a massive improvement and didn't really affect FPS for me, well worth getting.

speeduk · 18 Apr 2006 at 16:55

Richdog said:
Can you please post or host a link to that .ini mate or send a copy of it to my email in sig for me? Do the tweaks affect visual quality in any way?

The tweaks I use are to disable shadows on grass (which don't work correctly in game anyway) and to use iMinGrassSize=120.

The imingrass makes the grass less dense. You still keep the draw distance but instead of big clumps of grass its a little bit thinner.

Doing those 2 things (shadows can be turned off in settings) gained me over 10fps. Theres a few other tweaks that can be done to the ini but I can't remember them heh.

But if you must have shadows at least do the imingrass tweak because thats 5-10fps there (depending on how big you make the setting. 80 is default 120 is a good tradeoff and 160+ gives you much less grass but super high framerates.

Edit Clicky for screenshot

Richdog · 18 Apr 2006 at 17:05

Hmm but isn't there an option in the main settings to disable grass shadows? I'm at work now but will check later, and if not will do those .ini tweaks.

Also a strange thing happened to me, I had all the landscape LOD mods installed and all of a sudden they seem to have disabled themselves and my excellent distant landscape textures are now back to the "pea soup" cack that they were originally. I checked in my texture folder and the mods are still there, even re-installed the buggers twice but no joy. I may re-install the whole game tonight in order to get it working again but just thought it was a strange thing to happen...

speeduk · 18 Apr 2006 at 17:34

I think for some users you need a file that tells oblivion to use textures for mods. Ask on the official forums someone should sort you out.

Darkwave · 18 Apr 2006 at 18:02

egt I suggest you fix your computer or try some .ini tweaks, until then please stop misinforming people about the performance hit.

I was worried about it until I just put my first Oblivion screenshot up in the PC games section since upgrading, and my frames are fine with 4x AA and HDR in 1280x960.

Noni · 18 Apr 2006 at 18:36

7900GTX

Cooler, quieter and uses less power. But performs just as good (but a little worse).

egt · 18 Apr 2006 at 18:39

Exsomnis said:
egt I suggest you fix your computer or try some .ini tweaks, until then please stop misinforming people about the performance hit. I was worried about it until I just put my first Oblivion screenshot up in the PC games section since upgrading, and my frames are fine with 4x AA and HDR in 1280x960.

No misinformation coming from me, my comp doesn't "need fixing" and the ini tweaks have already been kindly suggested by speeduk.

Any honest poster will admit there is a large performance hit with AA+HDR. Maybe i should swap my x1900xtx for your card...

wellibob · 18 Apr 2006 at 18:40

Get both of them. Simple !

Darkwave · 18 Apr 2006 at 18:40

egt said:
No misinformation coming from me, my comp doesn't "need fixing" and the ini tweaks have already been kindly suggested by speeduk.

Any honest poster will admit there is a large performance hit with AA+HDR. Maybe i should swap my x1900xtx for your card.

Ah so now I must be lying, hah. Have you heard yourself?

Believe what you like, but it runs fine for me (35+ fps in 1280x960 with maximum in-game settings, 4x AA, and 16x HQAF) and other people, so I don't know why it's not running fine for you, but it certainly is playable and looks fantastic for me.

egt · 18 Apr 2006 at 18:45

Exsomnis said:
Ah so now I must be lying, hah.

Economical with the truth

Darkwave · 18 Apr 2006 at 18:56

egt said:
Economical with the truth

I'm not sure what your problem is, I was simply informing you that your statements about HDR+AA causing performance hits to the level of being "unplayable" were not entirely accurate, at least not for everyone.

If you decide to take that as lies, or as some sort of hostility, then I am not sure what else to say. :rolleyes:

The words overly-sensitive and bitter come to mind though.

egt · 18 Apr 2006 at 19:05

Exsomnis said:
If you decide to take that as lies, or as some sort of hostility, then I am not sure what else to say. The words overly-sensitive and bitter come to mind though.

Sounds like you're describing yourself

I'm more than happy with my x1900, but i didn't buy a high end card to run 18-25FPS in outdoor areas with AA+HDR, so for now at least, i'll not bother with it.

Darkwave · 18 Apr 2006 at 19:06

egt said:
Sounds like you're describing yourself

Why would I be bitter? Oblivion works on my computer. :rolleyes:

Enough of this, I'm going to go play it now instead of bickering about it.

egt · 18 Apr 2006 at 19:07

Exsomnis said:
Why would I be bitter? Oblivion works on my computer. Enough of this, I'm going to go play it now instead of bickering about it.

Enjoy the slideshow

speeduk · 18 Apr 2006 at 19:19

egt said:
Enjoy the slideshow

On max settings with an untweaked ini you will get a slide show with AA and HDR. Out of the tin oblivion sucks for performance vs I.Q.

But us tinkerers soon sort that out.

In Exsomnis' defense though I think he is referring to tweaked ini performance and not out of the tin performance. The framerate hit I get when applying HDR over AA is about 5-6 from what testing I did. Quite a big hit and its such a shame they didn't tweak the settings a bit more for some more fps so everyone can enjoy the enhanced effects.

I even run with gridstoload 7 (isntead of 5) which uses up 25%+ extra video and system ram. If I ran that setting with everything on max/default and HDR the framerate would be 10-15.

Darkwave · 18 Apr 2006 at 20:11

egt said:
Enjoy the slideshow

You can bet your hat that I enjoy my 35fps "slideshow" with HDR+AA. :rolleyes:

Oblivion is not an online shooter, so any framerate down to ~30fps is satisfactory for me.

speeduk said:
In Exsomnis' defense though I think he is referring to tweaked ini performance and not out of the tin performance.

It's appreciated mate, but I don't really need anyone to stand in for my defense, because I have no idea why egt is being so stubborn about this in the first place.

You are correct though, my Oblivion.ini file is heavily tweaked with tricks I picked up in various places while running this game on a GTO², they are still handy on this X1800XT. Memory usage tweaks and grass tweaks are, in my opinion, the key to getting every last bit of FPS out of this game while still being able to enjoy a lot of eye candy.

egt · 18 Apr 2006 at 22:19

Ok, my screenshot in the same spot you posted in the other forum, take note of the FPS (This is with 4XAA+HDR all settings maxed.

Flanno · 18 Apr 2006 at 22:38

Thanks for all the info everyone. Some serious thinking to know in the next day or two. I noticed on Anandtech with the latest Black and White 2 patch ATI are back on top. Hmmmm....