Graphics Upgrade VRAM Question

[Rennn]

 

HD 7950 has better drivers? ROFL.

 

 

Yeah, I laughed at that too.

 

Edited: Nvm, I read further. I'm on 304.48 on my 460 and I haven't had any problems so far, but I'm not interested in a flame war so I'm going to back down. I just left that line there to summarize what my original post was so that this edit makes sense.

 

To the OP:

I was looking at a 670 a while back. It looks like a very capable card, but honestly you probably won't use 2GB of VRAM at 1080p unless you go for a lot of very HD textures. Then again, Skyrim has memory leaks, so perhaps throwing more VRAM on top of it would help.

 

I'm afraid I don't know enough about AMD cards to give my advice on the 7950, but with the 670 you can force Ambient Occlusion, which is a big improvement. Given similar specs, I'd take the Nvidia card just for the AO.

Edited August 1, 2012 by Rennn

[FMod]

On 1GB: 560Ti is a good card that has use for 2GB.

550Ti isn't bottlenecked by its RAM, even in Skyrim. At the kind of settings where VRAM would be a big issue, it won't play smooth either way.

 

1280 vs 1024 MB is a considerable difference, it's the excess that matters (e.g. if the game needs 1350MB, it has to swap 70 instead of 326 now).

Anyway, GTX 570 is terrible value as of today, especially 2.5GB one. For its price (~$330 post-rebate minimum), you can get a 7870 2GB with money left over, or even a 7950 3GB with non-ref cooling, which is just better in every way.

 

 

Drivers: If they broke things for everyone, they would be pulled at once. They don't, but there's a lot of people for whom they do. Threads here, myself as well.

SSAO (ambient occlusion) can also be used via ENB series. It's just a shader.

Edited August 1, 2012 by FMod

[Vecna6667]

For those that get driver problems, you need to completely uninstall the previous driver before adding the new driver. I don't know why but video drivers tend to leave behind their folder and entries in the Registry and on a few occasions Windows 7 on my laptop has actually tried to re-install the old driver before installing the new one from those traces. Add in the fact that almost every BSOD I've ever had resulted from the video drivers and in those cases I had just downloaded and installed the drivers just like I had done with every other driver. So now after I uninstall an old video driver, I reboot into safe mode and run Driver Sweeper to clean up these traces before Win 7 tries to read them. Revo Uninstaller may do the same thing with its highest uninstall setting but I've never used it for video drivers before so I don't know.

[Thor.]

LOL none ref cooling, gigabyte rules them all.

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jX1xzbGUWSo&feature=player_embedded

 

Its so good newegg made a video of it. http://forums.nexusmods.com/public/style_emoticons/dark/teehee.gif

 

HAAA 400$ why didn't i get mine off of Newegg.ca. man i paid 550$ after taxes http://forums.nexusmods.com/public/style_emoticons/dark/teehee.gif

Edited August 6, 2012 by Thor.