Ultra-mode video card shopping guide

Does the ATI Radeon HD 4000 Series will work good for Ultra Mode becouse I'm getting at install into my computer.

Which 4000 series? The banter says 4850 is generally thought of as the minimum for UM.

Very curious now...
I just upgraded from a gtx275 to a gtx480 on a shiny new rig.

I went from the 275 to the 480 because no matter what I tweaked, I could not break the 30 FPS barrier.
I've tried in game and out of game settings, driver updates... the works.

The very bad news.... even with the 480, I cant get above 30 FPS, and
the culprit is Shadow Maps.
If I turn them on, FPS tanks. Setting them to off/Stencil Shadows... and I get back to 60.

So, what trick am I missing?

Pendix got me thinking about this - so when I had the 8800GTX I was at 50% CPU with settings described above. With the GTX285 I have bumped up the character and world detail to 200% and maintain about a 20fps framerate, but now the CPU is pegged up at nearly 100%. For the same settings, in moving the bottleneck from GPU to CPU I doubled the framerate (15 fps to ~30fps).

Now in looking at upgrades - with the socket 939 I have, the fastest CPU I could put in there gives something like a 15% improvement over my current CPU. I know it is not quite the case, but if we assume that that entire 15% improvement goes to framerate, for the bargain basement price of $200 I could get a pretty small framerate increase.

So my real upgrade path would be motherboard and CPU as I am not likely to get much more from the current mobo. Sigh - that ain't gonna happen anytime soon I think.

So be sure if you think of CPU upgrades to consider what you will actually get for your buck before you spend it.

Hi Fallenz,

My CPU is a dual core - the one I talk about is the fastest dual-core CPU that will fit on a Socket 939, but 939 is a 6-ish year old standard, so it is now obsolete and would drive the need to upgrade the mobo. Of course, if Pendix or others have a single-core CPU, yes they would get a big improvement without changing out the mobo if it accepts dual core or higher CPUs. I was hoping to just point out that just upgrading a CPU may not be the way to go.

I have been reading almost all of the posts on the video card guide, and I was wondering if anyone had any advice on laptops in regards to Ultra Mode and performance. What laptop would some of you recommend?

Just browsing the forums on any technical issues related to running CoX. About the 1.8 GHz Athlon 64... Aside from newer processors, the newer motherboards and memory that go with them will be optimized to transfer data faster, but still I doubt there are any programs that effectively use more than two processors. If the Athlon processor is single core and doesn't use something similar to hyper-threading then performance may be similar to a Pentium 4 2.0GHz with (maybe) faster memory. It could be the 4850, if it's a budget model, might have a thin memory bus (128bit vs. 256bit) -- I can't say for sure. It seems though the system should play CoH maxed out w/o AA on pre-i17 settings though.

For comparison I have a Pentium 4 3.4GHz HT, 4GB RAM, Sapphire ATI 3850HD 512MB (AGP), and 240GB (2x120GB RAID 0). I've tested all the Ultra Mode settings and some settings don't seem different to me on low versus high (e.g. environmental reflections). But I do manage to get a good blend of Ultra Mode settings that bump up the game's visual quality. I think the ATI HD cards are good, but maybe with an extra (logical) CPU there's a nice bump to performance. I get anywhere from 50fps to 9fps depending on many variables. Lower framerates in very crowded outdoor areas. Rikti raids can be 4 fps. The point is older systems can play CoH just fine, though perhaps clockspeed and an extra (perhaps logical) cpu may be necessary. Just some thoughts...

After reading everything else I could find in these Forums on the subject of video cards, I purchased the GeForce 250GTS card. Turns out it works very well as a mid-range card for Ultra Mode. However, it runs extremely hot! I ended up popping the cover on my Dell Dimension E521 and paring the chassis with a box fan...LOL. hey, it was 4th of July weekend and I didn't have an extra case fan handy. Wasn't about to give up my play time to overheat warnings and automatic system shutdowns! So my ploy worked and now I need to find a more permanent cooling solution.

Make sure your power supply can handle the card. I got a GTX 260 and in the old box it would run hot. In the new box it did not. Guess what was causing some of the overheating? PSU not having enough juice to run the old box with the 260.

edit: I just look up the spec for the Dell Dimension E521 and the 320 watt PSU is not going to do it. You are heading for a burn out of the worse kind. You need a bigger PSU for that card. Anything under a 500w on that is asking for problems soon or later.

Having come back to this for the first time in a while, and I'm finally getting ready to bite the bullet and upgrade my video card. For reference, I'm running WinXP 32-bit, on a Gigabyte P-55-UDR3 motherboard with 4gig of DDR3 memory, a nvidia 9800GT video card, and a 600W Thermaltake power supply.

I believe my power supply is more than enough to handle all the way up to the recommended nvidia 260/ATI 5770, but is my system going to be enough to handle say a generation lower (250/5750) and give me full results? There seems to be some negligible differences as you go up in cards, and I'm wondering where the breakpoints might be.

Any help would be appreciated.


S.