I recently held my breath and clicked "Submit" on Newegg and purchased a combo deal by eVGA. A SLi mobo and a 7800gt videocard for about $350. This was very hard for me to do because just four months earlier I had paid $420 for my agp X850XT PE and $90 for my Asus A8V. But I was having a lot of problems and wasn't happy.
Everything arrived, I installed, and was in heaven. Framerates shot through the roof, gameplay was very fluid and clean, and I've been enjoying gaming a lot more. I've now had the system for nearly a week and I'm still playing around with it. But there's some things I've noticed that are starting to bite at the back of my brain a little bit. I appreciate any feedback as long as it's constructive and usefull. I really don't want any obligatory stagnant ATI vs NVIDIA bickering to take place here.
1) My Xtreme Music still has static and pops in BF2. I really haven't played many other games yet to see if my old problem is still existing (on my second XFI card now. Forum of events so far is here:
http://www.totalbf2.com/forums/showthread.php?t=49941 )
2) Picture quality and crispness seems degraded. Games in general seem slightly cartoonish (textures aren't as apparent) and washed out. This is especially apparent in HL2. It almost seems like I'm running at medium settings, but everything is maxed out and at 1600x1200.
3) Settings missing. For example, the highest anti-aliasing in BF2 is 4X. But with ATI it's 6X. Even at 1600x1200 I notice the jaggies. It's especially noticable in the first l evel of the FEAR demo when you walk towards the yellow handrails to go down into the sewer/lower level (just befor eyou see the girl for the first time). 1600x1200 brings my fps down too low, and at the highest anti-aliasing and 1280x1024 its flickery and jaggy until I'm right up on it.
4) COD2 demo: is there a heat effect on the sand? I never noticed it with my ati card (probably because I was at all medium/low settings). If there is,it looks great, but if there isn't, what's going on with my card? Lots of wavy patterns that come and go depending on what angle I'm turned.
5) Just as with ATI, I honestly see no peformance boost with overclocking. Running coolbits 2.0 and slowly increasing my overclock slightly above the highest stock overclocking I've seen in advertised 7800gt cards (470/1.2ghz) gave no fps increase or otherwise peformance boost, except for in 3DMark05, where I saw a 300pt increase.
6) Simply because I'm asking questions about nVidia, and unfortunately haven't had much time to research further than I have so far, could someone explain the difference between 8x and 16x SLi? Is it all just a SLi version of anti-aliasing? Because 8X is pretty high all in itself. Is 16X really necissary? I ask because this mobo does one card at 16x, and then downgrades to 8x when you run in SLi. Will SLi actually run slightly slower than a single card then?
Again, I appreciate any help. I also appologize if this is a repeated thread topic. I did do a search, but I never have much luck with this site's search options. Thank you.
Everything arrived, I installed, and was in heaven. Framerates shot through the roof, gameplay was very fluid and clean, and I've been enjoying gaming a lot more. I've now had the system for nearly a week and I'm still playing around with it. But there's some things I've noticed that are starting to bite at the back of my brain a little bit. I appreciate any feedback as long as it's constructive and usefull. I really don't want any obligatory stagnant ATI vs NVIDIA bickering to take place here.
1) My Xtreme Music still has static and pops in BF2. I really haven't played many other games yet to see if my old problem is still existing (on my second XFI card now. Forum of events so far is here:
http://www.totalbf2.com/forums/showthread.php?t=49941 )
2) Picture quality and crispness seems degraded. Games in general seem slightly cartoonish (textures aren't as apparent) and washed out. This is especially apparent in HL2. It almost seems like I'm running at medium settings, but everything is maxed out and at 1600x1200.
3) Settings missing. For example, the highest anti-aliasing in BF2 is 4X. But with ATI it's 6X. Even at 1600x1200 I notice the jaggies. It's especially noticable in the first l evel of the FEAR demo when you walk towards the yellow handrails to go down into the sewer/lower level (just befor eyou see the girl for the first time). 1600x1200 brings my fps down too low, and at the highest anti-aliasing and 1280x1024 its flickery and jaggy until I'm right up on it.
4) COD2 demo: is there a heat effect on the sand? I never noticed it with my ati card (probably because I was at all medium/low settings). If there is,it looks great, but if there isn't, what's going on with my card? Lots of wavy patterns that come and go depending on what angle I'm turned.
5) Just as with ATI, I honestly see no peformance boost with overclocking. Running coolbits 2.0 and slowly increasing my overclock slightly above the highest stock overclocking I've seen in advertised 7800gt cards (470/1.2ghz) gave no fps increase or otherwise peformance boost, except for in 3DMark05, where I saw a 300pt increase.
6) Simply because I'm asking questions about nVidia, and unfortunately haven't had much time to research further than I have so far, could someone explain the difference between 8x and 16x SLi? Is it all just a SLi version of anti-aliasing? Because 8X is pretty high all in itself. Is 16X really necissary? I ask because this mobo does one card at 16x, and then downgrades to 8x when you run in SLi. Will SLi actually run slightly slower than a single card then?
Again, I appreciate any help. I also appologize if this is a repeated thread topic. I did do a search, but I never have much luck with this site's search options. Thank you.
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