Picking out a video card

My current choices:
Radeon 5770 for ~$160
Radeon 5830 but waiting for it to hit $200-220 (reviewers are blasting it over the $240 price)
Radeon 5850 for ~$300

It seems like all the Nvidia stuff is a bit overpriced for their level of performance, so I'm not bothering considering them at this point.

Right now I'm trying to figure out where the "sweet spot" is - not spending too much, but not spending too little, either. And right now, I'm not quite sure which is the best value. My motherboard cannot do SLI, so I'm not worried about that. The most demanding games I play are Demigod, STO and I'm thinking COH's upcoming Ultramode might want the extra horsepower. Supposedly the 5770 gives "excellent performance," but no mention was made as to resolution, CPU, etc.

My current system is:
C2D Q6600
4g RAM
Radeon 4670 w/1g RAM
Windows 7 Home Premium
I'll be getting a new PSU with whichever card I go with.

I'm assuming/hoping my CPU is enough to drive these video cards. Right now I can play COH at 1920x1200 at Recommended settings and good framerate.

All you need to do to get the specs is go to the website

Specs for the 5770: http://www.amd.com/us/products/deskt...fications.aspx

And here's a chart to show you were it stands in comparison to the other cards (including against nVidia cards): Graphics Card Hierarchy Chart - Review Tom's Hardware : Best Graphics Cards For The Money: February '10

Personally, I'd wait until the nVidia stuff is actually announced. Even if you don't plan to go with them, they may have something up their sleeve that may bring down some of the ATI prices. Better to wait the relatively small amount of time till the announcement than to pay more for something you might be able to get for less

We'll see....

Not worried about the specs - they're all good performers and the 5770 and 5850 are recommended by Toms.

I'm in no rush... got to save for anything I get anyhow.

well... if you are waiting on a price drop... it's probably not going to happen anytime soon. Remember, the RadeonHD 5850 was supposed to be a $260 card, but Nvidia's screw-ups across GTX and Fermi cards basically mean there's not going to be a competitor to any of the RadeonHD 5000 series cards for a while.

Most of the vendors (Asus, XFX, PowerColor/Tul, Sapphire) are the ones keeping RadeonHD 57xx and 58xx prices high since the cards are effectively cash cows for the foreseeable future. With pretty much everybody involved in RadeonHD 5xxx production or distribution making more money than expected, there's no incentive to lower the price on any of the medium to high end cards. The vendors will ride that gravy train as long as they can.

So, if you are spending the cash, I'd say go for the 5850. It's going to last a bit longer than the 5830 for more games.

That being said, if you are buying for Going Rogue... I'd actually wait until after Going Rogue launches. Okay, yes, Ultra Mode arrives in April... buut...

If you can hold off till the summer months though, some factors may change the state of graphics choices.

First: AMD has already said they are going ahead with the Radeon 5xx5 product refresh in the second half of this year, which means 5755, 5775, 5835, 5855, and 5875 cards should be landing at the same price points as the current line-up: http://www.neoseeker.com/news/12935-...-half-of-2010/

Now, I'm not going to argue that prices for each card are higher than they should be, and I think AMD could probably do a bit more to reign in vendors pricing... and launching the 5830 at $239 when the 5850 was originally tagged at $259... sort of seems like AMD is getting too cocky. They know they have the good thing, and most gamers know they have the good thing too.

Second: Paragon's current Graphics Partner... at least from the front page, is ATi/AMD. There could be a promotional deal in June to couple Going Rogue discounts with new AMD cards. We don't know yet. It'd be nice if we could get a buy a RadeonHD 57xx or higher and get Going Rogue free deal going...

Third: TSMC and Nvidia say Fermi's die issues should be solved by mid-2010. Fixing the problems with Fermi production could put Nvidia in a position to actually have mid-range cards out in July or August. Whether or not those cards will be price, performance, and feature competitive with the RadeonHD 5xxx series cards already selling... much less the RadeonHD 5xx5 refreshes... we don't know.

***

Now, my personal opinion is that given what I know, and have heard, when it comes to the GTX 480 and GTX 470 graphics cards, I seriously doubt that Fermi has a chance of being price and performance competitive with RadeonHD 5xxx series. If the chips are as hot as the vendors are saying they are, and if they are as expensive to make as indicated by Nvidia's desired pricing, Nvidia would need to wrap a $50 bill and a pound of copper around each card to get vendors like BFG and XFX to buy Fermi chips.

However, just having a competitor on the market, expensive or not, would help lower prices.

Well, if you're not sure about the specs....just ask

This portion is really the most important part:

• Engine clock speed: 850 MHz
• Processing power (single precision): 1.36 TeraFLOPS
• Polygon throughput: 850M polygons/sec
• Data fetch rate (32-bit): 136 billion fetches/sec
• Texel fill rate (bilinear filtered): 34 Gigatexels/sec
• Pixel fill rate: 13.6 Gigapixels/sec
• Anti-aliased pixel fill rate: 54.4 Gigasamples/sec
• Memory clock speed: 1.2 GHz
• Memory data rate: 4.8 Gbps
• Memory bandwidth: 76.8 GB/sec
• Maximum board power: 108 Watts
• Idle board power: 18 Watt

We'll see....

Well, the thing is I don't know how to translate that into English

What I do know is that, performance wise, its good, better, best. At the current pricing, review sites are universally critical of the 5830 so until its down by at least $20 (or includes $20-40 worth of stuff I'd want) its out of the running.

From experience, there's a minimum you need to spend to get good performance for the dollar. Any less and you're paying too much for too little. Likewise, there's a cap to that, where you start spending a lot of money for diminishing returns on performance (ie, bragging rights).

So, for me, cards like the 5670 and lower are out (not enough of an upgrade for me anyhow), as are the 5870 and 5970. That leaves the 5750, 5770, 5830 and 5850, and I'm a little less sure of my ability to suss out the best value here.

I either didn't know or forgot about the upcoming 5**5 model Radeons @_@

I'm willing to wait. Right now Positron's comment about the 5770 offering good performance under Ultra mode is nice, since I know that at least the lesser of the cards I was looking at can handle Ultra Mode. And honestly, I need to wait to save up the cash for the things anyhow

edit: I hope this makes sense @_@

edit2: GR performance will be important, but overall I'm thinking of my other games too. I'd love to play STO at higher detail settings, for instance. Since I go back to CO once in a while (yay free weekends) that's a perk. I'd like to run Mirror's Edge at higher resolutions than default. I'd really like to run Demigod at max detail at 1920x1200 (my desktop resolution) and 45fps+.

edit3: I've been told that some video cards require a powerful CPU to drive it, otherwise its power is wasted (hence most benchmarks using top-end CPUs). I'm *not* sure if my Q6600 is fine with anything or not. I'd like to hope so, though.

Nice to know. Given I'm running at stock speeds (2.4ghz) that's good news. My old CPU was a C2D E6300 @1.8ghz, so yeah... owie. CPU cap.

The question I have is what resolution are you looking to run the game(s) at? Needless to say, the higher the resolution, the more GPU power you will need. Also do you insist on playing games with AA on? Again it matters as AA Vs no AA affects performance.

And this page from the HD 5830 review summarizes the results of a number of games at either 1680x1050 and 1920x1200 at no AA or 4xAA against a number of games compared to an HD 5770 and an HD 5850. Actual numbers are found earlier in the article.

I'd love to run everything at 1920x1200 (native res for my monitor). As for AA? Uhm... that I've never really thought about. I'll usually turn that down first if I'm trying to improve performance in a game. I remember the last time I turned it off I wished it was turned on, but I got over it pretty quickly.

From comparison reviews I've seen, the 5870's alone will run cooler than many of the other cards with nice speed. Crossfire, they will surpass a 5970.

The 5770's are quite nice, as well, and in crossfire run quite nicely.


Here's a comparison on a site I visit that I found very helpful: ATI Comparison

There is still the original CPU emulator for PhysX in the game. What the game won't recognize is the nVidia GPU powered PhysX.

So the question is what's better? Stealing CPU cycles for physics or stealing graphics performance (assuming one video card) for physics. Which will impact framerate the least?

You can DL and install the PhysX software without having a dedicated card installed - I have done so on my laptop, as well.


There was some thread about it waaay back with PhysX first came out.

I have a GTS 250 and PhysX does not work no matter what software/drivers I install. CoH was never programmed to function with anything other than Ageia's PhysX card. I do however see things like mailboxes exploding with letters, leaves falling etc. These are just side effects of having a card capable of those extra high settings. In your graphics settings "Ageia PhysX" is not greyed out?

We'll see....