Monday, October 13, 2008

Morrowind - Technical Stuff

Morrowind is written for a 4:3 aspect ratio. As long as you have a more modern video card and modern NVIDIA drivers, this should not be a problem even if you have a widescreen monitor (16:9 or 16:10 aspect). In the NVIDA Control Panel, there's a setting that lets you set how you want scaling to work.

The default is to let your display do the scaling. Which doesn't do any good on my Asus, because it stretches all source out to be a 16:10 aspect at 1680x1050.

Another option is to use no scaling at all. Which means your smaller resolution games end up sitting in the middle of the screen with large black bars on the top and sides. Games that are 640x480 become very amusing, as you're trying to play by looking through a postcard sized view instead of using more of the screen.

The best option (for this at least) is to tell the video card to do the scaling, but to preserve the aspect ratio of the source. So for 4:3 video games, you end up with as big of a window as possible, but with black bars on the left/right.

For Morrowind, I chose to go with a 1024x768 resolution, scaled up to approximately 1400x1050 and centered on the screen. The 800x600 is too small (only shows 3 lines of icons in your inventory), while the 1280x960 size results in text that is slightly too small to read (but you can see 5 lines of icons in your inventory).

For the stuff that I record with FRAPS, I plan on scaling the 1024x768 source material down to 800x600 and using somewhere in the range of 800-1000Kbps XVid 2-pass to do the encoding. That leaves the text still legible, softens up the textures a bit so they're not so harsh, and reduces the required bit rate slightly.

Labels: 2008, ES3Morrowind, NVIDIA

posted by Wuphon's at 7:42 AM (0 comments)

Wednesday, July 23, 2008

AMD Phenom 9850 Quad-Core

(The previous benchmark report is at NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT.)

Overall with the old CPU (dual-core Athlon64 X2 5200+) was 10283 3DMarks. With the new 2.5GHz quad-core Phenom, I'm seeing:

Dual 8800 GT in NON-SLI mode:

11458 3DMarks
(4723 SM2 4835 HDR 3719 CPU)

Dual 8800 GT in SLI mode:

12844 DMarks
(4731 SM2 6286 HDR 3718 CPU)

The big gain here is the CPU performance, which boosted from ~2000 up to ~3700. The SM2 number got a boost, even without switching to SLI mode while the HDR test took a hit because I wasn't running in SLI mode.

In SLI mode, numbers for SM2 are higher (4700 vs 4300) and HDR is 6300 vs 5800. So between the Phenom CPU and the faster DDR2 800MHz memory (instead of 667MHz), I'm seeing a fairly decent boost without paying an arm and leg. About what I thought I'd see, so I'm pleased.

Labels: 2008, Benchmarks, NVIDIA

posted by Wuphon's at 10:45 PM (0 comments)

Saturday, March 29, 2008

NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT

After running with a pair of GeForce 7900 GT PCIe 256MB PCIe cards, I've decided to make the jump to a pair of GeForce 8800 GT 512MB cards. The 7900s just aren't able to run Oblivion well at all, not even at 1280x720 with moderate detail settings. Everything I've heard about the various 8800 series cards is that a single 8800 will beat out a pair of 7900 cards.

Well, we'll see if that's true. According to 3DMark06, I should manage to see about a 2x improvement in FPS from the pair of 8800 GT cards. I've been waiting on this upgrade for 6 months, not sure which 8800 card to purchase. But the key benefits of the 8800 GT series cards are:

- 65nm tech instead of 90nm tech on the GTS/GTX cards
- 110W peak draw vs ~150W peak draw for the 8800 GTS and 8800 GTX
- performs as well as the 9600 GT
- price is very reasonable
- 512MB vs my old 256MB card
- scales well in SLI mode until you run past the video memory limit

So I'll have a card that is roughly 2x powerful, draws only a modest amount of power, and is DX 10 capable.

Note: In terms of performance, it goes GTS (lower) -> GT -> GTX (higher). The GTX cards are very expensive, and the GTS cards are usually less expensive. So the GT cards usually end up as the mid-range card that offers a lot of power for the price.

...

Updates (Apr 2nd): Installed the new 8800 GTs and am working on running 3DMark06. The old numbers were in the 7500-7600 range.

Dual 8800 GT in SLI mode:

10283 3DMarks
(4301 SM2 5801 HDR 2004 CPU)

Oblivion is a bit smoother, but seems to now be CPU-bottlenecked, so I may need to upgrade my Athlon64 X2 5200+ to something faster down the road. Unfortunately, the higher speed X2s are a lot more demanding on the power supply and put out a good bit more heat. The Phenom X4s (quad-core) may be a good choice in about another 3-6 months.

Labels: 2008, Benchmarks, NVIDIA

posted by Wuphon's at 1:09 PM (0 comments)

Wednesday, February 14, 2007

New PC

So I finally upgraded my game box. I was using an Opteron 148, 2GB RAM, NVIDIA GeForce 7800GS AGP. The new system is an Athlon64 X2 5200+, 2GB RAM, and (2) NVIDIA GeForce 7900GT 256MB PCIe cards (running in SLI mode). I spent very little on the upgrade, staying below the "knee" in the price curve where things get expensive quick.

I figured it would give me about a 30% bump in CPU speed (just for the one core, not counting the 2nd core). But according to 3DMark06, the new box is a screamer.

Old: 2918 3DMarks
(1263 SM2 1247 HDR 835 CPU)

New: 7576 3DMarks
(3401 SM2 3280 HDR 1985 CPU)

So I'm very pleasantly surprised for being a mid-range upgrade.

Labels: 2007, Benchmarks, NVIDIA

posted by Wuphon's at 9:32 PM (0 comments)

Sunday, November 14, 2004

AquaMark3 NVIDIA GeForce 6800

Toasted my old Ti4600 card this week, the fan finally went out on it and I can't manage to get the old cooler off without destroying the card. So I picked up a new GeForce 6800 for $300 (which was the next reasonable step up from the FX 5900 XT).

NVIDIA GeForce Ti 4600
NVIDIA 61.77 (stock, high performance, 128MB aperture)
A7N8X-Deluxe motherboard AthlonXP 2600+ CPU PC2700 DDR
AquaMark3 Score: 19480 (CPU: 6286, GFX: 2304)

GeForce FX 5900 XT
NVIDIA 61.77 (stock, high performance, 128MB aperture)
Asus SK8V Opteron 144 PC2100 1GB
AquaMark3 Score: 36520 (CPU: 7260, GFX: 4878)

GeForce 6800
NVIDIA 61.77 (stock, high performance, 128MB aperture)
Asus SK8V Opteron 144 PC2100 1GB
AquaMark3 Score: 46982 (CPU: 7008, GFX: 7122)

So, it's about 28%-45% faster then my old FX 5900 XT card. Not a bad bump in speed, and a good deal faster then the old Ti 4600 card. Top scores for NVIDIA cards are in the 55000-60000 range, so it's not that bad of a score.

Labels: Benchmarks, NVIDIA

posted by Wuphon's at 2:05 PM (0 comments)

Tuesday, August 31, 2004

AquaMark3 Scores (GeForce4 Ti 4600)

AquaMark3

The following are with an AMD AthlonXP 2600+, DDR PC2700 (2x512MB), and a NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti4600 128MB AGP.

NVIDIA 43.45 (stock, best quality, 128MB aperture, A7N8X-Deluxe)
AquaMark Score: 22253 (CPU: 6270, GFX: 2706)

NVIDIA 56.72 (stock, best quality, 128MB aperture, A7N8X-Deluxe)
AquaMark Score: 19090 (CPU: 6253, GFX: 2253)

NVIDIA 61.77 (stock, high performance, 128MB aperture, A7N8X-Deluxe)
AquaMark Score: 19480 (CPU: 6286, GFX: 2304)

I bought a GigaByte FX 5900 XT this week, so I'll be posting new scores at some point. Hopefully, I'll see scores in the 40k range, which will be roughly twice as fast as what I have now. I looked around for a regular FX 5900 card, but couldn't find one in stock. The price in the FX 5900 XT's is only $180-$200, which was right in my target range.

Labels: Benchmarks, NVIDIA

posted by Wuphon's at 11:41 AM (0 comments)

Saturday, February 22, 2003

Hmmm... it was working

And now it's being flakey... problem #1 is that there is no chassis fan in this case (it's a regular desktop case), so I'm going to stick a single-speed 80mm chassis fan in there (it does at least have a spot for a chassis fan) and see if I can help with the cooling issue. At the moment I'm uninstalling and re-installing the nVidia graphics drivers because they seem to have gotten semi-hosed (system boots fine in VGA mode, but glitches in full-color mode). CPU temp was up in the low 50s (C) when I looked in the BIOS (case off), so I also have a larger cooler on order should I need it.

At the moment I'm trying to get the video drivers uninstalled and updated to the latest versions.

Update(s): A few hours later, case off, the BIOS screen reports the motherboard is at 38C and the CPU at 53C. However, the AsusProbe application will reports different numbers... 40C for the motherboard and 42C for the CPU. (Put the case back on... highest CPU temp reported by AsusProbe is 46C which is just fine.)

Okay, ripped out the Ti4600 AGP card, dropped in the older GeForce2 MX400... and when I put it into deep color mode, I get a jerky-mouse / keyboard syndrome going. Something is fighting with something for a resource, but I don't know which yet. ... Well, fixing the contention issue was easy enough, I just moved the Promise FastTrak66 RAID card over one more PCI slot and reset all of the BIOS settings to the optimal defaults.

Which makes me wonder if I can put the Ti4600 back in... I may try it again tomorrow once I redo all of my other installs.

Labels: NVIDIA

posted by Wuphon's at 5:21 PM

Friday, February 21, 2003

New Toys

Hooking up my new MB / CPU / RAM in my 2nd game machine... this motherboard has everything (Firewire, USB v2, two LAN ports)... (way too many connectors to get hooked up). Took me about 2 hours to rip out the old motherboard and install the new one (this upgrade cost me $850, but is replacing a 1Ghz AMD which was using 768Mb of PC133 memory). The only thing I was not able to do was switch over to SATA/150 drives (the motherboard comes with a built-in RAID1 SATA/100 controller. I did look for the drives, but all of the SATAs that I could find were backordered roughly a month or more. So I'm going to stick with my tried and true Promise FastTrak66 for the moment and upgrade the drives this fall (since that'll force me to rebuild the O/S again... which I tend to do every 6-9 months).

AthlonXP 2600+
2 x 512Mb PC2700 CL2
Asus A7N8X Deluxe
NVidia Ti4600 GeForce AGP 4x 128Mb
Promise FastTrak66 PCI RAID Card
(2) 40Gb Maxtor HDs

Currently rebuilding the mirror set, then I get to install the O/S, all of the drivers, the O/S updates... then run the burn-in program on it for a day or two. At which point I'll have to rearrange some things on my desk because I'm going to want to switch which PC is where. If I skip the burn-in test, I could be up and logging into EQ (shock!) sometime tomorrow night. The old system's PCMark2002 scores were CPU: 2500 MEM: 2000 HDD: 575 and I'm expecting new scores of roughly CPU: 6000 MEM: 4500 HDD: 600.

So far so good on the burn-in (let it run for 8 hours while I slept). CPU only got as high as 42/43C which is perfect. (I'm using the stock fan that AMD sends in the retail version of the CPU). Currently doing the Windows Update shuffle... then I get to shuffle the office around this morning.

Labels: Benchmarks, NVIDIA

posted by Wuphon's at 8:16 PM