Well I thought about it this morning and I feel just like writing this today after experiences with using a standard OC GTX 780 across NVidia Surround.
Alright, to those who hasn't really caught up with the subject of PC Hardware and Gizmos, just a refresher to what the GTX 780 has. And today's subject I want to write is Video Memory.
The card has 3GB of GDDR5 Memory on a 384-bit bus. Now those who game on a single screen like 1920 x 1080 and 2560 x 1440 may feel like 3GB of Video Ram is enough for a resolution. And yup, I do agree. Crank the resolutions to nVidia Surround and Eyefinity or go a 33% more to 4K Resolutions, 3GB I feel is definitely not enough. So nVidia: I would love and REALLY want you guys to release 6GB versions of the cards.
I've seen 6GB Cards but these are only from the Titans and the newly released Titan Blacks. 6GB is ideal on such high resolutions where you need it more for textures. But these are too expensive owing to the fact they concentrate more on CUDA Developers which require Double Precision Power which we DON'T need in a gaming scenario. AMD has opted for a good 4GB of VRAM on the R9 290 and R9 290X. Even though at smaller resolutions, these cards aren't as powerful as the GTX 780 Ti in terms of performance, the moment you go Surround or 4K, the differences become very close together. It may just be 1 Gig difference but that can mean a lot. It'll be so nice to have that amount of memory.
The Titans are not the first cards I see with 6GB of memory, Sapphire has actually managed to cramp 6GB of VRAM in their Toxic Editions of the Last Generation 7970 GHz Edition GPUs. That extra 3GB of frame buffer tested by Elric Phares back in his Motherboards.org days really helps a lot even though the card is now like 2 years old. It can still compete well as an OC R9 280X and perhaps a little more so with that additional Memory. And it's ironic that we actually see 4GB of VRAM on the Mobile GTX 780M on a GK 104 at 1920 x 1080, and we don't get to see more than 3GB of VRAM in a desktop non-double precision GK 110 that sees increasingly being used at 5760 x 1080 and Hardware enthusiasts are gonna need more than that. 5760 x 1080 is more common than 4K and it's still pretty damn demanding on VRAM despite being just three-quarters of a 4K here.
I really do hope nVidia comes up with a 6GB version of the card. Or 4GB and above at the very least...
Friday 28 February 2014
Saturday 8 February 2014
Elder Scrolls: Online BETA First Thoughts
General Gameplay
Okay! I get to try out a bit of Elder Scrolls Online (ESO for short). So I just decided to screw around a little bit.
Test Rigs:
Desktop
Core i7 2600K OC 4.5GHz
Corsair H70
Corsair HX1000
GTX 780 GHz (Zotac GTX 780 AMP! Edition Card)
16GB RAM
Testing in 1920 x 1080 and 5760 x 1080.
Laptop - Clevo W110ER Aftershock X11 - for Image Comparison
Core i7 3630QM
GT 650M
8GB RAM
Testing in 1366 x 768 and 1920 x 1080
Now hardware requirements aren't particularly demanding, seeing that game engine in Skyrim looks very similar to ESO's. So theoretically, most mid-range hardware can run this hardware on pretty decent settings. My laptop is starting to show signs of being obsolete with the Clevo W230ST fulfilling the new role. Still the last generation smallest gaming laptop holds its own well and can handle the game within its native settings at 1366 x 768 at Full maximum quite fluently. Frame rates will vary depending on the location, whether indoors or out, big or small battles. But more primarily location as it seems to be. Big areas with lot of combat will drop frames to around 20. But it's not spiking too much so it's still somewhat fluent. To me these MMOs are perfectly acceptable at 25-28 fps. It would be best to turn off AA but oddly doesn't really improve performance all that much.
As of the update 5th-April-2014: Tom's Hardware have released their performance review of ESO. It also concurred that something as low end as an AMD R7 240 can handle at Medium at 1280 x 720 and up to the GTX 650 at 1920 x 1080. And then Notebookcheck has published their benchmark reviews on notebook GPUs required to play ESO. Links follow:
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/the-elder-scrolls-online-performance,3789.html
http://www.notebookcheck.net/The-Elder-Scrolls-Online-Benchmarked.115100.0.html
Here's the screen quality as you tweak the settings:
As I've already tested with 5760 x 1080, the game runs no problem in Surround on a single GTX 780. Running in excess of 60 fps with Surround completely maxed out means that running on a single 1920 x 1080 should be quite overkill. And the GTX 780 Ti that Tom's Hardware used in their reviews performs pretty much where it should be; seeing my Zotac GTX 780 is already heavily overclocked to perform around this performance. Frame rates will start to cap at around the 100 mark. You can even get away with the HD 4600 Graphics at Medium Settings at 1366 x 768.
CPU PERFORMANCE
It seems in general that Intel leads the Battle as shown in Tom's Hardware, with even the low end Dual-Core Quad Threaded Core i3-3220 slightly edging out the former FX 8XXX Flagship 8350 that. The performance hit becomes more obvious to the APUs. For that one Notebookcheck used a GTX 680 to completely remove the GPU limitation, and becomes quite a CPU Bottleneck.
PROBLEMS
There are 2 problems with 5760 x 1080 which is this:
Yeah, the dialogue screen is bloated. It wasn't like this when I tested on a single screen: that case was the Laptop. And if you have surround setup, it's near impossible to get 1920 x 1080 to work properly and get it on a single screen. What reducing to 1920 x 1080 does is reducing the pixel density across the screens. Skyrim had these problems when I tried playing at 5760 x 1080 when it comes to bloated UI and I'm surprised that this problem still exists in ESO but albeit when switching between 5760 x 1080 and 1920 x 1080. So I hope Bethesda gets that patched up soon. So to compare I had to screenshot a window mode at 1920 x 1080. For now, there is no easy way to swap between 1920 x 1080 and 5760 x 1080 except turning off / on nVidia Surround completely when changing resolutions.
Speaking of 1920 x 1080, here's some comparing 16:9 1920 x 1080 to 48:9 surround 5760 x 1080.
Another optimization problem that Tom's Hardware found is that this game hasn't been optimized for Dual GPU cards quite yet. I would have done that but I don't have any Dual GPUs in my store. From their 5760 x 1080 Benchmark at full max, the Radeon 7990 and the GTX 690 seems to struggle quite a lot and its frame pacing shows.
General
One thing I seem to discover that loading times shrunk dramatically and the game responses a bit better when this game is installed on a SSD, which is also evident on Diablo III.
Aside from the display flaws, the game looks absolutely fantastic, especially once you get to the great outdoors. Even with Mid-ranged hardware on a single screen, the visuals are respectable. How you play this game is very similar to Skyrim. Now here's some shots all in nVidia Surround.
Okay! I get to try out a bit of Elder Scrolls Online (ESO for short). So I just decided to screw around a little bit.
Test Rigs:
Desktop
Core i7 2600K OC 4.5GHz
Corsair H70
Corsair HX1000
GTX 780 GHz (Zotac GTX 780 AMP! Edition Card)
16GB RAM
Testing in 1920 x 1080 and 5760 x 1080.
Laptop - Clevo W110ER Aftershock X11 - for Image Comparison
Core i7 3630QM
GT 650M
8GB RAM
Testing in 1366 x 768 and 1920 x 1080
Now hardware requirements aren't particularly demanding, seeing that game engine in Skyrim looks very similar to ESO's. So theoretically, most mid-range hardware can run this hardware on pretty decent settings. My laptop is starting to show signs of being obsolete with the Clevo W230ST fulfilling the new role. Still the last generation smallest gaming laptop holds its own well and can handle the game within its native settings at 1366 x 768 at Full maximum quite fluently. Frame rates will vary depending on the location, whether indoors or out, big or small battles. But more primarily location as it seems to be. Big areas with lot of combat will drop frames to around 20. But it's not spiking too much so it's still somewhat fluent. To me these MMOs are perfectly acceptable at 25-28 fps. It would be best to turn off AA but oddly doesn't really improve performance all that much.
As of the update 5th-April-2014: Tom's Hardware have released their performance review of ESO. It also concurred that something as low end as an AMD R7 240 can handle at Medium at 1280 x 720 and up to the GTX 650 at 1920 x 1080. And then Notebookcheck has published their benchmark reviews on notebook GPUs required to play ESO. Links follow:
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/the-elder-scrolls-online-performance,3789.html
http://www.notebookcheck.net/The-Elder-Scrolls-Online-Benchmarked.115100.0.html
Here's the screen quality as you tweak the settings:
 |
| 1366 x 768 - Low Preset, AA is off by Default |
 |
| 1366 x 768 - Medium Preset, Big difference, big difference. A GT 650M can handle this no problems. |
 |
| 1366 x 768 on High: Now Anti Aliasing turns on by default. |
 |
| 1366 x 768: Maximum Settings, it's still playable on a GT 650M, with stutters every now and again. |
CPU PERFORMANCE
It seems in general that Intel leads the Battle as shown in Tom's Hardware, with even the low end Dual-Core Quad Threaded Core i3-3220 slightly edging out the former FX 8XXX Flagship 8350 that. The performance hit becomes more obvious to the APUs. For that one Notebookcheck used a GTX 680 to completely remove the GPU limitation, and becomes quite a CPU Bottleneck.
PROBLEMS
There are 2 problems with 5760 x 1080 which is this:
Yeah, the dialogue screen is bloated. It wasn't like this when I tested on a single screen: that case was the Laptop. And if you have surround setup, it's near impossible to get 1920 x 1080 to work properly and get it on a single screen. What reducing to 1920 x 1080 does is reducing the pixel density across the screens. Skyrim had these problems when I tried playing at 5760 x 1080 when it comes to bloated UI and I'm surprised that this problem still exists in ESO but albeit when switching between 5760 x 1080 and 1920 x 1080. So I hope Bethesda gets that patched up soon. So to compare I had to screenshot a window mode at 1920 x 1080. For now, there is no easy way to swap between 1920 x 1080 and 5760 x 1080 except turning off / on nVidia Surround completely when changing resolutions.
Speaking of 1920 x 1080, here's some comparing 16:9 1920 x 1080 to 48:9 surround 5760 x 1080.
 |
| 1920 x 1080 - 16:9 |
 |
| 5760 x 1080 - 48:9 Surround |
 |
| 1920 x 1080 - 16:9 |
 |
| 5760 x 1080 - 48:9 Surround |
General
One thing I seem to discover that loading times shrunk dramatically and the game responses a bit better when this game is installed on a SSD, which is also evident on Diablo III.
Aside from the display flaws, the game looks absolutely fantastic, especially once you get to the great outdoors. Even with Mid-ranged hardware on a single screen, the visuals are respectable. How you play this game is very similar to Skyrim. Now here's some shots all in nVidia Surround.
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