Should I move up from an 8800GTS 320MB?

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I have a C2D 3.2GHz, 2GB RAM and a 8800GTS 320MB. I find myself limited in some flight sims like FSX and I also play Armed Assault, Crysis, STALKER.

What upgrade (if any) would help me the most with flights sims?
 
Unless your incredably rich and an upgrade is pocket change to you stay with what youve got
you wont get a huge increase by upgrading

ps: maybe ram, is your pc hitting the swap file ?
 
MSFS is not GPU-limited, even in the most extreme cases.

It is wholly CPU-limited.

That being said, all the other games you're playing will benefit tremendously from an increase in video memory - 320MB just doesn't cut it nowadays.
 
I have to dissagree unless your playing at really high resolutions

i chose your card and the same card with 640mb to show the difference that having twice as much video memory will have
I also chose 1600x1200 as its about in the middle of the resolutions available its also higher than a lot of people are using

3DMark06 (v1.0.2) HDR/SM3.0 Score
HDR-R/SM3.0 Benchmark (1600x1200x32, 4x AA, 8x AF, Default Quality)


Battlefield 2142
Fraps/THG-Demo Suez Canal (1600x1200x32, 4x AA, 8x AF, max Quality)



Microsoft Flight Simulator X
Fraps/Anflug Sitka (1600x1200x32, in Game AA, in Game AF, Ultra Quality)


most games show less than 5% improvement by doubleing video memory, fsx, doom3, Warhammer Mark of Chaos and prey are actually a tiny bit faster on the 320mb version

the exception appears to be dark messiah which shows a 300% improvement ,this may be some sort if glitch as a 256mb 7800 is 150% faster and a 256mb x1650 is twice as fast
 
I have to dissagree unless your playing at really high resolutions

i chose your card and the same card with 640mb to show the difference that having twice as much video memory will have
I also chose 1600x1200 as its about in the middle of the resolutions available its also higher than a lot of people are using

3DMark06 (v1.0.2) HDR/SM3.0 Score
HDR-R/SM3.0 Benchmark (1600x1200x32, 4x AA, 8x AF, Default Quality)

Games please. No one sits around and plays 3dmark all day.

Battlefield 2142
Fraps/THG-Demo Suez Canal (1600x1200x32, 4x AA, 8x AF, max Quality)

Has the Battlefield series ever been constrained by anything other than its memory footprint? I've never seen evidence to suggest otherwise...

Microsoft Flight Simulator X
Fraps/Anflug Sitka (1600x1200x32, in Game AA, in Game AF, Ultra Quality)

MSFS always has been and always will be ENTIRELY CPU-bound.

Tom's GT200 review has FSX results showing minimal FPS drop for all cards (other than the horribly-bandwidth-bound G92 results @2560x1600, clearly a memory management/memory footprint issue) when enabling AA & AF. Also note the insignificant decrease in fps moving from 1920x1200 to 2560x1600 on all hardware. There is just no way this can be seen as a GPU-limitation. In fact, MSFS may very well be the most CPU-bound title in existence.

Don't like Tom's results? Ok, read what Phil Taylor, the lead dev. of Ace's Studios (developers of MSFS X) has to say about the matter in this blog post. In it he states FSX is CPU limited (no qualifier, just straight up says "FSX is CPU-limited").

most games show less than 5% improvement by doubleing video memory, fsx, doom3, Warhammer Mark of Chaos and prey are actually a tiny bit faster on the 320mb version

Every one of those games is CPU-limited without extreme settings, and those extreme settings are just what would necessitate the migration to a graphics card with more video memory in the first place.

the exception appears to be dark messiah which shows a 300% improvement ,this may be some sort if glitch as a 256mb 7800 is 150% faster and a 256mb x1650 is twice as fast

It's not a glitch. This is what happens when you pair 320MB of video memory with a high-performance GPU and try to run games at settings which overflow the framebuffer.
 
Not a glitch so why do several cards with less memory run this game much faster when the 8800gts is considered much quicker (as born out by the benchmarks) is an x1650 really twice as fast as a 8800gts and why isnt the extra memory of the 8800gts 320mb vs 256mb increasing performance ? even a 256mb 7800gt beats the 8800

other examples
Oblivion: The Elder Scrolls 4 (Outdoor)
Fraps/THG-Savegame (v1.1) (1600x1200x32, no AA, 8x AF, max Quality, HDR-R) = less than 5% difference

Every one of those games is CPU-limited without extreme settings, and those extreme settings are just what would necessitate the migration to a graphics card with more video memory in the first place.

thats why i chose benchmarks with max quality whenever possible

they also do a graph where they addd all all the fps from all the benchmarks thats 7 games at 5 or 6 different settings
 
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Not a glitch so why do several cards with less memory run this game much faster when the 8800gts is considered much quicker (as born out by the benchmarks) is an x1650 really twice as fast as a 8800gts and why isnt the extra memory of the 8800gts 320mb vs 256mb increasing performance ? even a 256mb 7800gt beats the 8800

This is an architectural issue. It is widely-accepted that NV's memory management with G8x and its successors is not as efficient as their ATi counterparts.

other examples
Oblivion: The Elder Scrolls 4 (Outdoor)
Fraps/THG-Savegame (v1.1) (1600x1200x32, no AA, 8x AF, max Quality, HDR-R) = less than 5% difference

Why run Oblivion without AA on this card? HDR enabled - so what? My 88GT plays @ 1080p w/4x MSAA, 16x AF, HDR, max. in-game settings, and Qarl's texture pack 3. Seems to me someone's trying to misrepresent the situation by cherry-picking benchmarks.

thats why i chose benchmarks with max quality whenever possible

they also do a graph where they addd all all the fps from all the benchmarks thats 7 games at 5 or 6 different settings

I'm sorry, but 1600x1200 without AA is by no means max. quality, and running "max. quality" on simulators, RTSes, and large-scale FPSes, does not create a GPU limitation. Does it shift the bottleneck more towards the GPU? Most likely (barring setup bottlenecks), but not enough to say these games are now GPU-limited rather than CPU-limited.
 
ang on i did not cherry pick i checked all of the benchmarks at toms (every single one)
battlefield is 4aa 8af max quality
doom3 is the same but at ultra quality
dark messia the same at max quality
fsx is ultra quality but with ingame aa + ingame af
oblivion is at max quality (i dont know why they didnt use aa could it be because some of the cards cant do aa + hdr and they wanted a level playing field)
prey is at 4aa 8af max quality
warhammer is at 4aa 8af max quality

as for 1600x1200 i told you why that res was picked because its in the middle of available resolutions
and still more than most people play at ( i have a 22inch monitor and i cant do 1600x1200)
and as i dont know what res slides playes his games at I thought that was a fair choice...
 
Davros,
your choice of resolution is not best-suited to showing off a GPU limitation, so there is a bit of "cherry-picking" going on. The games in question are either inherently CPU-limited, or the choice of settings places the bottleneck on the CPU for the most part.

I suppose we really should find out what resolution the OP runs at :p
 
yes we should and like i said i ddint pick the res to show or not show (whatever be the case) any limitation or non limitation, it was picked cos it was in the middle

/Davros is cherry free :D
 
I have a C2D 3.2GHz, 2GB RAM and a 8800GTS 320MB. I find myself limited in some flight sims like FSX and I also play Armed Assault, Crysis, STALKER.

What upgrade (if any) would help me the most with flights sims?
New answer, get a 4870 and game happy. :)
 
Could be worse, could have been to a Donkey.
 
Ok, someone just explain to me what just happened in this thread. I've been away from the video card stuff for some time now. I think more memory is something I do need, but not sure if it's worth spending on right now.

The other problem I'm having right now with FSX is CTD in full screen mode (window mode is fine). This is a known (but unfixed) problem with nvidia cards. ATI/AMD doesn't seem to suffer from the same problem.

With that in mind, is there any good AMD/ATI card out there would beat my 8800 GTS 320mb and be worth the $?
 
If your talking about just fsx then no
would fsx benefit from a quad core since its cpu bound ?
or how about moving to vista and dx10 one of the benefits of dx10 was it is suposed to hit the cpu less maybe this would help
you'll have to check out some benchmarks

ps: the ati 4000 series looks good
 
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Ok, someone just explain to me what just happened in this thread. I've been away from the video card stuff for some time now. I think more memory is something I do need, but not sure if it's worth spending on right now.

The other problem I'm having right now with FSX is CTD in full screen mode (window mode is fine). This is a known (but unfixed) problem with nvidia cards. ATI/AMD doesn't seem to suffer from the same problem.

With that in mind, is there any good AMD/ATI card out there would beat my 8800 GTS 320mb and be worth the $?

What driver are you running? Keep in mind FS9/FSX seem to be much more forgiving to NV cards than ATi. As much as I'd love to recommend you get an ATi card, until they fix their MSFS and other OGL-based flight sim perf., I just can't do it...

If your talking about just fsx then no
would fsx benefit from a quad core since its cpu bound ?
or how about moving to vista and dx10 one of the benefits of dx10 was it is suposed to hit the cpu less maybe this would help
you'll have to check out some benchmarks

ps: the ati 4000 series looks good

FSX is multi-thread aware, but perf. gains are slim to none (sadly). The only thing FSX will use the extra cores for is caching/streaming of terrain textures, so "texture pop-in" will be less obvious/frequent. The only way to really gain perf. in MSFS is to increase single-thread perf. (higher-clocked processor or new architecture).
 
This is an architectural issue. It is widely-accepted that NV's memory management with G8x and its successors is not as efficient as their ATi counterparts.

drivers were also said to exacerbate the problems at first, which was corrected, so in early reviews the GTS 320 might not fare as well as it does now.
on the other end, in some recent games on highest settings or with texture packs you can run out of vid mem and that's due to textures not resolution, indeed the card suffers. (8800GT 256MB is also a card to avoid btw)

Here you can either upgrade (but it depends on your appreciation, whether you find 9800GTX or 4850 are or not a good enough boost over it), or play with lesser texture settings.
 
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