23.03.2010, 19:27
I never look at overclocks myself. If a card can't perform up to a level without an overclock then I don't think it should be considered at all for that level. As for stuttering...I've found in my real-world experience that the primary cause of that is lack of RAM...both on the video card and on the system. If you have (on a 32-bit OS), say 1GB system RAM and a video card with 512MB of VRAM, then you only have 512MB left for the actual system to use. This will often cause you to run out of RAM on the system when trying to run at higher resolutions, and thus you get stuttering. The only driver-related stuttering I've ever received has been from an nVidia card using more modern drivers trying to play an old game; I had to revert to ancient drivers to get smooth playability again. I think it's worth it to consider that ATi (1985) has been in this graphics business longer than nVidia (1993), so really the problems IL-2 has with ATi are Maddox Games' fault more so than ATi's. I don't know why they went with OpenGL when they should have known most graphics cards were tooled for DirectX first, and OpenGL second; only workstation cards even in 2003 had OpenGL as the primarily-used rendering API.
So yeah. I guess what I'm saying in a nutshell is that I wouldn't buy a new card for just one game (unless it's Crysis..
), hence me ragging on nVidia being a slouch these past 6 months. I don't have any particular brand bias (past three cards have been nVidia, for better or worse), but their behaviour recently from a marketing and consumer standpoint has been sub-par, and you and I both know that nVidia cards typically command a $100-$150 premium over their similar-performing ATi counterparts. That is why I can't justify recommending one of the new nVidia offerings to him, even taking IL-2 into consideration. What it boils down to is whether or not IL-2 is worth $100-$150 to him.
Edit: just remembered a little tidbit I read awhile back. nVidia has always had a focus on OpenGL in part because their programmable shaders used to be consistently inferior to those produced by ATi, making it difficult to implement the advanced functions of DirectX on nVidia hardware as opposed to ATi hardware. That's why we have Shader Model 1.1 (nVidia) and Shader Model 1.4 (ATi).
So yeah. I guess what I'm saying in a nutshell is that I wouldn't buy a new card for just one game (unless it's Crysis..
), hence me ragging on nVidia being a slouch these past 6 months. I don't have any particular brand bias (past three cards have been nVidia, for better or worse), but their behaviour recently from a marketing and consumer standpoint has been sub-par, and you and I both know that nVidia cards typically command a $100-$150 premium over their similar-performing ATi counterparts. That is why I can't justify recommending one of the new nVidia offerings to him, even taking IL-2 into consideration. What it boils down to is whether or not IL-2 is worth $100-$150 to him.Edit: just remembered a little tidbit I read awhile back. nVidia has always had a focus on OpenGL in part because their programmable shaders used to be consistently inferior to those produced by ATi, making it difficult to implement the advanced functions of DirectX on nVidia hardware as opposed to ATi hardware. That's why we have Shader Model 1.1 (nVidia) and Shader Model 1.4 (ATi).