Graphics card questions

[Dragon Tamer]

I've been looking into getting a new graphics card for my computer and I've had a couple of recommendations thrown at me. No matter what I get I will most likely need to upgrade my power supply which I am prepared to do.

The two that I am on the fence over are the GeForce 8800 GT and the GeForce GTX 550

I had a couple of questions regarding some of the specs of the cards.

1.) What are CUDA cores?

2.) What is the texture fill rate?

3.) The 550 says near the bottom that it needs 2 cards to run properly... what's this all about?

A GeForce GTX 550 Ti GPU must be paired with another GeForce GTX 550 Ti GPU

[Skuzzy]

I am confused.  The NVidia 8800 GT was released in November 2006.   It really is slow, as compared to what ships today and I can pretty well tell you it will not run the next version of Aces High well, at all, no matter what graphic settings you use.  We are targeting the NVidia 9800GTX as the low end card for the next version of Aces High.

[Bino]

Just for comparison, here's a synthetic GPU benchmark page that has all three cards under discussion:

http://www.videocardbenchmark.net/high_end_gpus.html

And these are the numbers reported:

GeForce GTX 550 Ti:     1,923

GeForce 9800 GTX+:     926

GeForce 8800 GTX:     776

[mikeWe9a]

CUDA cores - graphics cards nowadays achieve their speed in part by conducting multiple calculations at once, in parallel.  The CUDA core (an NVIDIA term) is the base element of this parallelism, so the number of cores is essentially the number of simultaneous operations the card can undertake.  

Texture fill rate is (roughly speaking) the number of pixels that the card can process a texture on per second.  Generally speaking, the higher the fill rate, the higher the performance of the card, though other factors apply as well.

The note regarding two cards is in reference to SLI(scalable link interface).  This is NVIDIA's technology for using two or more graphics cards to increase performance.  You do not need two cards, but if you do want to use multiple cards, the note indicates that they both need to have the same processor (i.e. the GeForce 550 Ti).

Mike

[Latrobe]

I had a 550 ti before. It was a very nice card. I could run AH2 on pretty much max graphic settings with it.

[Dragon Tamer]

I am confused.  The NVidia 8800 GT was released in November 2006.   It really is slow, as compared to what ships today and I can pretty well tell you it will not run the next version of Aces High well, at all, no matter what graphic settings you use.  We are targeting the NVidia 9800GTX as the low end card for the next version of Aces High.

Thank you for clearing that up, I saw it mentioned and mistook it for being the low end target.

CUDA cores - graphics cards nowadays achieve their speed in part by conducting multiple calculations at once, in parallel.  The CUDA core (an NVIDIA term) is the base element of this parallelism, so the number of cores is essentially the number of simultaneous operations the card can undertake. 

Texture fill rate is (roughly speaking) the number of pixels that the card can process a texture on per second.  Generally speaking, the higher the fill rate, the higher the performance of the card, though other factors apply as well.

The note regarding two cards is in reference to SLI(scalable link interface).  This is NVIDIA's technology for using two or more graphics cards to increase performance.  You do not need two cards, but if you do want to use multiple cards, the note indicates that they both need to have the same processor (i.e. the GeForce 550 Ti).

Mike

Thank you sir, it's a big help to know what these terms actually mean.

 

[MrRiplEy[H]]

Thank you for clearing that up, I saw it mentioned and mistook it for being the low end target.

Thank you sir, it's a big help to know what these terms actually mean.

 

Do yourself a favor and read up the tomshardware article of current best bang for buck graphics cards: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/gaming-graphics-card-review,3107.html

You do _not_ want to spend money on some antiquated card that gives you less value for dollar.

[ebfd11]

Dragon I have 2 of these collecting dust right now.. I would be willing to sell one of them to you fairly cheap if you are looking..





LawnDart

[MrRiplEy[H]]

Dragon I have 2 of these collecting dust right now.. I would be willing to sell one of them to you fairly cheap if you are looking..

(Image removed from quote.)

(Image removed from quote.)

LawnDart

I don't want to rain on your parade but Skuzzy said a 2Gb display ram is recommended for the future version. Those 570's might be severely bottlenecked by ram.

[Skuzzy]

I don't want to rain on your parade but Skuzzy said a 2Gb display ram is recommended for the future version. Those 570's might be severely bottlenecked by ram.

1GB will work, but at the cost of certain graphic features.  What those are, we have not completely settled on yet.  The minimum could be 512MB.  We do not know for certain.  We are confident 2GB should be a good number to have everything enabled.

Nothing is cast in stone yet.

[Bizman]

Dragon Tamer, you said you're prepared to upgrade your power supply if needed. However, there's a bunch of other components in your computer that can affect the performance of your video card. That said, without knowing the specs and your budget it's hard to recommend anything specific. For an older rig LawnDart's offer might be a good short term solution if the price is right. At least it would improve your current gameplay remarkably if even a 8800 GT were better than your current card.

[ebfd11]

I don't want to rain on your parade but Skuzzy said a 2Gb display ram is recommended for the future version. Those 570's might be severely bottlenecked by ram.

Well I can say I ran AH on a triple monitor with these for the time i owned them and they ran it at 60 FPS with everything on, except updates and shadows. I can give people who have seen this in person. If he runs one on a single monitor than he will have no problems doing so.

LawnDart

[MrRiplEy[H]]

Well I can say I ran AH on a triple monitor with these for the time i owned them and they ran it at 60 FPS with everything on, except updates and shadows. I can give people who have seen this in person. If he runs one on a single monitor than he will have no problems doing so.

LawnDart

I ran the latest games on Geforce256 also 15 years ago.

[vHACKv]

Seems like the 750ti card might be a sweet spot. Most cards have 2 gig and might not require power supply upgrades, and are small in size. These are available for $140.

[MrRiplEy[H]]

Seems like the 750ti card might be a sweet spot. Most cards have 2 gig and might not require power supply upgrades, and are small in size. These are available for $140.

The 750ti is a good upgrade option for older computers due to its very low power draw. It doesn't even require an external PCI-E power cable. But one must understand it's still an entry level card even though it's amazing value for price - it's not going to be screaming fast on latest non-AH2 titles. Most likely it will be playable on many games with lowered settings though.

You can get better bang for buck from Radeon (the tomshardware chart) at the price level of 750ti though, but the radeon takes more power which may force you to get a new PSU. If your PSU is fine you should get the 2Gb model 7770 radeon instead if 100 bucks is all you can spend.