I bought an SSD a few months ago. It was surprisingly easy to migrate my main drive (with the OS and the program files) over to the SSD. GTA is on the SSD (after moving a bunch of older games to a regular HD).
You’re right, of course, about RAM being much (much!) faster than drive access, but I don’t think I’ve ever run out of memory and started swapping. The most memory intensive stuff I do is probably gaming. I’ll take a look, though, to see how much is being used when GTA V is running. If it looks like I might start swapping, I’ll reinstall the older, slower memory.
Most DX11 cards are compatible with DX12’s new low overhead driver model and features a much more robust parallelization potential too. In fact most DX12 features are compatible with DX11 GPU’s.
There will be some features only compatible with the latest version of cards (most are DX12_1 compatible) but there are some features rumored to require as of now, unreleased hardware.
The big CPU overhead reduction though will be fully backwards compatible. Meaning that i7 920 is going to sing for many years yet.
Yes and no. For what you get today out of the box, yes, it’s a great value… but it really depends on what you’re looking for. I’m not willing to give up future upgradability as well as the myriad options PC offers me over consoles for the few hundred dollars I’ll save on a console up front, specially when lifetime costs, even with upgrades to the PC can end up being quite similar.
The world of gaming graphics and displays are already leaving these machines behind. I don’t want to be stuck with a PS4 in 3 years, the same I didn’t wan to be stuck with an xbox 360 4 years into last cycle. But obviously, people’s mileage will vary, and if the options Pc brings to the table aren’t your thing, then the PS4 looks mighty, mighty appealing, I bet.
I don’t think it’s a good idea to put two modules of RAM with varying speeds on the same mobo though.
Though yeah, assuming it’s the same speed, more RAM is good. The moment your game needs to go to your hard drive (assuming not during a load screen), well, that’s bad. Your game will lock up while it does this.
Oh wait, he means he would replace the existing RMA with slower, but more capacity RAM? Hmm, just how much slower?
True, but if I never run out of memory, why go with the slower RAM?
They are two different speeds. I only played a little GTA V tonight and I forgot to have the task manager up in my second monitor to monitor RAM usage. If I find that I’m running out of memory, I’ll try the second set. The set that’s in there now is DDR3-1600 and the set sitting in a drawer is DDR3-1333. I got the second set because I was getting blue screens and thought it might be the RAM. Turns out it was an external FireWire drive that was slow to start up.
OK, I loaded the game, drove around a bit, stole a Mini Cooper-equivalent, and I never got above 4.1 GB usage. So, I’ll keep an eye on it, but I’m probably fine with 6GB.
It will revert to 620x480 I think. All the icons on your desktop will look huge. All modern video cards today will work at this base, VGA level without any drivers present. Be sure to download the new GeForce drivers before you do anything else so you have them handy and easily accessible.
Once the AMD software is uninstalled power off your PC, pop the old card out and put the new card in (be sure to use the screws to tighten it down on the case…cards are heavy these days and they benefit from the support the screws provide).
Power on the PC and again you will see a screen with huge icons. Install the new software drivers which will take a few minutes and you’re good to go! (It may require a system restart but maybe not…I forget.)
You do not need to tell your games anything about the new card but you will of course want to go in the settings and start turning up the graphical goodies.
Use the 6+2 (seen on the right in that pic) for the 8 pin power and either a 6-pin PCI-e plug (if you have it) or another 6+2 plug and only use the 6-pin part for the 6-pin plug (the +2 part will just dangle by the side).
The plugs are keyed so should only fit in one orientation. If you are struggling to get the plug in you have the wrong plug or it is upside down.
I should have written down what my old settings were because GTA V automatically adjusted the settings for the new card. With my old card, on pretty low settings (but, 1080 vertical lines), I was getting between 20-30 FPS, closer to 30, when running the GTA benchmark. On the new one, with the new (beautiful!) settings, it’s at 60. I then turned up the MSAA to 2x so I could use Nvidia’s thing (TSAA? Something like that) and it’s still smooth as silk.
My windows experience index went from 7.7 to 7.9 for the graphics card (my bottleneck right now is the HD access speed – it’s a SSD, but my board is probably not fast enough).
Watching the memory, it got almost to 6GB during the benchmark, but doesn’t get that high during game play. I may just install the additional memory anyway.
I’ve been playing for a while now. The game looks fantastic now. It was raining and the puddles show reflections. During the day, the sun shines in just right. Beautiful!
Also, this card is much, much quieter than my last card – probably the lower power requirements of NVidia vs. AMD.
I’m probably going to try and install the other 6GB. The memory sits at about 5.7 GB all the time when I’m playing. Turns out that my mother board can’t make use of any memory speed above 1333, so I probably won’t see any difference at all, even theoretically.
Nvidia’s tech is called TXAA. And it’s a combo of MSAA + A post processing filter similar to FXAA + a temporal AA component.
It kills jaggies dead. But it also softens the frame considerably. Even more than your typical high quality FXAA filter would.
MSAA is great for AA on geometry, but it doesn’t tackle texture aliasing, or transparency aliasing. So for modern games it’s not enough.
I prefer a high quality post processing filter that tackles everything with as little as possible softening of the frame. SMAA does a good job of this, and some really good FXAA implementations also do this. The best are post processing effects that are smart about edge detection and include a temporal component, and are implemented by the dev directly so as not to be applied to things like UI elements.
I installed the additional 6GB that I had lying around with no issues. Checking the task manager as I play, GTA now routinely uses more than 6GB, so it must have been doing some swapping.
Anyway, that’s the end of my journey in this thread, unless anyone has any questions or tests they want me to do. Thanks again, all!
