Some upgrade advice please?

[startrekmike]

Okay, so I installed Cliffs of Dover with full knowledge that it was probably not going to be a great experience in terms of framerate on my aging machine but I have come to a place where I can upgrade my graphics card in hopes that things will improve a bit.

So here are my specs, I can't upgrade anything else for the time being (not sure when that will change due to being unemployed at the moment in a state where employment is a luxury and good employment is nearly impossible, so I already feel poor enough as it is).

AMD 9950 Black edition 2.6 Quad core (I will overclock to 3Ggz when I can get my hands on a better cooler, until then, it is what I got.)

8 Gigs of ram

Geforce 9800gt 512MB (I know, I know, it is way past it's prime).


So I have been looking at every possible card that I can afford at this moment, right now I am looking at the AMD Radeon HD 7770 with 2 GB's of ram, it is about $170(including shipping) on newegg and frankly, that is as high as I can go, not a dollar more.

Would this work okay in conjunction with my existing specs? Keep in mind, I don't run anything past 1280x1024 resolution due to my monitor and I am very happy with that, I don't run multiple monitors because I use head tracking and I don't really want to run it maxed out, I just want the game to look good, not amazing but I would like some ground detail beyond the blurry green and brown mess that I see now.

Again, I am not looking to run at 1080p resolution with maxed out settings in the game, I just am looking at something that will run at 1280x1024 with high to medium settings.


Does this card offer what I need?

[Untamo]

S!

I would say that yes, that card will be satisfactory. Comparing to my 2GB 6950 (with flashed bios so that is has the 6970 shader amount, but 6950 clocks), I run the game with Medium settings, and in 2560x1600 resolution, and I get ~25fps on the field, 30-40 over land, and ~45 over the sea. The nasty "enemy present" bug still sometimes kicks the fps to single digits though.

Note: remember to disable the Ubisoft video! If you have it on, it will most likely drop your fps to half of what they should be. Just delete or rename the video. More info:
http://forum.1cpublishing.eu/showthread.php?t=33628

[startrekmike]

Since you run at a fairly high resolution, should I expect high/medium settings on my end due to my much lower resolution?

To be specific, could I possibly expect to have medium to high settings for land textures?

I know that it is tough to guess when you don't really have the same system that I do, I mean, I need to upgrade the card very badly anyway but I just don't want to get my hopes up and think that I can have land textures that don't look like a blurry impressionist painting when it might not be possible anyway due to poor texture optimization.

The buildings can stay on low for all I care, they look good even at low (perhaps that is part of the problem), I just want some nice looking land and a smattering of tree's


Thanks so much for your help so far!

[ATAG_Dutch]

Hello again Mike!

Not sure if this will help, but I had the 5770 before the one in my sig, which ran the game ok on medium settings away from London at 1920x1080, but that was before all the recent improvements to the game. At your lower res, you could probably fly on medium over London too with the 7770, or possibly tweak things higher.

Whichever card you pick, make sure you turn off ssao and AA in the game and let CCC or NCP add CSAA (FSAA??FXAA?? Can't remember). A search on the forum should bring up recent tweaks for ATI cards.

I'm really happy with the GTX570 though, which I bought a year ago. No intention of upgrading this year, works fine with everything on high, original textures, effects medium. If you could run to one of these I think you'd be happier than a 7770. My opinion, you understand

[vranac]

HD7770 is ok, but you have better choices in that price range.
6850/70 are faster cards especially 6870.




http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...n=6870&x=0&y=0

But this is the bestbuy, good cooling, performance~6870

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16814127593

and you can buy cooler,something like this will be fine,CPU speed is very important

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16835103065

[TonyD]

Originally Posted by startrekmike

...

Again, I am not looking to run at 1080p resolution with maxed out settings in the game, I just am looking at something that will run at 1280x1024 with high to medium settings.


Does this card offer what I need?

In my opinion - yes

The lower resolution will definitely help, as at 1080p CloD will use in excess of 1GB VRAM even at 'Medium' settings. Having 2GB available will be an asset. You will also see an improvement when o/c'ing your cpu, but try this by upping your bus speed (FSB/reference clock) rather than just the cpu multiplier - you will see a bigger improvement this way.

Edit: as vranac says, the 6870 will be a better bet since it's 256-bit, rather than 128-bit. It all depends on the price you can get it for though.

[startrekmike]

I really hope it works okay, I imagine it will due to the fact that even my 512 Mb card does okay with everything aircraft wise cranked and the land detail to low, I get pretty decent framerates considering.

This is probably just a video memory issue and thus a 2gig card will go a long way to helping that.


Thanks for all the help.