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Video card for 24x AA?

Barfo

Barfo

Lifer
I have an acquaintance who games on a machine with a non OC Q9400, 6 GB of RAM and a Radeon 4890.

He told me he was playing with CCC and enabled 24x AA for shits and giggles.He was pretty pleased with the resulting IQ but of course his FPS took a dive. So he asks me how to get it smooth again while keeping the AA and I told him to get a beefier video card.

My question is, which video card would allow him to enable 24x in every game while keeping playable FPS?

He games at 1280x1024, with no plans to upgrade anything but the video card, and his budget is $600.
 
Well depending on the game he is going to be CPU limited in certain situations @ 2.66ghz on a 3 1/2 year old CPU so he needs to keep that in mind before he goes and blows $600 on a GPU.

That point aside, as I understand it AA can drastically increase VRAM usage depending on which type of AA a game uses so a 3gb card would seem like a good idea. Also choosing a card with a faster memory bit rate would be advantageous as the game will be shifting more data in and out of the VRAM.
 
Puppies04 said:
Well depending on the game he is going to be CPU limited in certain situations @ 2.66ghz on a 3 1/2 year old CPU so he needs to keep that in mind before he goes and blows $600 on a GPU.

That point aside, as I understand it AA can drastically increase VRAM usage depending on which type of AA a game uses so a 3gb card would seem like a good idea. Also choosing a card with a faster memory bit rate would be advantageous as the game will be shifting more data in and out of the VRAM.
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CPU speed isn't very important at the resolution and the AA settings he wants.

He is going to need something like a 7970 to run AA like that.
 
spending 500-600 bucks for a video card to play games at 1280x1024 is beyond silly. if IQ is so important then he should get a modern widescreen with higher res. plus that will also actually let him see more than just 2/3 of a game.
 
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He should seriously spend that money on a better monitor first. A nice 24" 1080p monitor would look WAY better than his 24x AA.
 
TemjinGold said:
He should seriously spend that money on a better monitor first. A nice 24" 1080p monitor would look WAY better than his 24x AA.
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Dude is an old geezer who wants to upgrade as few parts as possible, I already told him about the monitor and he doesn't want to. I also showed him this thread and he called toyota a [wonderful person], lol.

No profanity in the tech forums
-ViRGE
 
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Barfo said:
Dude is an old geezer who wants to upgrade as few parts as possible, I already told him about the monitor and he doesn't want to. I also showed him this thread and he called toyota a [wonderful person], lol.
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🙄
 
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Barfo said:
Dude is an old geezer who wants to upgrade as few parts as possible, I already told him about the monitor and he doesn't want to. I also showed him this thread and he called toyota a [wonderful person], lol.
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Here is what i have to tell him about that:

MOV AX, 4C00H
INT 21H
 
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No, wait, make him upgrade to SLI GTX680s, so he can use SLI 64x AA.

SLI Antialiasing. This is a standalone rendering mode that offers up to double the antialiasing performance by splitting the antialiasing workload between the two graphics cards, offering superior image quality. One GPU performs an antialiasing pattern which is slightly offset to the usual pattern (for example, slightly up and to the right), and the second GPU uses a pattern offset by an equal amount in the opposite direction (down and to the left). Compositing both the results gives higher image quality than is normally possible. This mode is not intended for higher frame rates, and can actually lower performance, but is instead intended for games which are not GPU-bound, offering a clearer image in place of better performance. When enabled, SLI Antialiasing offers advanced antialiasing options: SLI 8X, SLI 16X, and SLI 32x (only available on newer, higher-end models starting with the 8800 series). A Quad SLI system is capable of up to SLI 64X antialiasing.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scalable_Link_Interface
 
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i need to know what the difference between 8X AA and 24X AA is. i mean are there any comparison screenshots??
can you get him to post some screenshots Barfo?????
 
AA has somewhat diminishing returns, if you have a bunch of money to drop on hardware to improve image quality it's a better idea to get a better monitor which runs a higher resolution and increase the base level image quality rather than focus on the diminishing returns of high levels of AA.

Switching to something like a 1920x1200 panel and then using small amounts of AA such as 4xAA will make everything look nicer. than 24xAA at 1024
 
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