yeah, I was kinda shocked seeing the 560 being a recommended gpu.

9/29/2011 1:24:58 AM

GTX 570 seems to be a nice balance between price, performance, and quality for BF3. The 580 is preferred, but with that MSI deal, two 570's for 500 bucks is epic, assuming you want to slay (100+ FPS w/ 120 Hertz Input Acer) all of the releases coming out in the next few months.

[Edited on September 29, 2011 at 8:54 AM. Reason : -]

9/29/2011 8:45:11 AM

Yeah but you can get 2x 560s or 570s for much cheaper than a 580 and the performance is way better.

[Edited on September 29, 2011 at 8:58 AM. Reason : 2 560's at least. ]

9/29/2011 8:58:16 AM

The 570 is basically a 480 with a slightly smaller power requirement.

9/29/2011 9:27:56 AM

Contrary to popular belief, game companies aren't in the business of making games that only run on enthusiast hardware.

9/29/2011 9:56:30 AM

PC gaming is about getting the maximum graphical potential out of the software. Obviously all games are designed to scale.

9/29/2011 10:00:42 AM

16% of gamers on Steam believe that too...

[Edited on September 29, 2011 at 11:11 AM. Reason : .]

9/29/2011 11:11:20 AM

^^in theory... not all games are well built or efficient at using the latest API's or hardware advancements. But yes, most develops are trying to achieve a level of scalability over a larger hardware pool than in previous years as to make their game available and playable on more computers. There are very few game engines on the market (think overall games including crappy ones and "casual") that actually stress the hardware and showcase their full potential. Just look at DX11, only a few games are native; and how long has that API been out now and supported by hardware?

I think the term "gamer" has really been diluted in the past 5-10years as more and more "general population" are encroaching into our nerd kingdom. Whats annoying are the "causal" gamers who claim themselves as actual gamers who play the shitty indie flash games on steam or whatever; don't get me wrong, its fun and all, but god damn. They are annoying. They are the same people who don't know the difference between intel integrated and discrete gpu; if they have a dedicated card, they claim how well their flash games are better... really? going to claim that?

/rant...

9/29/2011 11:54:33 AM

Good deal on a 6950 $190 after MIR: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814150523&nm_mc=EMC-IGNEFL092911&cm_mmc=EMC-IGNEFL092911-_-EMC-092911-Index-_-DesktopGraphicsVideoCards-_-14150523-L0C

Quote :

"Contrary to popular belief, game companies aren't in the business of making games that only run on enthusiast hardware."

BF3 is an exception and you've seen how popular Crysis became after the 1st one was completely impossible for anyone to max out. This made everyone want to use Crysis as a tech bench and it made everyone have interest in Crysis 2. BF3 is not as far ahead of its time as Crysis 1 so it gets the best of both worlds. People can play it and it also causes increased sales of computer hardware.



[Edited on September 29, 2011 at 12:24 PM. Reason : _]

9/29/2011 12:19:50 PM

Well EA pushed DICE to make their games scalable on POS hardware and max on more powerful systems. While BF3's frostbite 2 engine will stress the lastest hardware (beta not included), its more accessible compared to the upcoming skyrim engine; which I think will be as much or more demanding that FB2.

Either way, you will have a tough time having eye candy and med/high res on entry level budget/performance gpu's; but $100gpu will get you through the toll booth to play the game.

9/29/2011 12:44:24 PM

^

Yeah, but that defeats the entire purpose of gaming on a PC at that point. Why invest more than the cost of a console system if you are going to be running some ghetto gpu on some ghetto board? All that just to use a mouse/keyboard instead of a controller? There is a pretty obvious upswing to having at least a middle of the road hardware setup for PC gaming. This is why I often don't agree with low-balling your rig to save money on certain components. You don't need a 150 dollar case for your rig, but you should invest in at least a 2500k processor, and a modern Mobo, a 60+ FPS-sustained GPU @ 1080p res, with at least 8GB of 1600 DDR3 SDRAM.

Enthusiast level hardware setups are different. With that we are talking SLI/Crossfire mobos, Processor Cooling, Great Air Flow, Overclocking Most Components, etc.

You don't need to be an enthusiast to be a PC gamer. You also don't have to overclock to get great performance in BF3. They are really different levels of nerdom, although over-clocking has become a simple process for most of modern mobos/gpus/memory, if not all high-priced mobos/gpus/memory.

[Edited on September 29, 2011 at 1:10 PM. Reason : -]

9/29/2011 1:02:01 PM

by the way there are no "Native" DX11 games, only 3 native DX10 games exist. Easy way to tell is if the game will play on XP, then it is DX9 native.

9/29/2011 1:22:42 PM

Quote :

"Why invest more than the cost of a console system if you are going to be running some ghetto gpu on some ghetto board?"

you're assuming that people don't have PC's for regular usage, which is incorrect. people have PC's for general usage first... that they happen to play games on. nobody who builds a computer for gaming is going to buy anything budget-related. it's referring more to those people gaming on their everyday home computer.

Quote :

"All that just to use a mouse/keyboard instead of a controller?"

for FPS games, it's proven nothing can come even remotely close to a mouse/keyboard setup

Quote :

"This is why I often don't agree with low-balling your rig to save money on certain components."

it's not about low-balling, it's about finding the best value for your money. value does not mean cheap, value means you're getting good performance for a good price. bad value would be paying more money for something where the performance gains are marginal. as an example: buy a 560 Ti for $200 or a 570 for $300. Does the 570 provide 50% increase in performance to justify the 50% increase in price? if not it's not as good of a value as the 560 Ti. but of course this all depends on how much money you have to spend, and your expectations or need for a certain performance level.... which would then justify the cost.

Quote :

"a 60+ FPS-sustained GPU @ 1080p res"

again, not that many people have 24" monitors which are the standard for 1080p or higher.... MOST people I'd say are in the 22" range or 1680x1050... I'm just saying. And you don't need 60fps to game, 30fps is plenty for most people.

[Edited on September 29, 2011 at 1:48 PM. Reason : /]

9/29/2011 1:38:03 PM

Stimwalt, don't get me wrong, I agree with you on this point, but right now, $100 gpu is far more powerful in relations with performing with current games compared to 2-5 years ago with a similar $100 gpu on then-current games.

While I agree that any budget gaming systems right now should only look at the i5 2500k or the i7 2600k, the i3's are very potent dual cores for gaming right now for a very cheap price. Don't forget the cheap X4, X6 cpu's. You can build a system for about $600 that will play this game pretty good. Throw in another $100 and you should be able to play this game on high settings at 1080p.


And by native DX11 game, I mean programmed with DX11 in mind. You can add it in later on like crysis did, but I think it did more harm than good. BC2 is a good DX11 that was DX9 as well, its just the game engine was flexible and used both. Dirt 3 is as well and I think Dirt 2 is dx10, I forgot. Don't forget Batman.

Now I wanna play some batman.

9/29/2011 1:43:31 PM

Say what you mean then, they are DX9 or DX10 games with DX11 features added on.

It will be years before we see a "native" DX11 game, it took years after the DX10 GPUs launch.

9/29/2011 2:09:17 PM

you should know what I'm thinking fucker... add your own fucking name to the bf3 list dammit... lol

9/29/2011 3:43:04 PM

You are the one who said native, that implies the base game engine.

9/29/2011 6:26:33 PM

When game comes out, does it support DX11? that's native.

9/29/2011 8:24:33 PM

Quote :

"While I agree that any budget gaming systems right now should only look at the i5 2500k or the i7 2600k, the i3's are very potent dual cores for gaming right now for a very cheap price. Don't forget the cheap X4, X6 cpu's. You can build a system for about $600 that will play this game pretty good. Throw in another $100 and you should be able to play this game on high settings at 1080p. "

My get-up cost me $700 and I can run the beta on Ultra (which should be pretty close to final product in terms of graphical intensity) on 1440x900, so the moral of the story, get off yer high-horse and get a smaller monitor

9/29/2011 11:33:55 PM

Btw, its confirmed; us.ncix.com will still honor the batman vouchers, their system shows that the coupons are in stock, but actually aren't and thus giving the error when adding the combo after checkout. Remove the batman coupon, contact us.ncix.com and they will mail/email the coupon code when they become available.

9/30/2011 2:01:00 AM

Quote :

"While I agree that any budget gaming systems right now should only look at the i5 2500k or the i7 2600k"

just out of curiosity, is there any proof for this? i'm not saying i disagree (in fact, i haven't kept up with hardware for the past 5 years, so i'm little more than a noob these days), but i was under the impression that the majority of games relied on the graphics card and as such, the CPU isn't nearly as important

for example, my phenom II x4 925 has a passmark score of 3458

the i5 2500K has a passmark score of 7370, more than twice the performance of my phenom

there is no doubt in my mind that the phenom will play skyrim (all that i care about, but a fair measure of performance) not just fine, but WELL...i could, of course, be wrong (and we'll see if i am because i have no intention of upgrading my CPU unless i "have" to)...but i'm just curious as to whether there's any evidence to support that spending $210 on a newish (less than a year old) processor will provide any significant advantage over having spent $95 on what is now 2 years old

i suppose you could be referring to future-proofing, but to say that the 2500K should be the minimum just seems to be a bit overkill since you don't need it NOW and you can spend just as much money buying a proc that's more than a year out of the gate at half the price every year

9/30/2011 9:41:56 AM

You still have a some what modern cpu, you are fine. But if you are coming from a much older processor (think Core 2 Duo or the older athlon 64's) and your focus is for gaming performance, then its either the more expensive i5 2500k, i7 2600k on the intel side or the cheaper x4/x6 series on the amd side. Either set will get you there, but right now, the 2500k/2600k beats amd hands down.

And yes, modern shooters are much more cpu intensive than the earlier generations of games. Even Oblivion was very CPU intensive as well as GPU intensive. When I jumped from my 8600 C2D to the i7 930 last summer, my frames basically doubled and that was with using the 5870 on both systems. CPU can be your bottleneck.

Just look at any CPU tests, they do gaming benchmarking; although if its part of a newer generation, you will see very minor changes in gaming speeds.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/4083/the-sandy-bridge-review-intel-core-i7-2600k-i5-2500k-core-i3-2100-tested/20

9/30/2011 10:13:33 AM

Not too impressed with BF3 at least on the beta multiplayer. Runs smoothly on Ultra at 1080p. Doesn't look near as nice as Crysis or Crysis 2 with the latest texture patches. Oh well.

9/30/2011 10:15:15 AM

What are your average frames?

9/30/2011 10:25:12 AM

How many times do we have to say it... its a neutered frostbite 2 engine, not even dx11 enabled yet. This is a stress test beta on making sure the game runs and find any bugs in the game. This is NOT the final product.

Lots of stuff missing in the game itself, animations, texture packs, etc...

Although, this will look more like the console version.

[Edited on September 30, 2011 at 10:28 AM. Reason : ]

9/30/2011 10:26:56 AM

neo you should be pushing sustained 120FPS if I remember your rig correctly.

9/30/2011 10:29:03 AM

^Not sustained 120. Close to it sometimes. I turned everything up though. Drops below 40 quite often. Looks decent.

That's at 4.0ghz with 2 super clocked 460's. See both the GPUs maxing out and interestingly 5 cores close to max. Hmm.

9/30/2011 10:36:12 AM

If you lower the detail settings, can you get dat 120% sustained?

[Edited on September 30, 2011 at 10:50 AM. Reason : -]

9/30/2011 10:50:20 AM

^^^^ Do you have an article for that or do you have some tools that give you readings for that info. Just curious, I belive you but I'd also like to see/know where you got that info. Thx.

9/30/2011 11:25:11 AM

^^Yes I lowered the details to medium (like JBaz says it seems high and ultra are the same). Medium runs mostly 120fps sustained. It even goes up to 130-140 which is odd because v-sync is turned on. Medium still looks fine. Probably play the campaign on Ultra but when it dips below 40-50 FPS it gets annoying for multiplayer.

While Ultra looks nice and it's decent at around 40-50fps. 120fps is a much nicer gaming experience. Dammit now I want to upgrade to get Ultra sustained at 120fps.

[Edited on September 30, 2011 at 11:57 AM. Reason : s]

9/30/2011 11:54:35 AM

can we kinda keep the BF3 talk in the BF3 thread? I'm starting to get confused as to which thread I read something in, lol.

9/30/2011 12:25:33 PM

Its in the bf3 beta forums. Search it yourself, my clanmates made a note about it when they were researching issues and told me/sent me the link over teamspeak.

9/30/2011 12:50:14 PM

Built a new PC and seeing a weird issue.


Everything's hooked up and ready to power on. The PSU hard powerswitch is set to O (off) and I plugin the power cable. The fans start spinning and the system starts turning on, but I don't get any video coming out. Flipping the hard switch doesn't turn it off and the only way to shut it down is to pull the plug. Does this sound like my PSU is busted?

10/1/2011 7:57:30 PM

repost ur sys specs, dont want to sift through pages of crap.

10/1/2011 10:15:36 PM

Do you have another PSU you can switch to for testing?

10/2/2011 8:38:50 AM

^ - this , ^^^ - seemingly.

10/3/2011 5:53:06 PM

well now i'm pissed. this POS MSI GTX 570 seems to have a chipset incompatibility with my Gigabyte GA-P67A-UD3-B3 or something... it's not the driver, it's the card or motherboard and since the motherboard was reset and updated, i'm assuming i'm gonna have to RMA the card and that's not a sure thing if there's a chipset incompatibility.

Background:
1) Complete working system w/ 9800GX2
2) Replaced with 570
3) No video post
4) Random reboot loops (unplugging power supply for 10+ seconds fixes)
5) No video post, boots into Windows 7, THEN I get video
6) Reboot, and doesn't post any longer
Seems to give me video in Windows 7, once every 40 times of trying to boot. Never any video POST.

Tried:
1) Updated motherboard BIOS
2) Unplugged everything except CPU/1-DIMM/VGA
3) Reset CMOS
4) Cleared BIOS settings to Fail-Safe defaults
5) Set PCI-E to first
6) Checked PSU (650W @ 87% efficiency, 54A on the 12V rail (nVidia recommends 32A))
7) Checked cable
8) Checked monitor
9) Replaced with 9800 GX2 and works everytime, no issues.

Specs:
http://www.syprus.com/desktoppc/ (ignore old images, they are current specs though)

Any other thoughts of what I'm missing?????

10/4/2011 11:46:08 PM

it's DOA man, just send it back.

10/4/2011 11:56:58 PM

except i get video in windows after posting (rarely, but I've got video once or twice).... randomness usually means that though.... i'm just seeking out other ideas while I wait on the RMA request, it's already submitted.

heck it even made it through an entire 3dmark11 and Kombuster, it's just that once it loses power, i may never get it back online

[Edited on October 5, 2011 at 12:08 AM. Reason : .]

10/5/2011 12:07:13 AM

Only other thing that could do that is your PSU, go to Best Buy and purchase one. If the problem remains then return the PSU.

10/5/2011 12:15:23 AM

Quote :

"Prospero, have you tried a different pci-e slot? Also try to uninstall the nvidia drivers when you have the 9800gx2 installed. could be a driver issue from that."

10/5/2011 12:29:39 AM

yes, tried another PCI-E slot, but both assumptions are wrong.

a) my 9800GX2 worked in PCI-E slot 1, and still works just fine
b) it's not a driver issue, the card doesn't POST (which if you didn't know, isn't dependent on the OS)

it's not the PSU, my 9800GX2 pulls 180-340W and works just fine. (570 pulls 140-330W respectively)

the 570 requires 38A on the +12V and I have 54A... it's fine.

thanks for the suggestions though, at first i too thought it may be PSU related.

my guess is that this particular 570 because it's not reference-based design has something wrong with it that is incompatible with my PSU output or motherboard

[Edited on October 5, 2011 at 12:42 AM. Reason : .]

10/5/2011 12:35:00 AM

have you tried another computer? also if you are in raleigh, u can borrow my 570.

10/5/2011 12:54:16 AM

may try another computer tomorrow. about the only option at this point.

the good news, i hit 556MB/s read time on my Corsair Force GT (write time was about 493MB/s)

10/5/2011 1:19:18 AM

I SAY SIR IT'S TOO SLOW SIR

10/5/2011 1:24:00 AM

Snail speeds I tell you, snail. You got the 120GB one, right? Also, what program are you using to see your SSD speeds, and did it come with the SSD?

Try a different machine before you RMA the GPU, but it does sound like a busted card. I had to RMA my ROG motherboard because the power didn't work on the Mobo, and they sent me a new one within 4 days, shit happens during delivery. It's frustrating still.

[Edited on October 5, 2011 at 1:06 PM. Reason : -]

10/5/2011 1:01:50 PM

Quote :

"Snail speeds I tell you, snail. You got the 120GB one, right? "

Yea, Corsair Force GT 120GB

Quote :

"Try a different machine before you RMA the GPU"

I'm going to, but if it works, then it means it's incompatible with my motherboard and/or PSU and I JUST replaced those. There's nothing in the specs which would imply it's incompatible with my desktop... brand new parts and they exceed the 570's requirements.... and other GPU's like my 9800 GX2 work just fine.

It's a simple GPU swap, power requirements are nearly identical to my 9800 GX2 that works just fine.

[Edited on October 5, 2011 at 1:07 PM. Reason : .]

10/5/2011 1:06:11 PM

so what's a good videocard / $ for bf3? recommendations?

10/5/2011 1:08:40 PM

depends entirely how much you want to spend...

I'd say 6950 & 560 Ti are best bang for your buck unless you want to risk your luck and try to get a working MSI 570 for $250, which would be the best value if you don't have to pay shipping to RMA it like I do.

10/5/2011 1:10:56 PM

Give us your price point. I agree with Prospero's recommendations for cards under 250, but I'm partial to Nvidia cards because of their 3d tech.

^ Hopefully you see the exact same behavior with the GPU in a different machine.

[Edited on October 5, 2011 at 1:17 PM. Reason : -]

10/5/2011 1:16:11 PM