How much difference between xfire 4850 and gtx 580?

[pontifex]

I have been running on Crossfired 4850s for several years and decided to upgrade. I went with a Galaxy GTX 580. I installed the latest Nvidia drivers.

I started up Skyrim and Crysis 2 and I am barely seeing a difference.
I maxed out Skyrim and I see a slight difference, but not much.

Crysis 2 I set to Gamer, Advanced, and Hardcore settings but I can't see that anything changed. I don't see anywhere to actually adjust individual settings, am I missing something?

Right now I am rather disappointed.

 

[Magic Carpet]

Try to run Crysis 2 w/ latest patches (High Res textures + DX11 enabled) with your X-Fire.

Sure as hell, you will see the difference.

 

[Gabkicks]

4850 crossfire loses to a single 5870... and 5870 loses pretty badly to a gtx 580.

When i went to a 4850 to a 5850, my framerates doubled in some games 0_0.

Skyrim isnt a good game to judge. its gotta be something really demanding like battlefield 3, metro 2033, Arma II, c.a.r.s, Crysis(wars), etc.

 

[Awkward]

Resolution?

 

[pontifex]

Oh, I can see that I can run some games on max at with much better framerate, but I expected to see a huge jump in graphics quality too.

I'm just not seeing it. Maybe I need a new monitor too? its a Dell 20 or 21" @ 1680x1050.
I think it's a 2004FPW model?

 

[skipsneeky2]

Perhaps a cpu bottleneck?

 

[RavenSEAL]

Should be around 20% in favor of the 580.

 

[pontifex]

Perhaps a cpu bottleneck?

i5 2500k
8gb ram

 

[darckhart]

i would say your screen res is pretty low to see how far the 580 can go. however, you should still see 1) liquid smooth high framerates regardless of eyecandy settings (hbao, tess, self-shadows, dof, etc), 2) much higher min framerate, 3) ability to crank AA all the way up.

btw, slap on some mods to skyrim (hd, realistic water, etc) and enjoy. vanilla is basically an ugly console port. same with crysis2.

 

[BallaTheFeared]

Are you talking visual quality, or fps?

You'll need the DX11 patch, and high res textures for Crysis though fps won't be amazing with a single 580 with all that load.

As for skyrim it's DX9, the best thing you can do is start modding it.

 

[TakeNoPrisoners]

Double framerates at minimum.

 

[T_Yamamoto]

Are you talking visual quality, or fps?

You'll need the DX11 patch, and high res textures for Crysis though fps won't be amazing with a single 580 with all that load.

As for skyrim it's DX9, the best thing you can do is start modding it.

Take this advice

 

[bullbearish]

I had 2x 4850 on my old machine and ran BF3 on high at 30 FPS. I've gone to a single 580 (ASUS ROG Platinum) and now run at 60 FPS on ultra.

Go for it.

 

[VirtualLarry]

I did some searching, and it appears that CF 4850 cards are most similar to a single GTX460 card, in terms of performance.

 

[Dark Shroud]

Right now I am rather disappointed.

Well you can thank consoles for that. I love Skyrim but it's badly coded game.

It's time to start loading in the different mods to improve the graphics quality.

 

[RavenSEAL]

Well you can thank consoles for that. I love Skyrim but it's badly coded game.

It's time to start loading in the different mods to improve the graphics quality.

"Badly" is a rather...soft term, for the sheer stupidity behind the design of the inner workings of the software.

 

[bunnyfubbles]

something is definitely very wrong

http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/295?vs=305

GTX580 vs. 5850 (which is arguably better than CF 4850s, as your 4850s likely have only 512MB for memory buffer)

granted, a lot of games you might be running over 60fps on your 4850s which will be hard to appreciate any frame rate gain from a GTX580 on a 60Hz monitor (although I'm not sure why you'd upgrade if you were already averaging over 60fps on all of your games), so if frames are smooth you need to crank up the IQ

Other than that your next course of action would be to get a better monitor (120Hz or 1440p+) and/or play some games that are actually GPU demanding.

Its always possible you just made a bad decision based on inexperience or lack of research.

 

[pontifex]

I was expecting a huge image quality jump. I certainly notice a difference in frame rate as I have a few games, like Crysis 2, Metro 2033 that I can now max out settings and play with good frame rates whereas on my 4850s, i couldn't go higher settings without drops in frame rates.

A friend got a nice laptop with a 6990m and a 1920x1080 screen and it skyrim looks noticeably better than on my 1680 x1050 display on my desktop with my 580.

I'm guessing that higher resolution is what makes it look so much nicer.

 

[pontifex]

got a 1920x1080 monitor and it's a big difference in quality. everything looks much clearer and sharper now.