Passing of the Guard................................

[MrRiplEy[H]]

Replacement HDD came in today (WD Caviar Black 32Gb cache 500Gb SATA 6Gb/sec HDD).

Popped it in & booted up & checked in BIOS............BIOS recognized & ID'd it!  YAY!

Went into Disk Management & set it all up. Once that was done I then went into the Performance tab, into virtual mem, turned off the "automatically manage the paging file across all disks" & moved the page file off the C:\ drive (set to no paging file) & onto the E:\ drive (set for system manage). Applied, saved & rebooted box.......................... .....ohhhh  YEAHHHHHH!

 

Man I LOVE this setup!
 

Yeah Skuzzy I know that the OS is not loading data from 1 disk into ram & writing data out to page file on another disk from ram at the same time but it's doing it sooooooooo fast that it sure seems like it. I can certainly tell the difference.

It's complete now!

I set the shadow textures at 8196 yesterday & this 560Ti started choking on that setting once the scene had a lot of fire & smoke going & 20+ planes in view (defending a large base).........never got any error messages, the game didn't try to cut back on any shadow settings...........FPS dropped to 47 & was very choppy until the plane count dropped to around 12 in view at which time the FPS went back up to 57-60.

So far I haven't gotten into/found a graphical event large enough to choke the card when shadow textures are set to 4096.
I'm figuring that it's the vid card that is overwhelmed as if it was the CPU the game would read this & shut down some/all of the shadow texture settings to free up enough CPU cycles to not allow the game to go into fault (this would happen on my old box if I pushed the shadow textures to 8196 & more than 5-6 planes along w/ a burning base in view).

I can feel a 680 tapping me on my shoulder just asking to be bought!

Salute!

 

The 8196 shadow texture is going to choke any current card, they simply lack enough video ram. I'm under the impression that the shadow texture feature is a bit weird, other game engines produce higher quality shadows without eating up all the display ram in the process.

[Pudgie]

The 8196 shadow texture is going to choke any current card, they simply lack enough video ram. I'm under the impression that the shadow texture feature is a bit weird, other game engines produce higher quality shadows without eating up all the display ram in the process.

Good point MrRipley, as this 560Ti SC only has 1Gb vid mem onboard.

 

[Pudgie]

Alright folks, now it's fully complete!

Got me a EVGA GTX 670 FTW vid card today. Popped it in & reloaded the 301.42's............................ .....

Now this card is a beast!

Had to set all up in AH to run full out (including shadow textures to 8192), turn off Adaptive V-synch (set to Use 3d Application), turn off FXAA, set AA Transparency to 8x supersampling & enable Frame Rate Target (set for 60 FPS) in PrecisionX to hold GPU clocks near the base clock speed of 1006 MHz w/ occasional boost up to 1215 MHz w/ FPS held at 59-60 running smooth as silk. In this config the vid card runs mostly between 835MHz to 915MHz (downclocking due to not enough load on card). Max temp under this "load" is at 68*C (highest temp I've seen w/ fan control in auto--not set up in PrecisionX).

With this vid card purchase this box's cost comes to $1757.38 so now all the money has gone thru the hole burned in my pocket.........but I am 1 very happy dude! 

It's paid for, it's bad-to-the-bone & it's MINE!!

Cheers!