Do I need anything more than my HD7850 ?

raglafart

raglafart

Limp Gawd
Joined
Feb 21, 2013
Messages
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I really have no idea how to judge my video card for the limited gaming I do.
All the games I want to play are WW2 or WW1 airwar type games.
I've got all the MS titles but really don't enjoy them so much these days.
I'm now playing IL Sturmovik Cliffs of Dover and wouldn't mind a bit of an improvement if there is one to be had by going for a better video card.
I also do quite a bit of photoshop work on my system so if there are any benifits there I'd also use them to justify a better card.

Asus PX 79 Pro, i7 3960X, 64 gig G Skill ram, Samsung 840 pro 512gig SSD, Swiftech water cooling and a Gigabyte HD 7850 OC 2 gb card. Win 7 64 bit
I'm using a Samsung 27" SA 350 monitor with a max screen of res. of 1920 x 1080

Cheers John
 
What frame rates do you get in your current games with detail turned all the way up not including AA?
 
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How do you find out what the frame rates are while running a game?
I did a 3D mkII and got the following scores
Graphics 6373 Physics 11694 and combined 7007 but these numbers don't really mean a great deal to me.
Cheers John
 
You could possibly stand to Step things up a little if you were going to get into war thunder, you certainly have all the machine in the world to back it up. Maybe do a wait and see with the 280x?
 
Okay, downloaded FRAPS and set everything at max and turned the AA off.
This is in IL Sturmovik White Cliffs of Dover
With dense scenery flying low over land the FPS dropped to around the 30 mark.
At sea and at higher altitudes, ie not very complex scenery the FPS got into the mid 50's
 
raglafart said:
Okay, downloaded FRAPS and set everything at max and turned the AA off.
This is in IL Sturmovik White Cliffs of Dover
With dense scenery flying low over land the FPS dropped to around the 30 mark.
At sea and at higher altitudes, ie not very complex scenery the FPS got into the mid 50's
Click to expand...

Does the game feel "smooth" when the game dropped down to the ~30FPS mark? If it does, then you should be happy..Personally I would think that FPS swings from 50~60FPS to 30FPS would be very distracting and sorta ruin the game experience, and you aren't even using AA, which will make performance drop even more..

IF you are located in the US or Canada, there is no reason to pick up a 3GB 7950 for $200 (~$180 after MIR)..Your current card should fetch you an easy $100+, making the upgrade a no brainer! You would get nearly double the performance of your current card with some very easy accomplished overclocking..You should be able to max that game out, even with insane amounts of AA and still have 60Fps..

Also, I noticed that you mentioned that you do a lot of PhotoShop work but are using a TN panel based LCD. Are you aware that the TN panels (generally) offer the worst color replication? They are designed for speed, in order to minimize/eliminate motion blurring during games etc...

There are not any 27" 1080P panels that use the superior IPS/PLS panels, but you can get a 1440P 27" LCD that uses a wonderful IPS/PLA panel from eBay for $300-320 shipped..As a side note, the 7950 would perform very well at this resolution thanks to it's speed and extra memory when using AA..

EDIT: After a bit of googling (I used to love flight sims and played the first IL), it seems this was a very, very poorly coded/supported game. This Team seems to have done a TON of work to get the issues with the game fixed. You might already know about it, but if not I would suggest looking into their work and see if helps performance before taking my advice about your GPU above..I still think that you should look into replacing that LCD though, considering the color specific nature of PhotoShop work.
 
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faster cards and a new monitor can always offer improvements. You could get a faster card to keep fps around 60. A new card plus 120hrz monitor would be even smoother. triple monitors would be great for flying games. Or, if spend more time with photography follow ccityinstaller advice and get a better monitor and card the would improve your experience gaming and photo editing,
 
Try Rise of Flight. A faster video card will help in that. I went from my 560ti 2GB or a GTX670 PE and saw a big performance imporvement.
 
Brilliant replies, thanks everyone. I'm an old fart at just turned 60 and while I'm up on some info, other stuff I'm just not aware of.
I've only just begun to realize that my monitor while nice and big (I like that) it's not particularly in line with the rest of my rig. I have been meaning to follow up calibrating the color on it but haven't got around to it yet.
To a certain extent the pc has become a bit of a plaything too.
Again, thanks for all the advice. I'll try and take on board your collective suggestions and make some improvements.
Cheers John
 
Can't thank you enough for the help everyone.
I've watched the video of the Rise of Flight and will be downloading that.
I've also found the Team Fusion site to do the patches for the IL Sturmovik game and will be following the advice listed there.
Something else I've found I'm going to add to my want list is the head tracking stuff. That looked to be really great in the Rise of Flight video on YouTube.
Again, many thanks everyone.
Cheers John
 
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