The AMD vs HD vs Nvidia War in modern games

[Haggis and tatties]

^^^^Where were you in 1996 when i bought my first cd-rom drive and found i had no room to fit it's driver, and the soundblaster awe 32 driver, all into high mem.....at the same time.

God that SB awe driver was a real pain i remember.

Although i did find out that the dos manual, although somewhat bulky, was also quite aerodynamic.

 

[Santaman]

What was it again? large drivers first than the small stuff, could have been the other way around though... I had a whole bunch of different configs on a floppy, some programs needed EMS, some didn't etc etc etc...

My first CD-ROM was a 2-speed thingy which used a special add on card with two cables, not IDE, not SCSI, very not standard anything..

Sound cards of that era were usually 99% SoundBlaster compatible... aka, that last 1% made sure you still could not have sound with certain games/programs..

 

[Haggis and tatties]

Yeap, Bill Gates and his 640k will be enough. lol

Thank god for stuff like mem manager, a total godsend, did it all for you and away you went.

Of course the irony was that once i did get everything up and running, the CD-rom version of Dune i had bought it all for was almost unplayable on my 1 speed cd-rom and my wee 25mnz cpu.

Oh how i laughed.

 

[Santaman]

In 1994 my brother and I bought a 486 DX2 66 Mhz with 4 Mb RAM a Trident 9400 VESA card a Soundman Games soundcard (yeah yeah 99% SB compatible) a 420 Mb Seagate HDD and that really strange CD-ROM, for that time the machine was EPIC, later on we even bought a QIC -80 250/420 Mb tape drive, it could run classics like Doom I and II, Descent, Dune I and II and so on, its still alive and kicking...

MemMaker, I remember that one... this stuff is really ancient history LOL I am starting to feel old.

Oops, I think I've been derailing this thread a little..

 

[Owain Taggart]

I more of a pain than anything else when you were trying to get a dos game to run and you had another driver to try and fit into high mem or the game would not run. lol

Oh god, extended memory. What a pain in the ass it was! It was just so specific. I remember getting the original NASCAR racing from Papyrus and was trying desperately get it working in high-res mode, or even get it working at all. It seemed to be either high-res or soundcard, not both. It wasn't until a later computer that I managed to get both working. But wow, you really had to know what you were doing to get things working back then. A lot of trial and error and hair loss.

Back then, the computer was in the basement. I had an Adlib card (remember those?) that I plugged directly into the stereo system. I was in FM Synthesis heaven.

 

[Haggis and tatties]

^^Ha, my Bro in law had a PC that had a 33mhz cpu, and he could switch on road textures on Nascar, but with my craptastic 25mhz could not, so all i got was a grey road while he got grit, tyre marks, road lines and i think some shadows. lol

Adlib card was the first sound card i bought seeing as the idiot in Dixons sold me a PC without any sound card inside, i spent a few days going red faced with rage as Star Trek 25th anni would only beep out of the pc's rubbish built in speaker.......Beep beep beep....beep beeep beeep beeep beeeeepp.....bep bep.......no sound, no music, just beeps. lol

How far we have come. lol

In 1994 my brother and I bought a 486 DX2 66 Mhz with 4 Mb RAM a Trident 9400 VESA card a Soundman Games soundcard (yeah yeah 99% SB compatible) a 420 Mb Seagate HDD and that really strange CD-ROM, for that time the machine was EPIC, later on we even bought a QIC -80 250/420 Mb tape drive, it could run classics like Doom I and II, Descent, Dune I and II and so on, its still alive and kicking...

MemMaker, I remember that one... this stuff is really ancient history LOL I am starting to feel old.

Oops, I think I've been derailing this thread a little..

A DX486, i would drool over those in PC world and Dizon's, enough to run all those Origin games. ha

 

[SPCTRE]

ou could actually download software from ATI etc but even then they didn't update as fast as nowadays.

I loved experimenting with different driver versions with wildly differing perfomance depending on the game*, Borsti's RIVAstation page was great for that.

http://web.archive.org/web/19990125102808/http://www.rivastation.com/

*I was in school, so I had way too much time on my hands - installing six different driver releases and experimenting with unstable driver builds to get more FPS out of Q3A was my idea of having "fun" - on the plus side, I got very good at doing clean re-installs of OSs and switching/updating drivers, which was way more of a hassle back then.

 

[Santaman]

Clean installs.. yeah.. 11 disks of IBMDOS 7 and 13 disks Win 3.11 for Workgroups.. don't get me started on OS/2 Warp, it came on CD but there were still CD-ROM less machines so it took 15 diskettes to install it.. aaaaaaaaaaand the 13 disks of Win 3.11 to make it win 3.11 compatible, otherwise it was a rather decent OS, never crashed.
A while later Norton invented Ghost which was beyond epic since it made images of drives, reinstall once, image the thing and you would never have to reinstall it again, of course having a external HDD using the parallel port it created those disk images at a glacial speed..

 

[Crow T. Robot]

^^I remember those days but never got in to the sound card mess - it seemed way too complex for me at the time and even though I had outrageous mobos (at the time) that could handle sound cards, I went with onboard sound. FWIW, I still don't know what a SPDIF connection is because I just never focused on sound - CPUs, MoBos, Cards etc. were more my thing.

I'm the same way today, actually. I must be a special kind of tone deaf or something, but I can never tell the difference between onboard sound and a high-quality soundcard. The only thing that frustrates me is that the channels are almost always reversed, and I'm too lazy to figure out how to fix them.

That said, I got an EVGA GeForce GTX 690 some time ago (and yes, it was expensive, but I was splurging on myself as I never really had a high-end PC before). And even today, it manages to run every single game I've played at max settings with no trouble whatsoever. I mean, I don't get the 120+ frame rates I see some people brag about from time to time in certain games, but anything over 60 is pretty much imperceptible to me anyway.

So I don't really get the "graphics card wars" thing myself. I mean, I know it's a big issue in the gaming communities, but it's never once affected me at all. Heck, I don't even check for driver updates all that often.

 

[jenji120]

I'm the same way today, actually. I must be a special kind of tone deaf or something, but I can never tell the difference between onboard sound and a high-quality soundcard. The only thing that frustrates me is that the channels are almost always reversed, and I'm too lazy to figure out how to fix them.

That said, I got an EVGA GeForce GTX 690 some time ago (and yes, it was expensive, but I was splurging on myself as I never really had a high-end PC before). And even today, it manages to run every single game I've played at max settings with no trouble whatsoever. I mean, I don't get the 120+ frame rates I see some people brag about from time to time in certain games, but anything over 60 is pretty much imperceptible to me anyway.

So I don't really get the "graphics card wars" thing myself. I mean, I know it's a big issue in the gaming communities, but it's never once affected me at all. Heck, I don't even check for driver updates all that often.

With today's onboard sound it may not be noticeable assuming the mobo is high end. I'm sure there's some difference you can here if you buy a super high end one AND also buy super high end speakers to go with it but it may not be noticeable with just a standard midrange speaker setup.

I prefer max settings but as long as I can play a game on at least medium settings with no lag, I don't care about the frame rate. Frame rate is only a bother to me if it's really bad. I don't play a lot of online games where my machine has to be the best or I get killed just as I spawn (the cheats stopped me from getting into those long ago). Most of my gaming time is spent in open world games where I'm exploring and doing stuff other than battling creatures constantly so that probably makes a difference. Right now, I'm revisiting Morrowind (the graphics and sound overhaul mod is awesome!) and still have Fallout 4 and the Witcher to complete. I tend to drag my game time out as long as possible instead of completing them quickly.

 

[Crow T. Robot]

With today's onboard sound it may not be noticeable assuming the mobo is high end. I'm sure there's some difference you can here if you buy a super high end one AND also buy super high end speakers to go with it but it may not be noticeable with just a standard midrange speaker setup.

I've been a hobbiest since the early 90's. I've never noticed a difference between high-end or low-end soundcards. Ditto with most speakers. I really think I lack whatever it is that allows people to notice the differences between such things. (It's probably why most of my friends and family think my tastes in music is pretty awful, too.)

 

[jenji120]

I've been a hobbiest since the early 90's. I've never noticed a difference between high-end or low-end soundcards. Ditto with most speakers. I really think I lack whatever it is that allows people to notice the differences between such things. (It's probably why most of my friends and family think my tastes in music is pretty awful, too.)

Well at least you can save money on it.

 

[Amaris]

I guess as I get older, I care less and less about which video card/chip has the super top 0.00001% performance increase for the next six weeks until the competition brings out their wondercard that is 0.00000025% more powerful than that (and all for the low, low price of $1,000+). I don't play high end games on my PC anymore, or ever did really, but I do a lot of DVD/HD authoring, and I like my video card to be reliable. I have an ATI Radeon 4670HD X2 that still does a terrific job of handling my graphic needs. The downside? Windows 10 hates it.

 

[Santaman]

^ You could buy a mid range AMD card to replace that 4670, it would be faster, quieter, draw far less power and Windows 10 (ewww) will not be bothersome.

 

[Amaris]

^ You could buy a mid range AMD card to replace that 4670, it would be faster, quieter, draw far less power and Windows 10 (ewww) will not be bothersome.

I plan on doing so now that I have an Xbox One (thanks Dad!). This card is from when I tried to play mid to higher end games (though not the highest stuff). These days, I don't need something geared toward such. I've been saving up to build a nice little PC, since this one is getting old and starting to fall apart. It's difficult for it to keep up with the HD standard nowadays.

 

[Santaman]

I think you could do with one of the higher end APU's then, they're quite snappy, and if you've got programs that use the power of the build in GPU then they can get quite a boost out of it.

 

[Amaris]

I think you could do with one of the higher end APU's then, they're quite snappy, and if you've got programs that use the power of the build in GPU then they can get quite a boost out of it.

Ah, that's right. AMD now has an APU, which is still hard for me to grasp because I'm used to chip makers moving away from the primary CPU pushing the graphics side of things.

 

[Santaman]

They're pretty nice designs, I have a low end Am1 APU, its 2.05 Ghz but a quadcore, its about as fast as an older Phenom at about 2.3Ghz and it has an R3 graphics card build into it, despite only drawing 25watts it kicks the ass of all my dual core machines with ease, the latest AM2+ APU's are also quadcore and have a R7 card build into them, its even DX 12 compatible/ready, also you can add a R7 card later on which will then work in crossfire with the build in card.

Its not high end but affordable and fast enough for everything besides hardcore gaming.

 

[Mr. Adventure]

I've been thinking of upgrading and lo and behold the GTX 1080 is coming out in a couple weeks, I'm looking to splurge a little bit on that bad boy, it sounds awesome.

 

[Santaman]

^^ That's quite a card, I probably will buy an AMD again if I happen to need a new GPU or even a APU since those are probaly going to be powerful enough to run the stuff I need it to run.