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

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.

ati 6850 is more than enough to handle this game at max settings and is cheaper than 6870 by quite a bit can get a XFX one under 200$s only problem is they are HUGE gotta make sure u got room to fit it in tower i have 2 which i had to bang into place w/ a rubber mallet rofl.the second card isnt even being used > >; 40-60 fps usually 50+fps resolution is set to max but i play w/ hdmi cable thru my 47inch LCD tv looks great... 6850 has HDMI/DVI connections for TV.




BTW ATI cards always seem to perfom better on games that are VERY graphic intensive. Almost every comparison shows it and hardly ever any Driver issues that use to cause problems for ATI cards.

I'm not very technical when it comes to computers, but here is what I can gather about my system:

-Current GPU: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 570

-CPU: Core i7 2.8GHz

-Hard Drive: 128GB SSD (really helped to eliminate stuttering)

-Anti Aliasing: 8xCSAA

-Resolution: 1920x1080

-General Drawing Quality: 8 (Standard)
- Background Drawing Quality: 4
- Shadow Detail: Highest
- Depth of Field: On
- Texture Quality: High
- Texture Filtering: High

-Windowed or Fullscreen: I've been switching between Windowed and Full Screen recently and don't really notice a big difference in performance.

Edit after checking actual FPS rates:
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.


Friends have said I should be able to go with even higher settings, but I think my case isn't very good at cooling because it gets really hot and the computer starts to make noise like it's about to blow up... so I've backed off a bit on the settings. ^^;

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Hikozaemon

ati 6850 is more than enough to handle this game at max settings and is cheaper than 6870 by quite a bit can get a XFX one under 200$s only problem is they are HUGE gotta make sure u got room to fit it in tower i have 2 which i had to bang into place w/ a rubber mallet rofl.the second card isnt even being used > >; 40-60 fps usually 50+fps resolution is set to max but i play w/ hdmi cable thru my 47inch LCD tv looks great... 6850 has HDMI/DVI connections for TV.




BTW ATI cards always seem to perfom better on games that are VERY graphic intensive. Almost every comparison shows it and hardly ever any Driver issues that use to cause problems for ATI cards.

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Glad someone said this and right away... its only $150 bucks, runs everything but ambient max with usually a steady 60 fps... oaying more then the $150 for a FF graphics card is overkill on pc and your wallet. Runs all my other games inc witcher 2 and crysis 2 extremely smooth as well! GTX 500's are overpriced and you'll be paying more per performance you get... and seeing as you don't need higher then a 6850 like I said... ya total waste xD if you have unlimited budget and don't care about price though go for w/e is most powerful. In conjunction with a ssd its extrememly smooth and loads are exremely fast! Especially all character models, they'll all pop as soon as they are within distance... this game benefits HUGELY from good read times and low response times from storage (hdd or ssd)!

All normal settings set to highest + no ambient

- ATI 6850 HD
- AA is set to 2
- 1920 x 1080
- 8
- full screen
- 60 fps even in towns ... dips a tad in windowed while in towns

Oh and I maintain 40 fps + with depth of field on!
Can't beat that performance for such a cheap card lol

*above posts are useless without at least cpu spec*




what's your system spec right now? what psu do you have? is FF14 your primary use? or are you planning on playing other games down the line? what's your budget and expectation for system longevity?

in other words, need more information :P

Oh I guess that would help.

asus m4a79t deluxe

Phenom 955 OC @ 4.1GHz

8GB DDR3

Yeah I have quite a bit invested into Steam.

Used for video game playin', video editing and encoding, photoshop, dreamweaver, firefox with 20 open tabs and 20 memory bloated extensions.

I have an ATI ASUS Radeon 6950HD (slightly slower than the 6970) and I can run the game completely max. apart from Ambient Occlusion, full shadows, the lot and maintain a stable 40-60 FPS, sometimes it can drop to 35 but just take off the Physix and lower res to 9 and its a solid 50-60FPS.

My Settings and specs:

Intel i5 2500k

ASUS Radeon 6950HD 1GB

Windowed
1920x1080
16xQ CSAA
Draw Quality 9 (10 causes lag due to 1GB graphics card....knew i shoulda got the 2GB)
Background 5
Shadows: Highest
Ambient Occlusion: Off
Depth of Field: Off
Texture quality: High
Texture Filtering: Highest

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Aenarion

*above posts are useless without at least cpu spec*




what's your system spec right now? what psu do you have? is FF14 your primary use? or are you planning on playing other games down the line? what's your budget and expectation for system longevity?

in other words, need more information :P

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Its rather safe to say knowing peoples CPU and etc doesnt matter if u got a dual core and a Harddrive and a hd6850 u can play ff14 at max settings for a hell of alot cheaper than an overpirced name brand videocard (nvidia) and an overpirced cpu (intel)

Personally I would go with the nVidia. From previous experience nVidia did have a bit of a slip with the series 8xxx and series 9xxx geforces but they've improved a lot since then, but all 4 of the ATI cards I've had in the past have had one or two problems with them, usually in the areas of poor RAM handling or struggling with fast frame changing. Seriously the ATI 4650 HD I bought couldn't even run WoW Cata in 1024x768 without the frame-rate dieing horribly in Stormwind, but then I took that back and swapped it for a Geforce 210 which cost the same price, and that works fine for FFXIV with all settings on medium, apart from a bit of a drop in frame-rate in some overly graphical areas (Black Shroud).

I've found nVidia to be much more game friendly and their nview program just seems to operate better than ATI Catalyst does.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Hikozaemon

BTW ATI cards always seem to perfom better on games that are VERY graphic intensive. Almost every comparison shows it and hardly ever any Driver issues that use to cause problems for ATI cards.

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Nope. Check Crysis 2 reviews for example. It's probably one of the most intensive game out there.
And no, it's not even the only game where nVidia performs better.

(I had a 6950, it died, I took a GTX 570, best decision of the year ^^)

Everything maxed with FSAAx16 EXCEPT ambient occlusion turned off, 50-60 FPS, falls down to 40-30 when loading characters when I tp to Ul'dah for example.

-Current GPU: GTX 570

-Anti Aliasing: FSAAx16

-Resolution: 1920x1080

-General Drawing Quality: 10

-Windowed or Fullscreen: fullscreen

-Average FPS: let's say 55