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

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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.