Woot! SL rocks with the Nvidia 7900 card!!

I see people posting here all the time asking what is the best card to use with SL. Just wanted to give some feedback that I just installed and am running the Nvidia 7900 and it is great. Still kind of sad thou, originally I was going to get the Nvidia 8800 GTX and was actually holding it in my hands. That one is a monster though and is 3 times the size of the 7900 and wouldn't fit in my motherboard.
But back to the 7900: At about $160 or so bucks now it is much more affordable then it was and I would recommend it.

oh be glad you dont have the 8800, power req is off the scale, 1st gen is waay to noisy and powerhungry to bother

7900 will last awhile since SL do jack with 99% of that card can do ;P

Besides pricewise 7900 is the card to get now, give it a few months 8800 will be half what its now.


-.- to bad Arctic cooling havnt made a 79xx cooler that fits yet >.<
drops the noise on them considerably, and blows air out instead of making circles (made my 6800 dead quiet and alot easier to clean : P )
<-

It pretty much doesn't matter what graphics card you use for SL. I have a Radeon X800GTO PCI-E 256mb in my main comp, and just a lowly Radeon 9600 Mobility 64mb in my notebook, yet both run SL at about the same speed. SL is all CPU-based and barely makes use of the graphics card obviously.

SL works great with a Geforce 6600 or above.

What people tend to get a little nutty about, I've noticed, is that they immediately assume a higher number = better.

But frankly I'd only trade my 6800 GTX for a 7950 or better.

So keep in mind, just cause it says 7300 7600 or something, doesn't mean its immediately a better card.

6800 GT/GTX/XT based cards will be more than sufficient for SL and any other game on the market til Direct X 10 launches, and then all those 7900 series cards are useless too because from everything I've read the only Nvidia cards that are being built with DX10 support currently are the 8800 series.

So don't spend your money right now, you'll just be spending more money again around March.

I have had two 7900 cards (one with 512 onboard, the other 256), and Makaio has the 8800 card.

In general, either 7900 card should do you just fine. I have very few problems with FPS and if you're running a 6X series (I have one in my laptop) the difference will astound you. Take the money you're saving off the 8800 and get yourself an extra gig of RAM for extra punch.

Mak's 8800 has a few growing pains. Better FPS than even my 7900 card, but the price is pretty damn high, including the cost of everything else you need to run it (he got his in a brand new machine). There's also some anti-aliasing problems where the lines are much more jagged than they should be. Possibly in another few months SL will be better tuned to the 8800, or maybe a better driver will help fix it. At this point though my money's absolutely on the 7900 series.

I got an XFX GeForce 7950 GT with 512MB RAM just before Christmas. It performed above and beyond my expectations. Very high fps, the colours are more vibrant than I was accustomed to and what's more, there's no fan noise because it's got passive cooling. Idle temps are around 55 degrees, and it never runs hotter than 70 (even with Doom3 running) which is good because temperature was a big concern before buying.

Are you running then in a sli mb togther? I never knew you can run two mismatch memory size GC fromthe same manufature? iS this possible?
I resently purchased the 7900 gtx extreme and I keep some pretty crappy fps.I running a 4400 110 watt amd. its was nice price.

8800 not on your life at the moment!
Maybe in my next computer build i use 1 or 2 . But at the moment noway!
BTW 7950 is ranked below the 7900.....

You can run sli with 2 diffrent ram size vid card long as they are same number 7600/7900/ect

Its similar to raid, lowest will determine the total

512+256 = 256 / 256
512+128 = 128 / 128

Some sli motherboards even allow you to use 2 diffrent pci-e card
7600+7900 but not in sli, just as single vid cards.

Just handy when you upgrade vidcard and you dont have sli, but want another 1-2 screens :>

Not so sure about that extra Gig Cory - I have 4 and SL only ever recognises 2!
Which doesn't seem to be a problem with any other apps I've checked.
Anyway, anything over 2 for SL appears to be a waste of money.

doesnt make much since.........But I ask the tech people over here to make sure. If i am do it i will be adding a second 7900 when i can afford it.....
I don`t know about this tho, my manual says to fun Idenical cards( when running in a slit format.........My english is not that great but I do believe it means memory and exect model..................
Your fogetting the limit of of memory support the motherboards has. It is max at 1 giga for 2 sli gc. You can`t run 2 giga total on a one giga max sli mb.......

I not really sure if this is true of not. After learning and studying computer buikdting for awhile. I really don`t believe you can mix. Just my 2 yen

as for the 6600gt one poster remarked about. hell yes that a great gc! i switched from 6600gt to a 7900gtx!...........

It was time for the change.

I was running 3 for awhile with xp pro but i removemt the the 2 512 because it caused so memory issues.


But let me ask you, are you running xp or xp 64bit os?
I like to add 2 more giga if i can. But as i been told its does not support over 2 giga on sli mb and reg xp pro...........


as for SL not reading the 2 extra giga ram. Its does use it! But the client is too stupid recorded it as such. Just bad coding as always the case with the sl client

Wanted to give some feedback on my original post. Definitely glad I didn't spend the extra money on the 8800 GTX. I spend 90% of my time in the beta grid testing and there I can max out all of my settings with no problems because there it much less data to download. When I am in MG though I am usually hopping from spot to spot running a few errands. I have found that bandwidth is the major limiting factor. I am running cable and am rated at 1.25 MBps but it is usually around 400kbps reliably from SL. I hit spurts of upto 700+ kbps at times though. But max settings in MG just takes way toooooo long to download all of the info that is available when you move around a lot. Now unless I am in my home sim I drop down to 128 max draw distance and in a really crowded spot may even drop to 64.

But that does bring up one interesting question. IF you are running max settings at a large draw distance and you are moving around forcing downloads from the servers....... Does that contribute to lag??????????? I do know that if you are in the same spot for a while then all of the texture info is in the cahce and you aren't polling the server for that info anymore. Just wondering about teleporting into a new area.

These Arctic coolers are fine if you never are going to go SLI. But if you do want to go SLI in the future they are too thick.

At least on my motherboard I had to leave the stock heatsink on one of my 6800GT's because the Arctic cooler would touch the second card and stop the fan from spinning.

Its poor design to have the little center buldge in the fan poping up like it does. If this were a standard sqirrel cage blower with a center intake it would be fine

Not exactly true. It is true for stock settings but the difference between video cards is the ability to increase AA and AF settings on the card's control panel. There can be a vast difference once you set these correctly. You pay the big bucks to be able to turn up AA and AF to eliminate "jaggies" without hampering framerate.

Sadly, the 8800's are not fully DX10 .. they are set up to basically emulate DX 10 support just as Flight Simulator X emulates DX10 features.

With Nvidia, the second number is the important one, the higher the better. A 7300 is not significantly better than a 6200 and a 5950 will out perform it in all things except the features exclusive to the 7xxx series. You would be downgrading in most cases if you went from a 6800 to a 7600 for instance. The letters at the end are very important as well as a 7800 SE is a reject bin part with a lot of features turned off and sold slightly cheaper than a 7800 GT but performance is vastly different.