Graphics Need Some Solid Advice, Please

Morning all.

I have the following set-up...

AMD 64 4000+ San Diego / AUSU A8N-SLI Deluxe mobo / 2 gig of ram / XFX 7800GTX 256mb / Enermax 600 watt supply.

Been playing STALKER recently, along with a few other recent games, and have found it stuttering quite a bit.

Would an upgrade to a 8800GTS be a smart move, and prolong the life of my current set-up for another year or so?

I know I need to move to dual core, and will do with the next big upgrade, but I'm looking for a quick fix that will last a good 12 months?

Any suggestions?

 

Whats your screen like? There's not really any point in upgrading to an 8800GTS unless you're playing at 1680x1050 or 1600x1200 imo. Not for now. Assuming you've got the screen to use an 8800..the 8800GTS is a great card and should give you some more life, but since those things result in your CPU being the bottleneck you're really going to feel it over the next 12 months. By 04/08 quad core(or maybe more ) will be the norm for high end gaming rigs, and games are increasingly designed to take advantage of multiple cores. HTH

 

I have to agree with spec - I upgraded from an Opty 146 @ 3GHz to this X2 at 2.7GHz, and newer games run a lot faster because they're multithreaded.

Upgrading to a new card will simply shift the bottleneck fully to the CPU, and you'll be disappointed with not being able to use all that raw power. I'd go for an X2 first, then a new card later. Or probably just a big upgrade to C2D...

 

If you do get the 8800GTS make sure it's got 640mb of memory.

If your playing at 1600x1200 then it starts to bottle neck on the 320mb cards. The 640mb will ensure that you have some future proofing. (according to guru3D).

I would have thought that your current setup would have allowed good performance at 1280x1024?

 

Upgrades to C2D needn't be all that expensive tbh. You can do an upgrade for the same cost as an 8800GTS 640, and when you consider that you can sell your old kit, you might be able to afford a GTS a few months later anyway.

 

its depends on what you want out of the short / long term. If you want a quick fix to make your games run a lot faster and make your system last the extra 12 months then get the 8800GTS ... it will give you that increase of speed you want to get you through the next 12 months and make you happy with your rig but as the guys have already said, as the more demanding games come out your platform will be the limiting factor.

The C2D system would be the logical upgrade for your platform (if you want to take that route), there really isnt any point in getting a s939 X2 processor due to the rarity/lack of high speed X2 processors available for the s939 platform these days ...

You could get yourself a nice E6300 - E6600, 2GB DDR2 and a 965/975 chipset board (or push to a nvidia i680 if you have a lot of cash) which will give you a nice boost in games, but it wont give you as much of a boost in games as the 8800 GTS would ...

 

A recent CPU performance test of Stalker on Firingsquads site states the game doesn't make use of multicored CPUs. Also pointed out was that by upping the resolution even more load is taken off the CPU anyway.

They go on to say that expensive AMD FX and Intel quad core CPU's are not needed for Stalker as the game makes no use of them anyway.

I have been hearing for well over 18 months now that multicored cpus are a must for gaming but still it is just not happening. Stalker was/is suposed to give a nice boost but now the games out this was just a myth, just as i expected.

Which brings me to my next point. Bottlenecking. A stock 2.4ghz A64 4000+ will hardly bottleneck a 8800GTS in any game. Infact it's so small you'll not even notice. With shader intensive games (like Oblivion and FEAR) there is no bottlenecking atall, at any resolution. Shader intense games are ALL GPU limited. Even the 8800GTX is not cpu limited in shader intensive games.

Here is a quote from another firingsquad performance test.
In shader-heavy titles like Oblivion and F.E.A.R. the GeForce 8800 GTX and 8800 GTS were never CPU-bound. In fact in our foliage test with Oblivion we were 100% GPU-bound, whether we were testing with an X2 3800 @ 2ghz or the FX-62, performance was the same across all resolutions, including 1280x1024! Of course, keep in mind that we were testing Oblivion in particular with HDR+AA, so that’s going to be harder on the GPU, if we’d turned off AA the results may have been a little different, but we have a strong feeling that anyone who is going to buy a GeForce 8800 card is going to want to run with HDR+AA.
In any case, this suggests that perhaps with next-gen shader model 3.0 and DX10 games the CPU won’t play as large a role in overall performance

So there you have it. I'm not saying this is 100% accurate but, to me, dual cored cpus and bottlenecking is nowhere near as bad as some people keep saying. And untill i see some hard facts i'm not going to be convinced otherwise.

Anyway a nicely overclocked Athlon 64 will last a while longer yet, regardless of what AMD and Intel would have you believe.

 

Check out HardOCP's test of SupCom on single, dual, and quad cores. That pretty much shows the way that many games are going to go imo.

 

You said that within the year it will be the 'norm', and then another game comes out (stalker) that blows that theory completely out of the water.
Infact i bet that by this time next year the amount of games released that don't utilise dual core (actually you said quad core) cpus properly or atall far outweight those that do.

We'll just have to see won't we

 

I experienced stuttering with stalker, but then people have said thats down to dodgy coding rather than anything else. So they advised to turn the lighting off in the options and it sorted it fine for me. Running at 1680 x 1050 on a sapphire x1950 pro with very playable framerates (I've never done fraps or any of the checking things, I just know I don't notice any lag except at occasional points)