Hajimoto Posted June 18, 2011 Share Posted June 18, 2011 (edited) Hello people! <must be read in Batwing's voice> I want to start this post by saying this is not an ATI/AMD bashing post. This is a snapshot of my experiences with different GPU configurations and is intended to enlighten readers to some of the pitfalls that I have encountered along the way with hope that this information saves them time and money. As most of you know I have had a dual HD5970 configuration for over a year now and have been really unhappy with the performance of this configuration. The ATI drivers available at the time of a game's release certainly left a lot to be desired. My gripe is not with ATI's single GPU configuration but with their CrossFireX program. It just does not live up to the hype. The HD5970 is a single slot dual HD5870 GPU configuration. So a user has CrossFireX on one card. Also the HD5000 series allow three monitors to be connected to a single HD5000 series card, something ATI calls Eyefinity. These were the main perks and are what drove me to the HD5970's to begin with. Prior to the HD5970's, I was running dual HD4870X2's, again another quad GPU configuration, and yes I was constantly chasing drivers with this configuration as well but just accepted the additional high maintenance as a necessary evil to have cutting edge performance. I have sold HD5970's and re-evaluated by plan of attack as it relates to multiple GPU configurations. I run a three monitor configuration and the Nvidia line of GPU requires two cards or two GPU's (SLI) to support a three monitor setup so I decided to go with the Nvidia GTX590 which is essentially two GTX580's on one card, one slot SLI if you will. The new card has been in the rig for about four days now and I have to say I am very satisfied with the preliminary results. I know what the white papers say regarding the HD5970 but the GTX590 is actually delivering on the hype. I am so used to searching the internet and forums so I can tweak drivers or settings in order to experience acceptable performance results from the HD5970's that it is almost foreign to just plug and play without the additional maintenance. I have not tested thenew card on ALL of my game titles but the ones that I have played appear to have more depth and smoother rendering characteristics than the HD5970's had. The Nvidia drivers are performing well and the screen rates are incredible. The addition of Physx dedicated hardware, can most definitely be seen in games like Batman: Arkham Asylum and Metro 2033. In closing I feel it is important to point out that when ATI's driver fully supported a title, I experienced performance numbers that could not be touched but the time it takes for a user to get there is long and painful. ATI tends to constantly tweak its drivers to squeeze more performance out of the cards for certain game titles but typically this squeeze negatively effects other game titles that were fine before the driver enhancement. I have revisited titles that are notorious to abuse GPU's and found the GTX590 at a mild jog and not even breaking a sweat. I realize this is the honeymoon stage of my new Nvidia partnership and will update this post as time goes by to keep you up on any glitches I may encounter. Thanks guys! Edited June 18, 2011 by Hajimoto Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MedicSN6 Posted June 18, 2011 Share Posted June 18, 2011 ...and you gave me shit for not choosing ATI last Fall. In all fairness, you did warn me about the drivers issue and I figured, I'd like to spend my PC time actually playing games instead of figuring out HOW to make them work properly. For everyone else, I run two GTX470s in SLI at stock speeds. ArmA2 is probably the only game that lags a bit when running at all options to max and the draw distance to 10,000km. I only get about 30 frames which for most people is still playable. However, it is completely unnecessary to play the game with max settings and to be honest I prefer not to play it that way. Most of the visual enhancement of the game are actually a things that will get you killed as the enemy can see through most if not all of it and the player cannot. "WHERE'D THAT F'ING SHOT COME FROM????!??!?!?!?!" The new GTX590 is beef tenderloin wrapped in heaps of bacon. Delicious. Color me jealous Haj, VERY jealous. Welcome back to nVidia!!! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
PANiC Posted June 18, 2011 Share Posted June 18, 2011 it's a pity that every single game is shipped broken/unfinished and that you have to chase drivers 1, 2, 3 months after release in attempt to fix unoptimised coding. i think there is a good case to blame the gave devs and publishers for rushing out games. funny that devs will release a patch that "fixes sli / xfire" for that specific game rather than than nvid or amd. glad you got a good setup haji, but a broke-ass game will come along and frustrate you sooner or later this is why i stopped framerate watching, spent more time fiddling than playing. but hey we're all PC games isn;t this what we are supposed to be doing (fiddling, tweaking, getting in a massive rage over our expensive gear? ) - long suffering ati and nvidia user Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Batwing~SPARTA~ Posted June 18, 2011 Share Posted June 18, 2011 Hello People ! <read it with the only and original Batwing voice > It s not a competition first of all, is not a flame and so far you player, (me, Haji, whoever) are happy with your game experience, God bless you I do appreciate posts like this because this is the real thing anyway. This is not sorta of manipulated reviewes you can read here and there, where the reviewer get some gift from manufacturer to speak well about the product. This is real life and we can trust it. Glad that the 590 is giving you happiness. Indeed those framerates we saw the other day were impressive! Arma2 at super high performances, you were achieving 140 FPS and I was achieving 40 LOL! However, on the tech side question, it is known the CF issues with ATI you described above, but is also very known they have been horrible in order to handle Quad GPUs but were quite decent handling Dual GPUs. I am just wondering if due to the fact you had a Quad config that could have amplified your pain. When I had 2 4850s in CF (dual GPU) I didn t suffered any major issue. I do admit I am not and hard core gamer like you, so my base of comparison can be irrilevant. Just wondering what would happen if you were putting a Quad GPU Nvidia config on the table, drivers would suffer for that and get to struggle to handle all of that correctly? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MedicSN6 Posted June 18, 2011 Share Posted June 18, 2011 Hello People ! <read it with the only and original Batwing voice > It s not a competition first of all, is not a flame and so far you player, (me, Haji, whoever) are happy with your game experience, God bless you I do appreciate posts like this because this is the real thing anyway. This is not sorta of manipulated reviewes you can read here and there, where the reviewer get some gift from manufacturer to speak well about the product. This is real life and we can trust it. Glad that the 590 is giving you happiness. Indeed those framerates we saw the other day were impressive! Arma2 at super high performances, you were achieving 140 FPS and I was achieving 40 LOL! However, on the tech side question, it is known the CF issues with ATI you described above, but is also very known they have been horrible in order to handle Quad GPUs but were quite decent handling Dual GPUs. I am just wondering if due to the fact you had a Quad config that could have amplified your pain. When I had 2 4850s in CF (dual GPU) I didn t suffered any major issue. I do admit I am not and hard core gamer like you, so my base of comparison can be irrilevant. Just wondering what would happen if you were putting a Quad GPU Nvidia config on the table, drivers would suffer for that and get to struggle to handle all of that correctly? He wasn't talking about a hardware issue. He was talking about a driver issue. Waiting for updated drivers for weeks in order to play a game is pretty ridiculous. With nVidia, he doesn't really have that issue. Either the nVidia driver works perfectly, or it doesn't and you just install the old drivers. The only caveat I would have between nVidia cards would be brand. EVGA all the way. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Batwing~SPARTA~ Posted June 18, 2011 Share Posted June 18, 2011 ... And driver is what I am talking about. ATI notoriously has driver issues especially when it comes to Crossfire config. However ATI has a few problems on dual crossfire but for sure has way more problems on Quad crossfire. Reading many reviews around, a lot of reviewer discourage users from adopting Quad GPUs configs, which is exactly what Haji had. The driver issue was mostly handling correctly the Quad GPU performance. However, on Dual GPU performance most recent ATI drivers have been working pretty well, also with the most recent games. Hajimoto condition was a particular very high-end performance issue, where ATI drivers were not able to handle correctly 4GPUs Xfire. Therefore my question was related to the real comparison on how Nvidia would work with their drivers when you are playing with 4 GPUs. At the moment Haji performance is great, but is dual GPUs related. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
IDAN Posted June 18, 2011 Share Posted June 18, 2011 Had 3 way crossfire 4870 until 3 months ago ,had enough with driver problems while playing arma and bad company 2 (hdr problems and crossfire problems) so switched sides and got zotac gtx 580 . I'm happy with the decision i made. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rooster90 Posted June 18, 2011 Share Posted June 18, 2011 Random question: I'm thinking about getting a new video card when BF3 comes out. I have a GTX 560 Ti right now which is certainly passable, but I want to push that game's settings as far as my computer can take it. I kind of want a 590 which would give me integrated SLI. However, does that card require or highly recommend it's own cooling? I have liquid cooling on my CPU and a ton of fans in a well ventilated case, but I've been reading mixed things about what kind of rigs can even run a 590. I know I have the power to run it, but the cooling worries me. Some say I don't need to worry about it since the card's built-in cooling is great if I'm not overclocking it (which I wont). But others say I'd be taking a huge risk without having its own dedicated cooling. Thoughts? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Hajimoto Posted June 18, 2011 Author Share Posted June 18, 2011 (edited) So far Rooster the stock cooler is doing a fantasic job. The only thing that I do differently than most is that I take manual control of my GPU fan and use profiles afforded you in EVGA Precision v2.0.3. I set up my Logitech G15 Keyboards G keys so on the fly I can adjust the fan speed based on my preset profiles of AUTO, 40%, 60%, 75% and 100%. I adjust the fan speed based ont he feedback of the GPU temp that I monitor in 3 places. The EVGA Overlay on primary monitor. Precision readout on the LCD of the G15. Windows gadget GPU Monitor on left monitor. The highest temps I have seen on the card thus far have been 72c and that was under 100% load and fans were at 50%. Once the fan was put to 75%temp dropped to 63c and at 100% it dropped to 59c. I run a substantial amount of system monitoring utilities and log all performance data (when applicable) so that I can chart a course of system regulation that best serve the trends collected. From everything I have read, an SLI 560TI configuration does a great job! The one thing that must be noted is that a single card SLI option forfeits the full benefit of a two card SLI configuration as they slow the 2nd GPU down on a single slot solution. Most 2 card SLI configurations will out perform a single slot as proven in this write up about dual 580s against one 590 ARTICLE HERE. My advice would be, grab another GTX560TI when you need it and you will have gobs of GPU power at a substantially lower investment. I just wanted a single slot SLI solution as I have grown tired of the multiple card configurations of the past 3 years and my current configuration leave the other PCIe free for a future GTX590 perhaps. Edited June 18, 2011 by Hajimoto Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Fatal_Papercut~SPARTA~ Posted June 19, 2011 Share Posted June 19, 2011 So far Rooster the stock cooler is doing a fantasic job...The highest temps I have seen on the card thus far have been 72c and that was under 100% load and fans were at 50%. Once the fan was put to 75%temp dropped to 63c and at 100% it dropped to 59c. It sounds like EVGA did a fantastic job with their 590 builds--those are the same temps I get running my single-core 580. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Batwing~SPARTA~ Posted June 19, 2011 Share Posted June 19, 2011 Haji, Haji.... You are doing a good job at converting me hehehehehe Keep up with the good news and the solid hardware analysis. I do believe to you way better than what sometimes I read around. I think I wanna open another thread to measure some performances on Arma using the Fraps benchmark feature providing data for 60 seconds play time. Stay tuned Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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