Question about 8800 GTS320 vs 640

[tigersty1e]

Originally posted by: blackangst1

Originally posted by: tigersty1e
Sad to hear these problems, but could the cards be throttling?

My 6800 throttles badly. It is smooth in the first 5 minutes and then throttles for about the next 5-10 minutes. After this, it sometimes plays smoothly and sometimes continues to throttle.

Try disabling throttling on the stock speeds and see what happens.

nah not throttling

So you've disabled throttling and the card still does it?

 

[lordroddington]

It's not throttling, I've got rivatuner monitoring temps and it never goes above 75-78 degrees. These cards are comfortable at temperatures much higher than 80. It seems very likely that it is a memory issue since that is the only difference between them and the higher end 640MB ones. My major complaint is how at certain settings it can get outclassed by a 256MB card. That extra 64MB has gotta do something, and if not it should at the very least not hold it back...

I keep hoping for a magical driver release that makes all of these problems go away. I've got till the beginning of August to use the step-up program, so I'm going to wait until the last possible second to see if something better comes out for cheap, but I would like to make this card work if possible. I'm gaming at 1280X1024, it seems stupid that it can even be affected by these problems at resolutions as low as this...

 

[will889]

lordroddington maybe step up to a 640MB model. or, you could sell the one you have and downgrade to a 7950GT. The entire 8800 line breaks certain legacy games like COD1/UO and a few others whereas the 7950GT will play anything old and new and not have the dramatic drops. Personally I think it's the hardware and a driver release may fix 30-40-50% of the issues but never 80-100%. That's just my guess. I myself am considering either returning mine for a 640MB version or just downgrading to another 7950GT or X1950XT (Wife's box already has a 7950 and it plays anything and everything just fine with none of the lousy issues).

 

[blackangst1]

Well, after much deliberation, I ended up getting a BFG 7950OC 512. Why you ask? As others have said, the GPU market is a little flat right now. I honestly dont think there are too many games that comparing this card to say 8800GTS 640 there would be much difference. Sure there are a few. Oh I guess it would matter if you were a benchmarker, which Im not. Benchmarks dont do anything for my multimedia/gaming experience. I honestly think this card is a great card for money. I just dont see a huge gain going with the 8800 640. If I were to see say, a 25-30% improvement, perhaps. But I honestly dont think I would see that much based on benchmards and reviews for both cards. *shrug* just MHO.

Anyway, Im very disappointed in the 8800 320. I really had high hopes. Perhaps Nvidia will listen to the hoards of people complaining about this card and go back to the drawing board.

 

[pcslookout]

Originally posted by: blackangst1
Well, after much deliberation, I ended up getting a BFG 7950OC 512. Why you ask? As others have said, the GPU market is a little flat right now. I honestly dont think there are too many games that comparing this card to say 8800GTS 640 there would be much difference. Sure there are a few. Oh I guess it would matter if you were a benchmarker, which Im not. Benchmarks dont do anything for my multimedia/gaming experience. I honestly think this card is a great card for money. I just dont see a huge gain going with the 8800 640. If I were to see say, a 25-30% improvement, perhaps. But I honestly dont think I would see that much based on benchmards and reviews for both cards. *shrug* just MHO.

Anyway, Im very disappointed in the 8800 320. I really had high hopes. Perhaps Nvidia will listen to the hoards of people complaining about this card and go back to the drawing board.

If you use FSAA and AF you will see well over 25 to 30% performence improvement with the Geforce 8800 GTS 640 vs the 320. Games that use the quake 4 engine, quake 4, BF2 have like a 50 to 100% performence improvement its huge. I didn't even know it made this much of difference. I still don't get why though.

 

[yuppiejr]

Interesting comments about the 320 vs 640 meg 8800GTS cards...

Xbit labs speculated that there was a memory management problem in the driver that caused abnormally slow performance in the 320 meg version when they benched it against a 640 meg card:

(from "http://www.xbitlabs.com/articl...0gts-640_22.html#sect0")

"Unfortunately, the technically promising graphics card, which differs from the more expensive version in the amount of memory only, is sometimes much slower than the GeForce 8800 GTS 640MB not only in games that demand a lot of graphics memory (e.g. Serious Sam 2 ), but also in applications that didn?t reveal any difference between graphics cards with 512MB and 256MB of memory before. Particularly, these are TES IV: Oblivion, Neverwinter Nights 2, and F.E.A.R. Extraction Point . 320MB is considerably more than 256MB, so this is a memory management problem, probably a driver issue. Anyway, even with the mentioned drawbacks, the GeForce 8800 GTS 320MB looks much more appealing than the GeForce 7950 GT or Radeon X1950 XT, even though the latter are going to become cheaper now."

 

[will889]

Originally posted by: blackangst1
Well, after much deliberation, I ended up getting a BFG 7950OC 512..

Great choice =) and by the time the 8800GTS 320 series is matured as usable with divers it will be a 8900 refresh and more affordable (probably). In the meantime you can actually enjoy your games.

 

[Circlestrafe]

I haven't played much of anything except Bf2 and Bf2142 since I replaced most of my old system about 3 months ago. I have an evga 8800gts 320 superclocked. I normally don't have problems playing for hours at a time in either game. I have BSOD'd three times once while watching a dvd the other two times in Bf2142. But I also had intermittent problems in both BF games with my old system (ati radeon x700 pro agp, athlon xp 2800+).

I've also played Red Orchestra w/o problems, Day of Defeat:Source, and various other shooters. I haven't re-installed Quake 4 to test it out yet. I run @ 1280x1024 on a 19" monitor everything maxed 4xAA. I have crashed to desktop in Bf2142 but my old system did that also, so it's probably the game in this case, not the card. I also had a little slowdown in Bf2142, but it was 85 degrees outside and my computer room was hotter, my card was reporting 79 degrees vs. idle of 55 so I'm assumming that was the problem. (Installing an air-conditioner before summer heat 'officially' arrives in my area.

[dse]Circlestrafe

 

[tigersty1e]

Originally posted by: lordroddington
It's not throttling, I've got rivatuner monitoring temps and it never goes above 75-78 degrees. These cards are comfortable at temperatures much higher than 80. It seems very likely that it is a memory issue since that is the only difference between them and the higher end 640MB ones. My major complaint is how at certain settings it can get outclassed by a 256MB card. That extra 64MB has gotta do something, and if not it should at the very least not hold it back...

I keep hoping for a magical driver release that makes all of these problems go away. I've got till the beginning of August to use the step-up program, so I'm going to wait until the last possible second to see if something better comes out for cheap, but I would like to make this card work if possible. I'm gaming at 1280X1024, it seems stupid that it can even be affected by these problems at resolutions as low as this...

Just sayin'.. but it's better to check everything.

Our 2 cards are so different in many ways, but my card used to throttle at temps way below dangerous levels. It idles at 48C and loads at 63C (goes up to 69C).

Throttling kicks in when it hits that throttle temp, but that's not the only reason a card will throttle.

Just turn off throttling. If the card is a good one and not overclocked, you shouldn't be damaging anything. Except of course, the card is a dud and is throttling to prevent damage. In that case, your card will die when you turn off throttling. If it does, then it was a POS.

 

[superbooga]

Originally posted by: pcslookout
If you use FSAA and AF you will see well over 25 to 30% performence improvement with the Geforce 8800 GTS 640 vs the 320. Games that use the quake 4 engine, quake 4, BF2 have like a 50 to 100% performence improvement its huge. I didn't even know it made this much of difference. I still don't get why though.

That's at like 1920x1200 and above. 8800GTS 320 still gets very good framerates in BF2 at that resolution. In BF 2142, the difference between the two shrinks because 2142 is more shader-performance bound.

For Quake 4, that's only if you use Ultra Quality. Drop it to high quality while keeping AA and AF the same (you probably won't notice the difference) and the 320 and 640 are the same.

Benchmarks show that at 1600x1200 and under, an overclocked 8800GTS 320 beats a stock clocked 640 in the majority of games. There are a few games where there is a significant difference at 1600x1200 between the 320 and 640, such as F.E.A.R. and Oblivion. If you're really into these games, then the 640 might be a better choice.

The bigger concern is really the memory management issue. If you don't get these issues in the games you play, then there's really not much of a reason to get the 640 over the 320 unless you really want the FSAA at super high resolutions, or play F.E.A.R. and Oblivion a lot.

 

[lordroddington]

Ok.... it ain't throttling...

Don't know how to disable throttling, but I've got rivatuner monitoring clockspeeds too, and they never drop. Incidently I overestimated temps in the last post, they actually only go in the 69-73 degree range, meh.

Along the lines of the original topic, I was just playing Lord of the Rings Online, which just got a patch on Wednesday, and it seems at least for me the problem is fixed. I ran around for a good 10 minutes, then I went into a town, and for a minute I thought it was going to start doing it, but it must have performed a memory dump properly and it worked fine again. Sure enough when I went back into one of the areas I had already been, I could see it reloading certain textures such as the trees. This might just have to be addressed on a game-by-game basis, unless nvidia manages to fix it in the driver somehow.