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The way it is meant to be played - or not 9800 GX2's

Aurhinius

Aurhinius

Aurhinius

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19 Oct 2002
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I thought I would post this for the small number of people that might be interested in playing at very High resolution games.

I currently use a 8800 Ultra to play LOTRO at 2560*1600 4xAA. My Ultra manages this just hovering above the 30 FPS with the ocassional drop in heavy activity stages.

Now here's the thing. 9800GX2 arrives and much to my excitement I see my FPS hovering about 60 FPS. Great! Well great until you get any amount of AA objects on the screen and then the FPS drops like a lead weight through the floor. The game starts to stutter and pause and generally runs like a 100 year old hamster with one leg.

So you guessed correctly I went back to my 8800 Ultra.

I read a lot of reviews before I purchased a 9800GX2 and to be honest only 1 which was tomshardware made any mention of rubbish 2560*1600 performance. So as a warning to any other potential buyers, DON'T! It can't cope with the higher memory requirements/bandwidth.

The biggest mistake Nvidia made was reducing the memory bandwidth to 256 and removing 128M of GPU Ram.
 
Yea the bus would probably matter tons at that res. You are asking a lot, what size is your screen. Wouldnt mind a screenshot just to drool over:D

I have a 2900xt (512bit) I'd be happy to swap, just to help you out of course :D


The GT is 256 too..



How much main memory do you have. Try tracking texture memory with rivatuner..
 
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512 bit bus, 1GB RAM and 256 shaders + GDDR4/GDDR5 for the win, only logical development, along with much higher clocks. Would be so nice :)
 
Correct me if i'm wrong, but this is due to the fact the although there is 1GB memory on the card, this is split into 2x 512mb and a lot of data is duplicated - meaning you're effectively gaming on a 512 mb card as opposed to a 768mb card.
I'd expect that this is why performance sucks so much when you get additional objects on the screen at high res + AA, since it is likely having to fetch the textures from main memory.
 
hmm more a problem of a reduced data bus trying to fill two memory banks of 512 & failing miserably? and the OP want to use lots of memory and the card is failing.
 
these cards fail IMHO, theres not a great need for them at 1680x150 and of no use at anything over 1900x1200 so there effectivly made for one res, whats the point?
 
Aurhinius,

I'm also looking for a good gfx solution for my LOTRO client. I'm currently sitting on a 3850, in med/high detail at 2560*1600 on a Dell 30".

I was going to get a GX2 also, but after hearing this, I may be looking to source two 8800Ultra's and SLi them instead now.

I'll also be able to test two 3870x2's in my maximus formubla board in the next day or so, so, i'll see how that stacks up at 2560*1600 with Ultra detail set.


Why couldn't they just have stuck with the 384 bit bus and given us more ram for the new cards, instead of crippling it.
 
It sounds like you have very similar setup to me mate. I use a Dell 30" too with the very high textures installed + everything on high. Draw distance is at max too.

The system is a Q6600 at 3.6, 4x1 GB of transcend aXe Ram (Micron d9's) at 1200 mhz on a Asus Max Formula. I can't SLI due to the motherboard so I am limited to crossfire. I was going to Try Tri-fire (3870X2+ 3870) but I have seen on the turbine forums that crossfire is not supported and doesn't work unless you use DX10 client mode and then your crippled straight away.

i would be very interested to see what results you get. Try the ettenmoors that is the best way to cripple your system. That is where I tested.

Oh I use vista 64 as well. Haven't updated to SP1 yet.
 
Can't do Ettenmoors yet, I'm not badass enough. (only been playing 2 weeks ;) )

hah, bing, the 3870x2, have just turned up. time to test.
 
would really say to go to sp1 - texture loading or something seems to have been sped up some. not getting as much hitching in games on my 2900 as I was. Sound though tends to need a reinstall, apart from thats its been all ++.

very interested in seeing xfire results
 
damian666 said:
these cards fail IMHO, theres not a great need for them at 1680x150 and of no use at anything over 1900x1200 so there effectivly made for one res, whats the point?
Click to expand...

I agree with this sentiment; I game at 3840x1024 where possible (4MP, equivalent to 2560x1600) and the internal bandwidth limitations on the 3870X2s and 9800GX2s is a bit crippling. In practice it limits the IQ you can whack on, but ensures once you're under the internal bandwidth restriction your framerate isn't likely to change from the vsync'ed rate.

GTR2 makes it all worthwhile for me, but there's a distinct lack of games that fall into the requirement for this much graphics muscle and there's only so much IQ you can add before everything falls apart in a big way.
 
Not good at the mo, I'm swapping out the 650w PSU with an 850, hoping that will fix my problem. With the 650 in, the maching would get to login screen and reboot all the time.
 
assuming it is a memory bandwidth issue and not a driver related issue as these are new cards...

Having said that - when OCing my 8800GT I ran slap into the memory bandwidth limitations before I'd got the core up very far - after a point I could increase the core 100MHz over that point and see maybe 2-3% increase in fps but if I pulled the memory clocks up I'd see a sudden huge increase in performance.
 
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