Be Excellent To Each Other

See you in a couple of weeks. I can hardly see what I'm typing

Was happily playing Dirt 2 when I smelled a funny smell and all of a sudden this -

Aw man, that sucks.

Oh dear, is it under warranty?

Also the obligatory:

Have you tried flashing the BIOS?

and

Get a 360.

My desktop (when I exited to it) was like something out of Star Wars when they do warp factor. Glistening with artifacts. So I shut the PC down and rebooted it.

Seems fine now

I know Dirt 2 is buggy. After about ten races it starts to stutter and I have to exit and reload it to get the framerates back up. I thought it was heat but I don't know. My fan isn't exactly going crazy.

Will put the card through some pain now and see if it happens again.

The card is under warranty but tbh I might opt for a 5850. It's apparently slightly faster than the 280 and uses 20 watts instead of 100. This thing is like an oven.

So you've tried turning it off and on again?

Crysis runs perfectly

I think I will wait until they patch Dirt 2. Something's definitely not right with it.

Once i started to have the star wars warpspeed thing in Stalker, and i just unpluged the GPU and plugged in again and it was fine since.

In news of a similar tone, my 360 froze twice in the last week.

Early signs of a RROD I think, my second.

Buy a GX4000.

That does look a lot like what my 360 looked like when it RRODed.

I like it like that. It reminds of Assassins Creed when the simulation starts failing.

Played it again. 10 races in started to stutter. It's definitely a driver or bug issue.

Got myself a Cavey car

I had a 4870x2 and it was really hot and bloody noisy. Fortunately, in a way, the card ended up faulty in the first year so I RMA'd and got my money back on it. Now Ive ordered this baby...just a shame theres such a long time until delivery. On the plus side, the price may come down before it ships.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/MSI-Radeon-Vide ... 69&sr=1-10

The 5 series use a new nm tech so they're much cooler. TBH I swore I wouldn't go back to ATI after the millions of lockups I suffered over the years. But the way these new toasters are? it's doing my head in. The summer is a living hell in hnyar I would have skinted myself on a 5850 (if I could bloody get one !) but thankfully the 280 seems to be fine atm. It's deffo going next year for something quieter.

So after a 9 hour boring as hell stint of staring all all different types of fans (some of them ludicriously priced I may add !) I have ordered three of these -



And one of these for the HDD exhaust.



They shift double the CFM of my stock fans. Also I can remove the Noctua fan (92mm) from the HDD bay and put it back on the cooler, doubling the value of the cooler lol.

I looked at Noctua's 120mm fans but was shocked to see that for £18 they shift about 39 CFM. That's not enough tbh. I don't want my PC quiet I want it cool. The Arctics shift 59 and 35 respectively. I can live with a little more noise tbh. They were only £22 delivered for all 4 too, the same price as one 120mm Noctua. /rolls eyes.

Enabled Vsync and problems completely evaporated. Game as smooth as butter.

Last time I listen to a fucking gaming magazine, assholes.

Always, and I repeat for emphasis always have V-Sync on.

Unless a game is finely tuned for specific hardware, no v-sync will always look crap, and be more expensive in many terms due to no rest periods.

I had no idea what it did tbh, well I know it syncs vertically but that's about it.

I read a readers letter saying he was getting shit FPS in a game, they told him to disable Vsync ALWAYS because it gave a massive hit in performance.

So that kinda scared me off of ever using it.

I noticed in the menu that I got some lines appearing sideways accross the monitor, but put that down to it being a cheap monitor with crap response time.

Also I disabled Avast! on access protection whilst playing and rolled back the drivers. But I don't think those were the issue because the menu was still crap until I enabled Vsync.

Now I have to reinstall Grid, because it suffered the same problems as Dirt 2.

To Vsync or not Vsync.. that is the question...

Ok - rendering takes place to an offscreen buffer always, of which there may be multiple. If you have Vsync on, then when the monitor scan line is in the vertical blank (ie.e off the bottom & looping back to the top in an old cathode ray monitor, and LCDs still use the same format for signal timing), that is when the current display is changed to the latest rendered frame. If VSync is off, it shows the latest frame as soon as it is ready, no matter where the current scanline is on the display.

So - if something is moving fast, and you monitor is refreshing at 60Hz, but running flat out your card is chucking out 120 FPS, then you will see 'tears' on the moving things. But you get a big number in the FPS count, which is used for epeen rating.

Difference it makes? Bugger all. So what if the top half of your screen is showing something 20ms in advance of the bottom half. Id that really gonna make the blindest bit of difference considering your eyes can only detect motion at around 25-30FPS anyway. 60 feels smoother, but going above that actually detracts from the realism as your eyes expect blurs with fast motion and not static crisp frames (hence why ultra-detail fast stuff looks 'artificial', and we now have a plethora of after effects to try and mimic the blurring our eyes do in the real world.... meh

There is an argument that 10ms updates (100Hz) means things are more responsive in-game. That may have been the case (Quake 2 era), but these days, for the past 10 years any game programmer worth his salt knows to decouple logic from graphics & run at a fixed update (usually 25 or 30Hz, sometimes 50/60 for twitch games), so FPS & gameplay aren't coupled any more, so the argument doesn't wash.

So - VSYNC good if you actually want to play games that look good, don't blow up your PC, and don't make your eyes bleed so much. Golden rule - FPS is NOT a raw measure of performance. Low FPS indictates bad performance, but if you can maintain refresh rate (50Hz+) with VSync, then squeezing any higher gains you no actual performance, just burns up your PC faster and introduces tearing.

Yeah pretty much what Dom said. Disabling V-sync works your gfx card harder for no gain and often a loss in visual clarity.

Not necessarily, if you triple-buffer - it'll always render ahead, throwing out a buffered (older) frame if a new one is ready in time.

Splendid post Dom !

It sort of makes sense now

Oddly since I fitted the new fans and did some jiggery pokery with directions through the radiator the GPU fan NEVER spins any faster than default. So new fans + a change in directions + Vsync has the PC running cooler and better than ever.