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Hellshade

GTX 580 on order! (Christmas comes early)

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:drinks:Hellshade They say that the GTX 580 is the fastest card on the planet according to what I have read . I will be picking up a new computer in 2 months. My choices are GTX 540, or last years ATI card. Please let the forum know what ya think of the 580 ?

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Hi Hellshade,

 

I forgot to mention that I'm not running the HiTR expansion yet. I hear it puts more demands on your graphics card than stock BH&H.

 

Before anyone says anything...HiTR is on my Christmas list! :grin:

 

 

Ratatat

 

It does On my current older rig. The graphics card is a Nvida 7600 le and with the Hit expansion the frame rate crawls and even stutters

without the expansion the frame rates run in the 30s and 40s.:this:

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Hellshade,

 

I get an average of roughly 35 fps. Resolution is 1920 x 1200.

 

Running a Dual Core E8400 @ 3.0Ghz, 4 GB PC-800 RAM.

 

Cheers!

 

Ratatat

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Hellshade,

 

I get an average of roughly 35 fps. Resolution is 1920 x 1200.

 

Running a Dual Core E8400 @ 3.0Ghz, 4 GB PC-800 RAM.

 

Cheers!

 

Ratatat

 

Not too shabby at all sir. Try bumping the Z-Bias Resolution (under the Z-Bias Menu) from the CFS3 config in the Workshop down from 15 to 13 and see if that bumps your frame rates up even more. Ever since I did that, I'm running no less than 45 FPS over airfields, etc but usually a steady 60 FPS at the same resolution you are at. 1920 x 1200, 16xQ, 16 AA, sliders at 4,4,4,5,5. My current card is nowhere near as good as yours (GTX 280) however I do have faster cpu and ram. Quad Core @ 3.8Ghz & 1500+ Mhz RAM. I know OFF loves a fast cpu so that could probably be the reason there.

 

Hellshade

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Thanks for the tip Hellshade!

 

I ran a little experiment tonight using your suggestion. I used Quick Combat as a constant with 5 vs 5 aircraft. I showed an average of 40 fps over the airfield, 50 fps up to 60 fps during combat - all viewed inside the cockpit. Outside views averaged from 30 - 40 fps. The flyby view caused the biggest hit. Frame rates would drop to mid 20s at times but rebound to mid 30s. Still, all looked very smooth.

 

I can't conclude that the Z-Bias resolution change made any effect though. I seemed to get about the same results with it at 13 or 15.

I'm going to leave it at 13 for now to see if there is any noticeable difference in campaign play when you can get some bigger furballs happening in the air.

I figure the fact that I didn't see any difference means I've got a pretty good set-up from the get go!

 

Carrick58's comment about HiTR crawling and stuttering gives me a bit of a chill. I think I'd be alright though.

 

Ratatat

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As long as it looked smooth to you, the FPS really doesn't matter a bit. Different machines will handle configuration changes differently so don't be alarmed that you saw no boost. It worked for me so I just passed along the tip. RAF_Louvert didn't notice a difference either.

 

More bummer news for me today though. I called CompUSA and they said they won't have my newcard back in stock any earlier than November 29th. I guess as long as it doesn't arrive DoA I can live with that.

 

Hellshade

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Any good news from CompUSA today, Hellshade?

 

I called and they said that they had a huge shipment of around 500 of my cards on order, however it takes 24 to 48 hours for their inventory to update so he couldn't tell me if they actually got my card back in stock. Since I paid for Next Day Air shipping, I'll probably have the card in my hand 3 hours before they send me an e-mail notice that it shipped. That's assuming it actually came back into stock today. Then again it might not ship until tomorrow. Unfortunately there's just no way to be sure.

 

Hellshade

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They say the waiting is the hardest part.

 

I'm also looking forward to the beautiful pictures.

 

My current GTX 280 actually does quite well in most circumstances when flying OFF. I very often fly at a solid 60 FPS using a 5,4,4,5,5 settings at 1680 x 1050 with 16xQ AA and 16x Anistropic filtering on. It might dip into the high 40s if I have a bunch of aircraft fighting over an airfield or an exceptionally large and dense forest. The challenge comes when I tell FRAPS to start recording. I'll take a frame rate loss of between 5 and 25 FPS depending on the scenery. Once that happens, if I move my head quickly to the left or right using TrackIR I get the white triangles back because now my frame rates are in the high 20s to mid 30s in areas with a lot of scenery.

 

The reviews on the GTX 580 showed it playing some high end games with frame rates as high as 168 FPS at 1920 x 1200. Since I'm maxed at 60 FPS with vertical sync on, I am hoping the card will be able to absorb the frame rate hit and still stay at a solid 60 FPS, which for me at least, always keeps the white triangles away from the edges of the screen while using TrackIR. If I lower my scenery and terrain to 1 or 2 (which obviously is less taxing on the GTX 280, because it's not as detailed), the frame rate stays higher and there's no white triangles even when recording. Since the reviews say that the GTX 480 was about twice as fast as my GTX280, and the stock GTX 580 is anywhere from 15% to 30% faster than the GTX480....AND the card I ordered is factory overclocked to be roughly 10% faster than that...I figure that should be enough raw horsepower to play with all settings on 5 and record FRAPS videos while staying at 60 FPS.

 

So basically, if all of those "ifs" pan out as I hope, we should indeed be treated to some beautiful OFF pictures. The downside still though is that youtube will always downgrade the quality of my videos a certain amount. I can literally record in Blue Ray quality of 24,000 bits per second, but youtube will knock it down to around 4,000 bits per second streaming quality. No free sites offer anything faster than that.

 

Hellshade

 

 

 

 

 

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And today when I called CompUSA I am told that the video cards will be in on the week of the 29th. I just checked Newegg and they are out of stock of every version (including the overclocked versions) of the GTX 580 except for a Gigabyte reference board version. So basically, nobody has them in stock. Now I'm starting to wonder if the 500 cards that CompUSA says they have on order will be enough to cover the backorders up to and including mine. Apparently these things are extremely popular despite the price.

 

Hellshade

Edited by Hellshade

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