Impulsive x800xt 256Mb to 8800GTS 320Mb upgrade

  • Thread starter Thread starter Andrew MacPherson
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A

Andrew MacPherson

I was looking to buy a 512Mb X1950Pro, mainly because I wanted the extra
bandwidth on the PCI-E bus for capturing Fraps footage while flight
simming. (I used an AGP card on an Asrock dual sata). But the 1950 was
155ukp and I was easily swayed at the last moment towards an 8800GTS for
194ukp, especially as I won't be upgrading (probably!) for another 2
years or so.

Anyway, I won't bore you with benchmarks, the net's full of them.
Overall speed & picture quality at 1600x1200 is great. But Nvidia's FSAA
is still, depressingly, behind ATI's in quality IMO. At x4/x8aniso I see
shimmering where I didn't have it before at resolutions like 1024x768
which I use for video capture. x16fsaa is better, but I'm not convinced
it's better than ATI's x4. All in all, this reminds me why I went ATI
with the 9700Pro and stayed there.

Andrew McP
 
It's a known fact that shimmering and texture crawling is worse on nVidia
cards, because such effects have to be seen in motion; they don't appear in
screenshots. You can minimize this by disabling anisotropic filtering in the
control panel. Also try the "weird" AA modes like 8xS.

BTW, your hard drive write speed, not the AGP bus, is the main bottleneck
when recording FRAPS footage. Even two Raptors in RAID 0 won't exceed 200
MB/s sustained. 200 MB/s is about 6% of the bandwidth available thru AGP 8x.
Face it, you just wanted a faster card. :-)
 
root@localhost (First of One) said:
Face it, you just wanted a faster card. :-)
Click to expand...

:-) I exchanged emails with the guy who wrote Fraps and he suggested
that a dual core processor would help, but that the higher bandwidth of
PCI-E would help even more. Obviously HD speed also comes into it, but
in theory the average HD had more than enough write speed to cope with
Fraps, especially if you're not short of RAM and the game's not
accessing the HD very often.

Anyway, it's a complicated equation overall, and PCI-E has certainly
helped. Whether it's helped enough to justify the cost is a different
matter. I certainly didn't need the speed for gaming as my sims are CPU
limited anyway. :-)

Andrew McP

PS Thanks for the suggestions about FSAA
 
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