GPU Question: Attn. -nVidia 570- & -ATi HD 6970- owners

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Originally Posted by Konachibi

Doot doot doot, another thread down the pan,
doot doot doot, another thread down the pan,
and another one shouts
and another one trolls
another thread down the pan,
Hey! Y'know he'll argue,
another thread down the pan.

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yea well, last week's immersion threadnaught has left me little patience :P

Hey guys try and stay on topic. This thread is a NO ANGER ZONE, meaning if you're mad you'll have to wait outside.

This threads purpose is to gather input on what graphics settings are viable with various hardware in XIV.

Also: AMD and nVidia cards both have their pros and cons, I've owned multiple cards from each company and have mostly had good experiences with the two.

Also: I'm looking to spend $USD 240-340 because I want the card to last for 10-16 months or so.

Also: I figured out one of the reasons XIV was so laggy for me, apparently it didn't like the texture filtering settings in my drivers all set to max. Also when I enabled AA I was enabling SSAA, not FSAA, so instead of drawing just parts of the scene at high resolution and scaling them back, it was redrawing the whole image at a much greater resolution. Disabled Visual Themes and Desktop Composition as well. Getting about 30-45 FPS at 1920x1080 with drawing quality set to 8 and 4xMSAA in windowed mode. Still would like to be able to take it to 8xFSAA+ and take the texture filtering/mip map settings back up while garnering 50+ FPS.

Thanks for the additional feedback.

I just upped my Anti Aliasing to 16xCSAA and set FRAPS to display FPS while running through all 3 cities and their surrounding areas. I edited my original reply to reflect the new observations, but wanted to post a new reply as well:

I average anywhere between 30 ~ 55 FPS in the cities, mainly depending on how many players, NPCs and special/event objects are around.

Out in the field I get a very solid 60 FPS even during rain and wind storms. My computer heats up quite a bit more, but the FPS rate doesn't drop. It only goes down a few FPS when running through bushes and trees and camps.

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Originally Posted by Aenarion

btw, nice OC, almost pulled the trigger on sandybridge, but figure I might as well wait for Ivy and see if AMD can pull one out of the hat w/ the bulldozer.

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Cheers, I've definitely got a lot of headroom left though on CPU, An get the feeling I can push the 1k with the GPU with a weebit more Votls and under liquid, but that involves having any free time to do the blocks, or well anything come to think of it. :(

I had intended to wait out the Bulldozer/Ivy-bridge chips but my faithful old 5200+ was going to die if I kept trying to get more out of it then it had to give, so i bit the bullet back near Dec/Jan (then had to wait out all the B3 revision crap lol).

Bumping for more feedback. Thanks.

btw does the nVidia 570GT have that linking capability that the other recent nvidia cards have?

Just had my job start date confirmed so I'm gonna start planning out the new computer I was gonna build, and wanted to build something that should last me quite a few years before being out-dated, and figured linking two top-end graphics cards together, although overkill, would make it capable of handling anything games companies could throw at me for the next few years.

i7 950, 6gb ram, GTX280:
Windowed @1920x1200
No AA
General Draw Quality: 8
Background Draw Quality: 5
Shadow Detail: Standard
Ambient Occlusion: off
Depth of Field: off
Texture Quality: Standard
Texture Filtering: Standard
50-60fps at any given time.

i7 Q820, 8gb ram, GTX240m
Windowed @1920x1080
No AA
General Draw Quality: 8
Background Draw Quality: 3
Shadow Detail: Standard
Ambient Occlusion: off
Depth of Field: off
Texture Quality: Standard
Texture Filtering: Standard
20-25fps at any given time.

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Originally Posted by Darkshade

Thanks for the information. Keep it coming, I do appreciate it greatly.

Also note that I have a 128GB SATA2 SSD which my OS and XIV are installed on.

Also please note if the graphics ever stutter/choke even if you get 60FPS most of the time and whether or not you have an SSD.

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SSD fixed my stuttering issue, for some odd reason SE makes the game timestamp like thousands of files a minute while play idk why but they do.

and your main question all depends how much you want to spend and what you want to do. In your case for the price of 1x GTX 570 I would consider getting 2x 6xxx series cards and tossing them into a crossfire setup provided you have the sufficient PSU to handle the multiple cards.

AMD designs there chipsets that run there chips to work best with Raedon cards they have done so ever since AMD bought out ATI.

Nvidia cards have a few extra driver options last I looked most notably the ability to have the physX settings handled by another cheaper video card or the CPU. I am not sure if Raedon cards have matched this setting or not. In any case the Crossfire setup would definitely outperform the single card nvidia setup in any regard.

Me Personally I will be tossing 2x GTX 570 into my setup when I build my new PC next year when Intels new Ivybridge Chips and the 2012 Chipset is out just because of how the Intel system performs with a SSD much less what the new motherboards will have on them. PCIE 3.0, USB 3.0, SATA 6, and Thunderbolt, but that's just me. If you have the money there is a lot of hardware changes due out by March and it may benefit you to wait until the early part of next year to make any upgrades.

Just so your aware im running

AMD Phenom 1090t
ASUS M4A7 + Motherboard
8GB DDR2 (Yes I know its DDR2 it sucks)
OCZ Vertex II 160GB SSD
EVGA GTX 470 with a custom Cooler as the fan setup on these sucked

I run XIV in

1920x1080 - 60FPS out of town 45 FPS in town
0x AA
All Standard Settings

There really was not that much of a difference between standard and high so I elected to drop settings to keep video card running cooler.

My new setup is going to be

Ivybridge Chip not sure which one yet there all 6 or 8 cores with hyperthreading
24GB Corsair Dominator DDR3 RAM OC to 2200- for 250 dollars cant go wrong here
EVGA SR3 Motherboard
2x GTX 570 SLI
1000w PSU Either Corsair or Silverstone

Phenom X4, 3.0 GHz
8 GB of memory
faulty GTX 285 (underclocked to 620ish for stability)
Windowed at 1440 x 1050
No AA
General Draw Quality: 8
Background Draw Quality: 3
Shadow Detail: Lowest
Ambient Occlusion: off
Depth of Field: off
Texture Quality: High
Texture Filtering: Low
Extended Draw: Off
Physics: On
Dust Effects: On
>30 fps outside of cities, 15~25 fps in cities. Never 60 fps.

Phenom X4, 3.0 GHz
8 GB of memory
GTX 560
Fullscreen at 1680 x 1050
x2 AA
General Draw Quality: 8
Background Draw Quality: 3
Shadow Detail: Lowest
Ambient Occlusion: off
Depth of Field: off
Texture Quality: High
Texture Filtering: High
Extended Draw: Off
Physics: On
Dust Effects: On
>30 fps outside of cities, 15~25 fps in cities. Never 60 fps.

Phenom X4, 3.0 GHz
8 GB of memory
GTX 560
Windowed at 1680 x 1050
No AA
General Draw Quality: 3
Background Draw Quality: 2
Shadow Detail: Lowest
Ambient Occlusion: off
Depth of Field: off
Texture Quality: High
Texture Filtering: Low
40~50 fps, but not 60 fps in most places, about 30 fps in the city

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Originally Posted by Konachibi

btw does the nVidia 570GT have that linking capability that the other recent nvidia cards have?

Just had my job start date confirmed so I'm gonna start planning out the new computer I was gonna build, and wanted to build something that should last me quite a few years before being out-dated, and figured linking two top-end graphics cards together, although overkill, would make it capable of handling anything games companies could throw at me for the next few years.

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nVidia's multi GPU technology is called SLI
AMD's multi GPU technology is called CrossFire

Just about every medium end card and above supports the technology, but you also need a mother board that has multiple PCI-E 2.0+ slots and your motherboard specifications if it supports one or the other technology.

In general I recommend getting a single "decent" card over two equally priced "okay" cards because some games don't support GPU scaling that well, like XIV for example only supports it in fullscreen mode.

See http://tinyurl.com/falconguide for more information.

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Originally Posted by Darkshade

nVidia's multi GPU technology is called SLI
AMD's multi GPU technology is called CrossFire

Just about every medium end card and above supports the technology, but you also need a mother board that has multiple PCI-E 2.0+ slots and your motherboard specifications if it supports one or the other technology.

In general I recommend getting a single "decent" card over two equally priced "okay" cards because some games don't support GPU scaling that well, like XIV for example only supports it in fullscreen mode.

See http://tinyurl.com/falconguide for more information.

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That's fine, I don't really like playing games in windowed mode anyways, kinda takes the feel away from it when you can see the desktop round the edges.

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Originally Posted by Konachibi

That's fine, I don't really like playing games in windowed mode anyways, kinda takes the feel away from it when you can see the desktop round the edges.

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I only play XIV in windowed because it crashes upon alt tab, I use a direct x launcher to make it border-less so it appears full screen at the loss of some FPS.

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Originally Posted by Darkshade

I only play XIV in windowed because it crashes upon alt tab, I use a direct x launcher to make it border-less so it appears full screen at the loss of some FPS.

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ah well yeah the alt+tab is a pain, especially when boosting crafting and I need to check up on a new recipe to get something that gives more SP.

May just by myself a cheapy laptop to get around that problem.

I have a 6950 and I think it's great. You can tweak it to almost match that of 6970 performance for a much cheaper price.

Anyway I play on..

Resolution: 5948x1080 Full screen
General Drawing Quality: 9
Bakcground Drawing Quality: 4
Shadow Detail: 4
Ambient Occulsion: Off (I havent messed with this yet)
Depth of Field: On
Texture Quality: High
Texture filtering: High

Everything is smooth and I get an average of 40fps

Weather you go for ATI or Nvidia I'd say go for the one one model lower (6950 or 560). I also prefer more memory, but thats cause I play with a high res. The difference to cost is huge, you only get a little bit more performace by paying significantly more. However if you have the budget go for whatever is the most you can afford!

Good luck with your new GPU purchase :)

AMD phenom ii x6
2x HD 6990
Gigabyte 990-FXA UD5
16GB HyperX RAM
Crucial 64GB SSDx3
750w Antec PSU.
and a bunch of home-job cooling.

1920x1080
No Ambient Occlusion
No Depth of field


I can run everything on max settings, the only thing I get is a few overheating issues if I play for too long. Nothing life threatening. But the 6850 is a great card for the price. As long as all of your other hardware can support it you should do fine.

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Originally Posted by Darkshade

Hello and thank you for stopping in to read my thread!

I have a question. I'm having trouble deciding which GPU to purchase.

I will likely be upgrading my GPU from an ATi 5850 1GB to either a nVidia 570 or ATi 6970. I probably won't make the purchase until the HD 7XXX series ships.

They both seem to have their strong points in the benchmarks with the 570 taking more FSAA wins and the 6970 taking more high resolution wins. As no one does benchmarks with XIV I've decided to come here and ask the source.

I'm curious as to which card performs better in XIV especially with FSAA at around resolutions of 1920x1080. Particularly if you could answer the following:

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-Current GPU:

-Anti Aliasing:

-Resolution:

-General Drawing Quality:

-Windowed or Fullscreen:

-Average FPS, if you don't know just ballpark it(Great/Smooth as silk=60+, Decent/Occasional FPS dips or lag=40+, I can deal with this/Bowling ball camera, choppy or laggy movement=20+, Horrible/I hate my life 0-10+):

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For comparison, here is mine with my current settings and a 5850.

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-Current GPU: 5850

-Anti Aliasing: 0

-Resolution: 1920x1080

-General Drawing Quality: 7

-Windowed or Fullscreen: Windowed

-Average FPS, if you don't know just ballpark it(Great/Smooth as silk=60+, Decent/Occasional FPS dips or lag=40+, I can deal with this/Bowling ball camera, choppy or laggy movement=20+, Horrible/I hate my life 0-10+): Between 25-40.

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Thank you very much for your time.

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Do it "on the cheap." If your motherboard has two PCIEx16 slots, get two 470's and SLI them. Beautiful performance.

I'm pretty sure I read somewhere that SLI/Crossfire doesn't really help unless you're in fullscreen mode

Something about DirectX 9 and Crossfire - but SLI can?
http://ffxiv.zam.com/forum.html?foru...032671432&h=50

I hope a dev gives a final answer

Just though id add Most shaders are using your CPU an not GPU in rendering engines as of blender or 3ds its more effective to use CPU then the GPU so i figure its the same case meaning no matter what graphics card u have AO might not work great still ,

-Current GPU:2 ati Sapphire5870's Radeon

-Anti Aliasing:4x

-Resolution:umm idk the 1700 setting they have in the config

-General Drawing Quality:10

-Windowed or Fullscreen:both but fullscreen is much better

-CPU: AMD 6 Core Black Edition OC 3.9 with ASUS Mother board boost an unlocker

I'm not sure if it' still a problem but for those people that have more then 2 cores you have to set affinitys if your using windows 7 everytime u want to play the game using all your cores i know i still have to an its plays great fraps shows drawing rate at 83-90 latly though my power fan has been going stupid >.> i have to poke it with a rubberband its making noise but thats the power supplys :p well thats my setup

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Originally Posted by Litre

I'm pretty sure I read somewhere that SLI/Crossfire doesn't really help unless you're in fullscreen mode

Something about DirectX 9 and Crossfire - but SLI can?
http://ffxiv.zam.com/forum.html?foru...032671432&h=50

I hope a dev gives a final answer

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I'm not sure what I'm doing right, but I'm in windowed mode and EVGA precision is showing both GPUs in use. So Iunno.

Both SLI and Crossfire Can work in windowed mode, the limitation with Crossfire at the moment is the game needs to use DX10/11 for it to work, while SLI will work with DX9 games in Windowed mode. However, in both cases, it doesn't work as well as it would in Fullscreen. Which is a given since games run better in fullscreen in the first place.

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Originally Posted by ispano

Both SLI and Crossfire Can work in windowed mode, the limitation with Crossfire at the moment is the game needs to use DX10/11 for it to work, while SLI will work with DX9 games in Windowed mode. However, in both cases, it doesn't work as well as it would in Fullscreen. Which is a given since games run better in fullscreen in the first place.

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That explains it, thanks. My technical skills have been out of practice lately. Early adopter of i7 so I haven't needed to tinker with anything for a while, haha.

Except for my water cooling project last year, that was a lot of fun.