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BOOTY-ADE
Aug 30, 2006

BIG KOOL TELLIN' Y'ALL TO KEEP IT TIGHT

PC LOAD LETTER posted:

Uninstall old drivers> turn off pc and install new card> reboot and reinstall latest drivers

Should work fine after that.

This, but might be good to boot the PC into Safe Mode after installing the new card, run Driver Sweeper/Fusion to clear all the old stuff out, then boot into normal mode and reload drivers.

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Magic Underwear
May 14, 2003


Young Orc
Why? They're both AMD cards...

PC LOAD LETTER
May 23, 2005
WTF?!
They're very different GPU's though. The 68xx was VLIW5 and the 280X is GCN 1.x.

Spug
Dec 10, 2006

Then turn not pale, beloved snail, but come and join the dance.
I'm getting a new Dell laptop from work, and yes it's a laptop, but I thought maybe it'd be cool to be able to play some games on it.

Looking at either Latitude E6540 or Precision M3800/M4800. On the latter model I can choose between two GPUs, so I can choose between these (all have 2GB GDDR5):

* AMD Radeon HD 8790M (E6540)
* AMD FirePro M5100 (M4800)
* NVIDIA Quadro K1100M (M3800/M4800)

All else being equal (which it's not but this isn't a laptop thread), what's the better choice? Game-debate.com only had the Radeon I think.

EDIT: Okay, NotebookCheck has the FirePro M5100 in high-end (but no ranking beyond that) and the other two in mid-range with Radeon 8790M at 37% and Quadro K1100M at 16% so I guess that's my ranking right there.

Spug fucked around with this message at 15:10 on Dec 6, 2013

craig588
Nov 19, 2005

by Nyc_Tattoo
Looking at the specs of the Firepro M5100 it looks like it should perform similarly to the Radeon 8870M. It's just the "pro" version of the card with a different driver focus. Nvidia has been usually good about supporting games with their professional oriented drivers, and I've only used AMD (ATI) cards from back when they had really inconsistent drivers, but it's probably better now. Check into how AMDs support is and if you can't find any reports about issues with the games you want to play then the M5100 is probably the best choice.

If battery life and mobility are important to you the Quadro K1100M is a much better choice even if it's significantly slower because Nvidia really did a FANTASTIC job with power management on the Kepler series that it's based on.

PC LOAD LETTER
May 23, 2005
WTF?!
Unless you're using software that needs a Quadro or FirePro I don't think you'd want a laptop that used either for gaming.

Those are workstation GPU's and their drivers are "tuned" for stuff like CAD and not gaming.

AMD mobile GPU's have good performance and as far as driver stability are fine but they tend to be power hogs compared to the Nvidia GPU's. AMD really needs to work the bugs out Enduro which have persisted for quite a while now. Until they do a gaming oriented Nvidia GPU would be best to get over all.

Only get a laptop with a AMD GPU if its an APU (power saving works fine with those) or if you can get a good deal on it and can live with much less battery time. Generally speaking though any gaming laptop with a mid to high end dGPU is going to have generally poor battery time compared to one with only a iGPU.

Spug
Dec 10, 2006

Then turn not pale, beloved snail, but come and join the dance.
Thanks guys, this was exactly the stuff I needed to know.

I'm not looking at specific games to play really, but my last laptop had a lovely onboard GPU that couldn't play anything, so I just want a dedicated GPU so I can at least play something, and out of my options there I'd like the "best" one, but I guess it's not that cut and dry

PC LOAD LETTER posted:

Unless you're using software that needs a Quadro or FirePro I don't think you'd want a laptop that used either for gaming.

Those are workstation GPU's and their drivers are "tuned" for stuff like CAD and not gaming.
Ah OK, thanks. I thought things were as simple as "this card has more numbers than this" but I guess GPU comparison is a science. I don't use any software like that.

PC LOAD LETTER posted:

Only get a laptop with a AMD GPU if its an APU (power saving works fine with those) or if you can get a good deal on it and can live with much less battery time. Generally speaking though any gaming laptop with a mid to high end dGPU is going to have generally poor battery time compared to one with only a iGPU.
"Good deal" doesn't really factor in, as my workplace is paying (within reason, which is why I landed on these models) but battery life is certainly something to think about.

Thanks again.

Gwaihir
Dec 8, 2009
Hair Elf

PC LOAD LETTER posted:

Unless you're using software that needs a Quadro or FirePro I don't think you'd want a laptop that used either for gaming.

Those are workstation GPU's and their drivers are "tuned" for stuff like CAD and not gaming.

AMD mobile GPU's have good performance and as far as driver stability are fine but they tend to be power hogs compared to the Nvidia GPU's. AMD really needs to work the bugs out Enduro which have persisted for quite a while now. Until they do a gaming oriented Nvidia GPU would be best to get over all.

Only get a laptop with a AMD GPU if its an APU (power saving works fine with those) or if you can get a good deal on it and can live with much less battery time. Generally speaking though any gaming laptop with a mid to high end dGPU is going to have generally poor battery time compared to one with only a iGPU.

The driver difference for games on Quadro cards is almost nonexistent. I've never run in to anything that presented issues in the slightest on my Thinkpad with a Quadro.

At worst, you'll get maaaaybe 3-5 fewer FPS. Don't worry about playing games on a Quadro.

The Firepro M5100 will be the "best," but for actually using the laptop as a laptop, the Nvidia card is going to come out far ahead thanks to Optimus.

Spug
Dec 10, 2006

Then turn not pale, beloved snail, but come and join the dance.

Gwaihir posted:

The driver difference for games on Quadro cards is almost nonexistent. I've never run in to anything that presented issues in the slightest on my Thinkpad with a Quadro.

At worst, you'll get maaaaybe 3-5 fewer FPS. Don't worry about playing games on a Quadro.

The Firepro M5100 will be the "best," but for actually using the laptop as a laptop, the Nvidia card is going to come out far ahead thanks to Optimus.
Oh, what about the Radeon 8790M then?

Meltycat
May 20, 2006

Melty and adorable!

Gwaihir posted:

The Firepro M5100 will be the "best," but for actually using the laptop as a laptop, the Nvidia card is going to come out far ahead thanks to Optimus.

Just a note -- on the m4800, if you get the QHD screen, Optimus is completely disabled as far as I know. The QHD m4800 looks like a super nice laptop, other than the fact that battery life is ~3 hours due to the lack of Optimus.

Gwaihir
Dec 8, 2009
Hair Elf

Meltycat posted:

Just a note -- on the m4800, if you get the QHD screen, Optimus is completely disabled as far as I know. The QHD m4800 looks like a super nice laptop, other than the fact that battery life is ~3 hours due to the lack of Optimus.

Wow, really? That's loving bizarre. I wonder why they did that/if we'll see Lenovo do the same thing on the new T/W540 with the similar screen?

veedubfreak
Apr 2, 2005

by Smythe

Spug posted:

Oh, what about the Radeon 8790M then?

We just got new Dell's about a month or 2 ago and the 8790m seems to be a pretty baller card for a laptop.

PC LOAD LETTER
May 23, 2005
WTF?!

Spug posted:

"Good deal" doesn't really factor in, as my workplace is paying
Ewps. Yea get whatever floats your boat then!

Canned Sunshine
Nov 20, 2005

CAUTION: POST QUALITY UNDER CONSTRUCTION



Holy crap I might need the 780 Ti with EVGA's translucent ACX cooler now.

Precambrian Video Games
Aug 19, 2002



SourKraut posted:

Holy crap I might need the 780 Ti with EVGA's translucent ACX cooler now.

'world renowned overclocker Vince “k|ngp|n” Lucid'

Grim Up North
Dec 12, 2011

I don't get it, are there really people who choose one card over another just because someone's lljk handle is printed on it?

Josh Lyman
May 24, 2009


Grim Up North posted:

I don't get it, are there really people who choose one card over another just because someone's lljk handle is printed on it?
Think of how rich Fatal1ty is now :negative:

Canned Sunshine
Nov 20, 2005

CAUTION: POST QUALITY UNDER CONSTRUCTION



Grim Up North posted:

I don't get it, are there really people who choose one card over another just because someone's lljk handle is printed on it?

I don't care about that at all - I just like the translucent aesthetics of the cooler cover plate. In reality though I won't be buying one however.

Canned Sunshine fucked around with this message at 20:48 on Dec 6, 2013

deimos
Nov 30, 2006

Forget it man this bat is whack, it's got poobrain!
Hopefully they sell to a good home.

Agreed
Dec 30, 2003

The price of meat has just gone up, and your old lady has just gone down

SourKraut posted:

Holy crap I might need the 780 Ti with EVGA's translucent ACX cooler now.

Marketed specifically toward liquid nitrogen suicide run overclockers, ugggh. That cooler will be the first thing to come off, assuming they pick this over Gigabyte's "no WE have the most power delivery!" cards (once they can stop 'em from blowing up, oops).

For the average dude this just means that they've had enough time to really bin these things and you're more likely to get the kind of badass awesome turbo turkey puncher 3 level overclocks out of it that I got out of my regular ol' 780Ti SC before they had a chance to keep all the best chips. This is my version of "sometimes it pays to be an early adopter" - my card "unlocks" into a few hundred dollars more worth of card from the same brand and line once they have time to run thorough in-house validation on the really good chips vs. the average chips for special branding! :p

Canned Sunshine
Nov 20, 2005

CAUTION: POST QUALITY UNDER CONSTRUCTION



Ignore. Meant to fix a typo in my previous post.

Zero VGS
Aug 16, 2002
ASK ME ABOUT HOW HUMAN LIVES THAT MADE VIDEO GAME CONTROLLERS ARE WORTH MORE
Lipstick Apathy
PNY is what, a pretty awful brand? I'm about to get another $200 in Dell.com promo bucks that expire in 3 months, and the only thing worthwhile to buy from the site would be a GTX 770, but PNY is the *only* GTX brand on the site and seems to have only a 1 year warranty.

The credit is use it or lose it so I should just roll the dice, right?

Agreed
Dec 30, 2003

The price of meat has just gone up, and your old lady has just gone down

Zero VGS posted:

PNY is what, a pretty awful brand? I'm about to get another $200 in Dell.com promo bucks that expire in 3 months, and the only thing worthwhile to buy from the site would be a GTX 770, but PNY is the *only* GTX brand on the site and seems to have only a 1 year warranty.

The credit is use it or lose it so I should just roll the dice, right?

Best figures for returns that we have come from a giant French distributor for larger Europe, and by their metrics there is no significant difference in the return rate of any nVidia card brand. nVidia's Greenlight program is designed to ensure that all cards meet reference specifications, and seems to be working. That's not a very long warranty, but it's also not any more likely to fail than any other reference-design 770, most likely, and if it should fail, I'd reckon on something with moving parts, difficult to test, like the fans croaking and croaking early (within one year) as opposed to electrical components down the line.

Zero VGS
Aug 16, 2002
ASK ME ABOUT HOW HUMAN LIVES THAT MADE VIDEO GAME CONTROLLERS ARE WORTH MORE
Lipstick Apathy
That's reassuring, as I nabbed a new Hydro H110 for $40 on Cyber Monday that I'll be sticking on there.

Precambrian Video Games
Aug 19, 2002



Do you have one of those premium credit cards with extended warranties? That should give you an extra 6-12 months. I suspect return/failure rates for GPUs are probably lowest around the 2 year mark.

dont be mean to me
May 2, 2007

I'm interplanetary, bitch
Let's go to Mars


SourKraut posted:

Holy crap I might need the 780 Ti with EVGA's translucent ACX cooler now.

8-pin... PLUS 8-pin... PLUS 6-PIN?! What is that, 450W? I don't think an OCCT backbreaker run will cause my entire system to hit 450 (not that that says much, because it's an OC 2500K and 560 Ti, but at 450W still probably means that 780 Ti alone draws more than most enthusiast systems).

I'm surprised people are even allowed to possess those in California.

dont be mean to me fucked around with this message at 21:44 on Dec 6, 2013

Factory Factory
Mar 19, 2010

This is what
Arcane Velocity was like.
It's for suicide run overclocking and pretty much no other reason.

Agreed
Dec 30, 2003

The price of meat has just gone up, and your old lady has just gone down

Factory Factory posted:

It's for suicide run overclocking and pretty much no other reason.

I would be interested to see the ASIC scores on these cards, see if they're super high leakage or extra low leakage or just moderate leakage like average consumer GK110 chips are. Given that they're looking at sub-zero cooling I would expect high leakage, but if they intend it at all as a product for normal high-end buyers to use to get high overclocks without using exotic cooling, they'll be more likely to straddle the line there and just validate some unusually high leakage chips that nonetheless work well at the allowed voltages.

In other words, wonder if it's really a card aimed at super overclockers, or if it's a hybrid card meant to fill the role of "best of the 780Tis" in EVGA's lineup now that they've had time to catch up to demand and start more aggressively sorting the chips into perf categories while ALSO being good for the uber overclocking suicide-run record breakers thing.

I'm equally curious about the Gigabyte one, though it is having trouble coming to market as it seems they had some production problems with their VRMs. Hm.

If these are super high leakage, I'd reckon the Classified will still be the highest end binned chips from EVGA for anyone who doesn't genuinely intend to ruin their card within a few minutes of running benchmarks on it to try to be the super fastest ever for the time being. If they're middle-of-the-road leakage but binned for other characteristics (like unusually high voltage handling) they might actually serve as a solid hybrid design that doesn't sacrifice one functionality for the other, but whichever company is willing to put out the most crazy OCer friendly version will get all of the dollars from crazy OCers, there can really only be one best OCing design for extreme OCs. Just having a shitload of power delivery doesn't cut it if they aren't able to win all-out. A waste of a neat cooler if they put out a card just for sub-zero cooling, though. Ah, well, it's a different world for those folks.

Interesting to see them getting into the high-end, one-run-only OCing game though. Gigabyte has a whole department dedicated to that stuff, I guess EVGA decided they'd not be outdone.

Sidesaddle Cavalry
Mar 15, 2013

Oh Boy Desert Map
Was the 6GB thing going to be on that suicide run card? I was thinking enough people would be duped by the excessive amount of VRAM to get it anyways.

Agreed
Dec 30, 2003

The price of meat has just gone up, and your old lady has just gone down

Sidesaddle Cavalry posted:

Was the 6GB thing going to be on that suicide run card? I was thinking enough people would be duped by the excessive amount of VRAM to get it anyways.

Rumor mill, denied by EVGA. As an OC'ers card with a shitload of power delivery, they don't want to tax the VRAM or memory controller hardware any more than necessary. More VRAM for them in this case basically just means more that can go wrong to gently caress up an otherwise solid suicide run, and thus the need to either buy more cards (holy poo poo expensive) or go with a brand that doesn't put unnecessary stuff on the product (Gigabyte, I reckon).

Legitreviews update 12/4/2013 posted:

UPDATE 12/4/2013 3pm CT: EVGA responded to our inquiry on the EVGA GeForce GTX 780 Ti Kingpin Edition and informed us that it would have higher clock speeds than the standard Classified version, that it is aimed at LN2 cooling users and that it is just 3GB contrary to what the rumors have said. So, no 6GB version is to be had here.

P.S. I haven't got an email back from you, man, is everything good?

Agreed
Dec 30, 2003

The price of meat has just gone up, and your old lady has just gone down

Of note is that Gigabyte's 450W monster card, the 780 Ti GHz Edition (seriously? GHz edition? :raise:/:laugh:) also only has 3GB of VRAM. It seems somewhat likely at this point that there's a bit of enforcement coming down from nVidia on that. More info on the GTX 780Ti GHz edition and the best source for that VRAM limitation speculation here.

But I do have reasons for thinking it apart from "I read it on a rumor mill web site." The 780Ti already dramatically outperforms the Titan at single-precision CUDA tasks (DP is handicapped, but SP isn't) thanks to its much faster core and SMX clockrate and fully unlocked shader count. If it had more VRAM, then a whole line of CUDA development would be enabled on a consumer card instead of requiring the much higher price overhead for a comparable Quadro or Tesla card.

This becomes important when you remember that one of the few things left that can differentiate between the fastest nVidia consumer card for videogames and the entry point to their development cards - which Titan was, is, and shall be until Maxwell comes out and we see if they repeat the Titan experiment there - is the fact that many CUDA operations are VRAM space limited. One of the things that keeps cards like the Quadro K6000 set apart from both Titan and the 780Ti is the fact that 1. it runs at a much lower power setting while delivering very similar performance due to really tight binning, and 2. it has 12GB of VRAM.

Consider applications for the Quadro line vs. the GeForce line, something where both would be good performers, not a DP-limited task, like Vray raytracing. Texture size becomes a limiting factor, and 3GB isn't enough to manage larger workloads. So it's a case where if a company throws 6GB on a 780, or a 780Ti, you get performance that eats the Titan's lunch and becomes far more competitive with the Quadro K6000. They need to keep the market segmented there to have their two forks for videogame vs. workstation cards (not counting the Teslas here, since they're strictly GPGPU).

Sidesaddle Cavalry
Mar 15, 2013

Oh Boy Desert Map

Agreed posted:

UPDATE 12/4/2013 3pm CT:

Doh. Yeah, the usual suspects were at work with the rumor mill there. :smith:

And yeah, everything's as it was earlier this week with the card, I haven't actually gotten around to playing games much this week yet. Also Sleeping Dogs gives me a giant slowdown bug that I didn't experience on my 7970, haven't finished googling the solution to that yet.

Agreed
Dec 30, 2003

The price of meat has just gone up, and your old lady has just gone down

Sidesaddle Cavalry posted:

Doh. Yeah, the usual suspects were at work with the rumor mill there. :smith:

And yeah, everything's as it was earlier this week with the card, I haven't actually gotten around to playing games much this week yet. Also Sleeping Dogs gives me a giant slowdown bug that I didn't experience on my 7970, haven't finished googling the solution to that yet.

:raise: What kind of slowdown bug? I played a lot of Sleeping Dogs on that card (and the one before it) and never had any issues, though at 1600p Extreme AA can have a pretty dramatic FPS hit. At its lowest AA setting, it runs FXAA only (shader-based, pretty much no performance hit). You can't turn FXAA off at all. That's "Normal" AA. Above that is "High" AA, which uses "High" FXAA (still basically no performance hit with this level of card) but it also enables a much more performance heavy type of AA called SSAA, at "Medium" level. The "Extreme" setting uses "High" FXAA as well as "High" SSAA.

SSAA is an old method of AA. How it works is to simply render the whole scene at a higher resolution internally, and then scale it down for display, per-frame. You might be more familiar with MSAA - it was invented to replace SSAA by using edge detection technology and other psycho-visual optimizations to use site-specific SSAA on only those areas which show noticeable jagged edges. The final result of all that effort is that MSAA has about 25% the performance hit of SSAA, but it does a poor job at things like transparent textures. A good combination in modern games is to use nVidia's driver implementation of FXAA forced "On" and a game's MSAA, as FXAA is another whole-frame AA method but works entirely via a post-processing shader, so it will help remove jaggies on transparent textures as well as conventional aliasing/stair-step effect on geometry. It also doesn't suffer a performance hit that scales proportionally with resolution. Very neat technology. In a game like Sleeping Dogs, though, the driver knows that it always has FXAA on at some level so it won't let you double-force it, but in other games it can be quite visually pleasing to have a nearly-free added degree of AA that works with any game, regardless of rendering technology used, and without the hassle of using individually forced injectors a la SMAA.

Combining FXAA and SSAA leads to a soft look and a very high degree of AA; while it is not really technologically anything like nVidia's TXAA, it still has a "cinematic" look because of the softness of its overall appearance. It also has the really high performance hit that MSAA was invented to get away from. The less site-specific and the more general an MSAA implementation is, the closer it gets to hurting performance like SSAA does. You can imagine what happens if a dev just says "screw it, we're using SSAA 'cause it looks great, performance be damned!" SSAA is basically the same thing as raising the resolution by however much - you can read up on it here (as well as other technologies).

In the case of Sleeping Dogs
, the highest AA carries a 50% performance hit compared to the second highest method, which, depending on your resolution, especially 1600p and above, can cause minimum framerates to drop such that if you're using conventional vsync it will jitter between 10-15FPS at times.

The biggest bottleneck for SSAA becomes geometry - pure pixel throughput - and given that Sleeping Dogs is just a game that prefers AMD's basic micro-architecture over nVidia's, it's not entirely surprising that you wouldn't see any improvement going from a good 7970 to a good 780, especially if you turned up the AA at all. This may not be a full explanation, email me if it doesn't feel sufficient or if you don't think it's something to do with this.

Agreed fucked around with this message at 23:25 on Dec 6, 2013

Byolante
Mar 23, 2008

by Cyrano4747
I am a bit disappointed that they didn't go with 6gb of vram on the one and done cards. My crazy scheme was 3x1440 on slid ones which I could write off on tax as a work expense due to my day job in design

Altran
Mar 20, 2013
Hello,

I got i5 750, 1 ati hd 6970, and 8g RAM. no overloading
I only get about 20-40 fps when playing BF4 at 1920x1200, medium settings, that is, medium on everything, AA off and all fancy stuff off.
The fps is very very low, I mostly find it unplayable, the question is: is BF4 infested with bugs and badly optimised or there is something wrong with my rig?

Agreed
Dec 30, 2003

The price of meat has just gone up, and your old lady has just gone down

Byolante posted:

I am a bit disappointed that they didn't go with 6gb of vram on the one and done cards. My crazy scheme was 3x1440 on slid ones which I could write off on tax as a work expense due to my day job in design

Do this with OC'd Titans? They're actually suited for the job, and are also within striking distance of the performance such that the hierarchy goes 780->Titan->780Ti in pretty small increments, even when overclocked, for most games. If the government is buying you graphics cards and you can afford to front the money in the meantime, why not go for it?

Just make sure the IRS doesn't know that you can't really get proper GPGPU and SLI at the same time.

Factory Factory
Mar 19, 2010

This is what
Arcane Velocity was like.
Ah come on, a click in the driver and a reboot and you're ready for GPGPU-friendly Maximus.

fletcher
Jun 27, 2003

ken park is my favorite movie

Cybernetic Crumb

Altran posted:

Hello,

I got i5 750, 1 ati hd 6970, and 8g RAM. no overloading
I only get about 20-40 fps when playing BF4 at 1920x1200, medium settings, that is, medium on everything, AA off and all fancy stuff off.
The fps is very very low, I mostly find it unplayable, the question is: is BF4 infested with bugs and badly optimised or there is something wrong with my rig?

BF4 is certainly infested with bugs but when it's not crashing it seems optimized pretty well - your rig just isn't powerful enough to run it on medium settings. I had a similar rig and I ran it on low settings @ 1920x1080 with fancy stuff all turned off and it was definitely playable, 30-65fps.

Ghostpilot
Jun 22, 2007

"As a rule, I never touch anything more sophisticated and delicate than myself."
For the perspective lite coin miners in the house. Apparently China has banned banks from BTC / LTC trading, which has caused an enormous hit. LTC rates are now down to $26.26 with the word that people panic selling.

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Magic Underwear
May 14, 2003


Young Orc

Ghostpilot posted:

For the perspective lite coin miners in the house. Apparently China has banned banks from BTC / LTC trading, which has caused an enormous hit. LTC rates are now down to $26.26 with the word that people panic selling.

This isnt the bitcoin thread.

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