I received my "4K" monitor just in time for yesterdays AT training, only to notice that my current gfx card is not able to run it at UHD resolution (3840x2160). Game seemed somewhat playable with 75% sampling (2880x1620), so I figured that I’d need some 1.78x more powerful gfx card. My current one is GTX760, thus GTX980 ought to give plenty enough power for playable UHD. However, I wouldn’t want to pay that much €€€ for a 28nm card, while 20nm cards should be around the corner. Spec-wise GTX970 should have about twice the shading power compared to my current card (1.44x more CUDA cores, 1.07x increased frequency, and ~40% claimed increase in per-CUDA performance) but the numbers tell you only so much. R9-290 would be even cheaper than GTX970 but they are hard to compare by numbers.
So the question is this: does anyone of you have knowledge (or event an informed guess) if R9-290 or GTX970 would be enough for UHD? I’d be happy with "very high" or even just "high" quality, as long as I could use 8xMSAA. This Tom’s Hardware review was somewhat encouraging but used only 4xMSAA and complained about stuttering with R9-290. I’d also like to hear about multi-player performance in actual maps that we are using.
"I wouldn’t want to pay that €€€ for a 28mm card". What is wrong with 28mm lol? Only thing that matters in gaming is performance. It’s like people whining about the "narrow" 256bit memory bus of the GTX 980. Pointless.
20mm will be there at the earliest next year Q4. Or MAYBE H1 2015, but these will be the 800€+ cards like Titan whatever, and spending that much € to play Arma is very, very silly.
To get 30fps on Arma 3 at UHD, I’d say that a GTX 980 would be very welcome.
But anyway, what’s your processor? If it’s anything below the i5-4690k (or equivalent from previous gens, up until sandy bridge) get a new processor and overclock it. (an i7 is overkill, get the 4690k).
PS: Why do you specifically want to use 8xMSAA? One of the nice things of larger resolutions is that you need less AA. At UHD you would need 2xMSAA at most.
[quote user_id=“1680930” avatar=“https://s3.amazonaws.com/files.enjin.com/821401/site_logo/medium.png” name=“Intact”]"I wouldn’t want to pay that €€€ for a 28mm card". What is wrong with 28mm lol? Only thing that matters in gaming is performance. It’s like people whining about the "narrow" 256bit memory bus of the GTX 980. Pointless.
20mm will be there at the earliest next year Q4. Or MAYBE H1 2015, but these will be the 800€+ cards like Titan whatever, and spending that much € to play Arma is very, very silly.
To get 30fps on Arma 3 at UHD, I’d say that a GTX 980 would be very welcome.
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I agree in that there is nothing wrong with the process itself, but the point is that when the next gen fab cards appear, 980 price will drop to sane levels. I’d love to have 980 but if it takes until Q4 for prices to drop, then there is no point waiting and I’d have to go with either 290 or 970.
I have [email protected] and I’m fine with it at the moment. Running at UHD, my gfx load is at 100%, while CPU runs somewhere around 70%.
I don’t need the eye candy. I want high resolution for improved target detection and identification at long ranges. 8xMSAA is there to make those pesky thin power lines, tank guns, EI, rifles, AT, etc. as visible as possible at long distances. That is why I got the 4K display in the first place. Not having the full MSAA would defeat the purpose. There really is a big difference between 2x/4x and 8x when the feature you are looking at is basically a single pixel wide.
[quote]
I agree in that there is nothing wrong with the process itself, but the point is that when the next gen fab cards appear, 980 price will drop to sane levels.[/quote]
There’s always a "next gen" around the corner. Always delaying your purchase doesn’t make much sense.
You’re right about the AA actually, I forgot that in arma there are so many small objects like power lines etc, that really do require AA at maximum to see at long distances.
So if you want to play with 8xMSAA at UHD, I think GTX 970 would just be enough. A 980 would be nice to feel more comfortable and be able to play at 35-50fps instead of the 30-40fps that I think you’ll get.
3.8Ghz is good but you can definitely squeeze more out of your cpu, and that will bring performance increases. I don’t know exactly which one you got, but you should certainly reach 4.2Ghz without temp issues (unless you’ve got stock intel cooler).
EDIT: This is pure speculation on my part but, if you want, you can wait a month or two and see if a 970Ti comes out. I suspect the "Ti" card will be on the x70 this year. Why? Because there’s a huge 200dollar price gap without the 970 and the 980. I don’t think it’ll be a 980Ti because they’ll probably just release a Titan when AMD reveil their new GPUs in a few months.
I know. This is literally the first time I think about waiting for the next gen in 20 years of buying PCs, but then again this is also the first time I consider buying the latest gen stuff…
I think I have come to some synthesis from this discussion:
980 is good for my Arma@UHD requirements, anything more is an overkill.
970 is not good enough in the long run. I don’t want to risk being stuck with 30FPS for a year or more.
Buying 970 now and 980 a little later makes no sense. I’d be cheaper to buy 980 right now.
If rumors are true, AMD will introduce some 20nm stuff next year, but nVidia won’t.
I will not pay 620€ for a gfx card. I say that again: I will not pay 620€ for a gfx card.
So my only choice is wait for AMD to release something good early 2015 to force 980 price down to 500€ range.
Thanks Intact for helping me think this through. I hope that I can sleep better next night.
No problem, I like hardware and know quite a bit about it ^^.
Maybe the R9 390(X) will be what you’re looking for. R9 390x would be ideal, but the launch price of the 290x was $550, which would translate to ~600€ in our countries. The 290 was $400, so the 390 might ideal. In any case, the introduction of these 2 new cards should indeed force the prices of the 980 down, but not so much I expect.
Graphics card seem to be expensive where you live though. Here for an MSI 980 it’s ~570€.
Id recommend buying a AMD because the Nvidia cards have been going downhill fast over the last couple of years. The R9 series is pretty awesome and cheap !
I am sorry, but there is no way you are going to be able to play in 4K with 8xMSAA with the current generation of graphic cards and not blow a gigantic hole in your wallet.
Yep, ARMA is just bad. I wouldn’t go an spend a lot of money just for ARMA because you’ll probably have to sell your house before you have a system powerful enough to run it properly.
I did find a setting that really improved my performance without making the game look too ugly: In the \Documents\Arma 3\Username\Username.Arma3Profile file, edit the ‘sceneComplexity’ parameter down to 500k or lower. It makes the engine render less objects/polygons the further they are from your position (Imagine looking at the edge of the map - good FPS, right? then you rotate 180 degrees, look in the direction of a town thats 1km away and behind a mountain and your FPS drops to like 20 - This should help reduce this). Totally worth a shot!
[quote name=“Intel”]MSAA works by running the pixel shader once per pixel but running the coverage and occlusion tests at higher than normal resolution, typically 2x through 8x, and then merging the results together. While significantly faster than super sampling it still represents a significant additional cost compared to no anti-aliasing
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That means your better off with higher resolution and textures so you don’t require shit tons of redraw of you screen then higher AA as you have more pixels to display for example the powerline making it more visible on top of that you can put some more basic AA forms for smoothing. All in all a 4k monitor with a high end graphics card (GTX 760 2G DDR5 for about 200 euros) should be more then enough to give you nice visuals especially at higher resolutions I can recommend the new AA form called CMAA which stand for Conservative Morphological Anti-Aliasing. Check out this link which explains what it does, it also explain most AA we have today such as MSAA & FXAA. Reason I recommend CMAA is because they optimized it so you can run better textures but still get good framerates.
anyways if you want to see good close up visuals get more AA anything else get more reso and steady framerates
EDIT enjin I wasn’t ready yet don’t post my shit for me!
But a GTX 760 really won’t cut it for 4k though. Besides the basic lack of computing power for 4K, 2GB VRAM is far from enough if you want to play at 4k with high textures. 4Gb VRAM is minimum if you want good textures @4K.
As far as I managed to gather, ARMA’s code soft-caps video memory to 2047gb, so if you have a 4GB card and set maxVRAM=4096 it might not do anything or it might do something unexpected.
After testing a lot with ingame settings and the .cfg settings, I found that… nothing really helps.
I can have 100fps while chilling at base but on a server with 90 players, even if there’s nobody in the area and I’m just CQBing 1v1, my FPS will drop to 15-25 each time. Driving me nuts.
But a GTX 760 really won’t cut it for 4k though. Besides the basic lack of computing power for 4K, 2GB VRAM is far from enough if you want to play at 4k with high textures. 4Gb VRAM is minimum if you want good textures @4K.[/quote]
I got a GTX 570 and i get steady framerates with a 4k reso and textures on good in arma and it has only 2GB of DDR3 VRAM which GTX 760 beats straight up
however I check my settings to ensure that there is a little redraw as possible as this always clogs up CPU & GPU power my suggestions would be to do the same just google what the settings mean if you unsure after that the only bottleneck can be ARMA and the weird way it does server FPS/ client FPS(I don’t really understand it)
I’m sorry Zero but I don’t believe that you can have steady 30 fps @4K with a GTX 570 (loading up an empty altis map in the editor and having steady 30 fps doesn’t count). Only way I’d believe you is if you lowered all your settings to standard and only put textures on high… And if you’d have your CPU overclocked to 4+Ghz.
660 vs 570 bench
According to this a 660 slightly beats a 570 1.25Gb, so I’m loosely assuming a 2Gb 570 would perform at GTX 660 levels. Now let’s pull up at bench results from tomshardware.
http://media.bestofmicro.com/T/F/404115/original/arma-fr.png
At QHD your GTX 570 (assuming it’s performing at the same level as the 660) would average at 25fps on very high (note: not ultra!). @4K this should give something around ~15fps avg. Lowering from Very High to High should boost that fps to about 20fps avg. So even if you would lower other settings to get average 30fps, that is still only average fps. You would have dips in the low 20s and high 10s soo often.
Steady 30fps with settings around High at 4k … I don’t know but it doesn’t seem like a GTX 570 2Gb would cut it. But I’m speculating(may or may not be equal bullshitting :D) way too much. I’m just curious because I’d like to game at 4K myself in about 3months and I don’t want to spend too much dollars.
@Bull: That soft-cap doesn’t really mean much. VRAM discussion
Arma 3 consistently uses more than 2Gb VRAM if possible.
