Joe, What did you buy?

Please say you went to Fry's and got the PNY.

Nothing.

At the last minute, a forum member emailed a link to this thread to a friend who happened to be sitting on a pile of used high-end video cards, who subsequently sent me a GTX 280 for free.

Free is good.

Arrrr. I really want this video card to arrive!

I scored a Strange Rainblower tonight in TF2 which carries with it a very effective taunt kill, except I can't use it because equipping the Rainblower forces you into Pyrovision, which forces HDR and Bloom on, which turns my system into a lagfest.

Shoulda bought the PNY at Fry's. It'd be humming right along by now.

Free is good, but time is money.

Y U no liek GTX 280?

Amusing sidebar: I was doing some reading on this chipset, and apparently it hold the record for the largest physical GPU die ever constructed. A somewhat dubious honor (makes me wonder what the power consumption will be) but it was apparently the highest of the high-end cards in its day (circa 2008), retailing at over $600.

I can't even begin to comprehend spending that kind of money on a video card, and yet a quick trip 'round the Egg shows that the current-gen "gamer class" high end cards still sell for $600-$700.

Seriously, who the hell is spending $700 on a video card just to play videogames?


Still, at least I can see the merit in spending money on a video card, in that you do in fact get some performance return from it. Contrast this to the $70 Bigfoot Gaming Network Card. Seriously? It's an ethernet card. It's one link in a *VERY* long chain between you and the rest of the world. The ethernet adapter that came built into your motherboard is capable of a hundred times more throughput than your fancy cable modem, to say nothing of the dozen or two routers between your cable headend and whatever game server you're connected to.

Not that I don't like, but that I couldn't stand to wait. I'm very impatient sometimes.

Oh, and edit out that double post. I expect it to be gone by the time I finish typing this.

Hey, if someone offered me a GTX280, I'd jump on that quick.

IIRC, they have a full CUDA implementation, which is exactly why I bought my 470 originally. I should upgrade here in the near future, but nothing has offered a conclusive enough upgrade to entice me yet.

And yet Monster cable sells gold plated power cords. Never mind your house wiring is all copper, and may have crappy connections. It's all about the bragging rights as to who can spend (waste) the most money.


Very good on editing out the double post, but you were a litle slow this time.

Yeah, most of the high-end "gamer class" stuff I find quite over the top, but a "gamer class" ethernet card is about as retarded as an "audiophile" power cord. And by retarded, I am talking short-bus here. Everyone knew of some kid in high school that made you ask "why is he/she here? They are literally not going to gain anything from this experience, and are merely consuming educational resources which could be used to prepare others here for a life of productive, lotto-playing, Escalade-coveting, minimum-wage employment."


Have you been having this issue with your browser frequently? I see no doppelpost.

I am absolutely not saying "Go buy a monster network card" here, Joe, but unlike high-end Audiophile crap, there is actually quantifiable improvements with the network card.

AnandTech - Bigfoot

The last review they had on a wired ethernet card they had showed FPS gains up to 10%, so...Yeah. If you are dropping $600-$1k on video cards, $70 on a network card that can also net you up to a 10% FPS gain is nothing. Wrong target market and all.

/Sadly, not even I am in the target market, but hey.

This just doesn't make sense.

Seriously- I can think of no way in which swapping ethernet cards would cause a 10% increase in rendered framerate of a videogame, unless there was something so horribly wrong with the old one (or its drivers) that it was misbehaving badly and consuming tons of CPU / memory / bus resources.



At any rate:

https://www.miataturbo.net/attachmen...ine=1341254419



Irony:


When it comes to home-theater stuff, I usually bitch and moan about how all the cool new devices (eg, set-top media players) only have HDMI outputs, but don't support my TV's component input needs.

My monitor at home only has HDMI inputs, whereas this card has two DVI ports and, amazingly, one analog component output.

Off to Fry's to pick up a DVI -> HDMI adapter.

I can think of lots of ways, Joe.

The simplest way to explain it conceptually is how much faster a hardware raid card is vs. a software raid card. Remember, everything is software LAN-wise now, so a pure hardware chip that offloads everything with heavily optimized drivers....

http://hardware.gotfrag.com/portal/story/34683/ goes into some detail on it, I'll later dig up the anandtech article on it that also goes into detail.

So the wait wasn't so bad, rleete.


First things first. This card is MASSIVE. From front to back it's longer than the motherboard. The last time I owned an expansion card which fit that description, it had an 8-bit ISA connector on it.

It weighs a ton. Literally. As a test, I constructed a huge see-saw out of a couple of steel I-beams which I happened to have lying around left over from when I built the Empire State building using only a leatherman tool and three matchbooks from a jazz club in west Harlem, and with my Miata on one end and this card on the other, I only had to move the card 9 inches out from the fulcrum in order to counter-balance the car. In addition to two expansion slots, it also consumed two hard drive bays, forcing the relocation of two of my hard drives. (I wound up moving all three of them, just to tidy things up.) It covered two of the six SATA ports, and will have to be removed if I ever need to un-latch the RAM slots to remove a stick of memory:

https://www.miataturbo.net/attachmen...ine=1341290116


At any rate, everything finally managed to fit, though ironically my 1.8" SSD is now sitting in a 5.25" drive bay. (Yes, I actually still have a couple of 3.5" to 5.25" adapter kits lying around- complete with beige faceplate with embedded LED. Remember when hard drives had a little two-pin header on them for an external LED?) And I was honestly a bit surprised that I was able to find the correct power cables to attach it to my power supply. When I bought this unit two years ago, I just tossed 'em into a random box figuring that I'd never need 'em.


Fired it up, and then:

https://www.miataturbo.net/attachmen...ine=1341290116


Aaah, my old nemesis. It's been quite some time since we've been together.


Ok, into Safe Mode we go.

Works fine, so reboot into normal mode.


http://speedmaxpc.com/wp-content/upl...n-of-death.bmp

Hmmm.


Back into Safe Mode, works fine.

Hmm.

Too lazy to grab the laptop, so I boot into Safe Mode with Networking so I can do some gooling. When suddenly:

Attachment 239910


Well, now this is interesting.

You may recall that just this morning I was extolling the virtues of the Atheros AR5BDT92 wi-fi card in another thread. Turns out that it and my new GTX280 hate each other. So sadly, I've had to remove it and go back to the ole' USB Netgear WN111. It seems to mildly dislike me, but is content with just the occasional disconnect.

So there we are. On to TF2.

Hmm. Graphics options. So many choices... Fuсk it, let's just set everything to maximum and increase the resolution all the way to my monitor's native 1920x1200. And no sense beating around the bush, let's just jump straight into Pyroland with my shiny new Rainblower equipped.

http://up-ship.com/blog/wp-content/u..._beautiful.jpg

I'm nearly speechless. Visually, everything looks nearly the same (albeit at higher resolution) but the smoothness is just mind-blowing. I didn't really realize what I was missing, but it is so much easier to play now! Previously, close-in engagements were almost impossible, because the video became so choppy that it was impossible to circle around an opponent at close range while still maintaining accurate aim. But now it's just utterly fluid and seamless- I scored my first flamethrower kill of a Heavy tonight, simply because I could actually see him as I circled around him!

I also picked up FOUR charred/burned item drops and got two group invites in less than an hour of play.

Coincidence?

I could get used to this.

Send me that Atheros card and I'll send you the ASUS WiFi card in return...

That would be the one with "unwanted glitches like the repeated stuttering in video" I assume?

Playing at 60+FPS is nice, isn't it? I hate having to spend $500 for the latest video card every few years to be able to accomplish the same thing with the newest games, but it has to be done.

Make sure you turn off VSYNC. It adds a small amount of input lag that is detrimental to your performance in online games. Get used to the screen tearing. You WILL slay more foes with it off.

the problem is that the GTX280 doesnt support DX11, so some shaders in newer games are glitchy as FUUUU.

I loved my GTX280OC, it was tits... still runs BF3 in DX10 on max settings with a 60+ fps average on my work computer.

so am i reading this right that gigabit ethernet chipsets @ household bitrates can generate enough interrupts to be measurable in terms of FPS? i'm a little bit surprised.

i'm not good with windows, but in linux there are various knobs you can turn for interrupt routing.

in following case core 0 is handling all of the ethernet interrupts. if this same core is handling your video card interrupts, then i can believe you would see effect of one on the other.

in linux you can tweek these things. IE: SMP affinity and proper interrupt handling in Linux - Alex on Linux
or if you are feeling lazy on some distros you can run irqbalance daemon...

edit: this is also worth a read: http://www.alexonlinux.com/msi-x-the...interrupt-load

Oooh, fancy!

(Yes.)

Joe. Whats your steam handle?