Radeon 5770 Outperfoming GeForce GTS 450 By A Lot

Good lord... if you're getting a Zalman flower style cooler you can go to 3.0 easy as pie. I was talking 3.2GHz with the stock air cooler and no voltage tweaks or anything o.O

I take it you're running Vista currently? We had a PC in the house running Vista and 2GB of RAM... Vista chokes on this game. No hardware changes, just clean install of Windows 7 and the FPS went up by 3-5. That seems small... but it makes a difference when you're at 25-30 in cities.


But yeah, OC that CPU and try again. You should be ok with your current setup. Good Luck :D

Vista actually runs faster than 7 for most things. My only complaint about Vista is how volatile it is, everything crashes. You want to open a browser? Sur-ERROR WIPING HARD DRIVE. But yeah, XIV runs fine with Vista on my other PC.

Not at all directed at you. Was directed towards everyone in general. People tend to see a shiny new system and buy it without regards to what the individual parts are, then get disappointed and trash the game when it won't run on their "Brand New System." It's a consumerist thing.

It's like buying a new car. Before you buy it, research what you want. Learn about the parts and ask questions about the system you're looking at. Make sure it has what you need before you buy it. Don't just ask the guy at Best Buy "Will this play such and such?" Chances are, he doesn't have a clue, but will tell you "Yes, and make you coffee at the same time." Just to sell the computer.

Didn't mean to single you out if it seemed that way :(

It may have been the higher RAM usage in Vista that caused the slowdown as well. Not bashing Vista completely... even though I couldn't stand how sluggish it was for everyday tasks... but to each his own :)

I haven't had a crash on vista in a long, long time. People still trash the OS because of how buggy drivers were when it was released. People seem to forget how buggy and crashy XP was when it was released (I used to get 15+ BSODs a month) and it has now grown to be the most widely used Windows OS today. I'm not trying to suggest that Vista will fall in XPs footsteps, but its not even close to as bad as people still claim.

Yeah, if I will buy anything right away it'll be more RAM. My basic startup @idle eats up 33% of my 4 gigs of RAM immediately. Win7 and 6 gigs total should clean up that issue very well.

I still treat it like the ME version of 7. Even after it was out for 2 years, it felt sluggish and crashed a great deal for me. Was the last time I bothered with Nvidia graphics too. "Nvsomethingrandomletters.dll Has Display Driver Stopped Responding and Has Recovered."


Only recovered after it murdered everything I had typed or crashed my game though ... mumble mumble.

Ok I'll give you that. The display driver will crash on me every once in awhile. That kills FFXI, but this only ever happens when I'm dual boxing.

Is it really Vista's fault that nvidia's driver crashed (and recovered)? I couldn't tell you. What I can tell you is the OS doesn't BSOD and require a reboot. I've had 60+ days uptime on my home machine. To me thats the important thing. It would be longer but windows updates require reboots :/

:| That's just how Vista works! It eats up as much RAM as possible for some reason. They argued that "Unused RAM is wasted RAM..." But it was slow to release all that hoarded RAM for other programs that needed it, thus the sluggish feel when launching apps.

On a typical restart with Vista on my laptop, it would be using 1.4GB of RAM from the start. Same laptop, 7 eats like 540MB.


Plus! you can't put DDR2 into a new PC :O

Save your monies! :D

Oh, I agree. Blue screens were much less prominent with Vista over XP. But, that also ties into the driver stack management and the ability to restart key system drivers without a reboot.

I liked Vista over XP. XP needs to die already... it's holding back innovation ; ;

But... after I tried 7, Vista felt like a turd. A chrome plated turd, but a turd nonetheless. 7 really is a huge improvement.

Edit: Been running Windows 7 since the early Betas... had a few issues early on, but after release, have not had one blue screen or error/crash. That to me is amazing stability.

I lol'd pretty hard at this.

I like Vista, it was just very shaky and the SPs never really helped it much. I've had 4 BSODs in 2 years, which is pretty low, but usually over something ridiculous like a faulty driver.

What I origionally quoted there sure makes Vista sound like the debil to me ;)

I didn't have a major problem with Vista aside from the driver issues, but moving to Windows 7 was a humongous leap in my eyes.

Lol. I wanna watch that movie again.

And happy to oblige Krizz. I live to spread mirth and sarcasm throughout the lands.



Oh, and herpes. :|

Is DDR2 RAM really that outdated? ._.
I'd need a new mobo to support DDR3.

The mobo I ordered takes DDR2 RAM and it's a new mobo. I went with that because it's what I have in the desktops now (4GB in both or something like that). It gives me room for expansion.

Honestly, I should have researched DDR3. It's cheaper than DDR2 in a lot of cases now.

Edit: To quote an article I read "DDR2 is still the standard, but DDR3 is the future"

Or something like that.

Yeah, DDR3 is just now becoming the norm. Most, if not all computers moving forward should use DDR3. That said however, you can buy new Mobos with DD2 support. And the performance gain from DDR2-DDR3 is minimal at best at this point.

In the year 2000 though... when DDR3 hits speeds commonly above 2000 ( I realize that specialty memory is in fact almost at 3000 speeds right now... but common means mainstream.) The move to DDR3 will have more weight as the performance gain will be something like 1.3 fold. over the 1.0 of DDR2.

Agreed. I'm also not completely caught up on how much of a difference there is between 16GB of DDR2 and 8GB of DDR3 (I was comparing two mobos and those were the max supported numbers). So unless the ratio is 1:2, the DDR2 board would win in the end (by performance, not price).

At the same time, DDR3 would probably win in price.

It all comes down to how much RAM you actually need. Anything beyond 8GB is probably overkill.

Well yeah, I just mean every program literally had a chance of causing some horrible crash. Mine was a laptop, and the touch pad drivers that were updated caused a BSOD. Was horrible. That aside Vista does perform better with games than 7 on average.

Yeah, it's been my experience that anything above 4GB is currently overkill. Unless using photo/video editing programs. But 8GB is a good, solid point to be at right now.

And DDR3 has several advantages in theory, aside from the supposed lower power consumption. Which gets thrown out the window when they clock it sky high anyways...

It has to be clocked higher than DDR2 in order to make up for the latency being higher in DDR3 versus DDR2. DDR2 800 is roughly equivalent to 1333. DDR3 has a slightly higher bandwidth threshold. It is able to transfer information at a faster clock rate, but at a slightly higher latency. so it's not a 1:2 speed boost at all. More like 1:1.5. Until the norm is DDR3 at 2133, I wouldn't bother with it. And by then we'll be staring down the gullet of DDR4/5. So yeah... no real reason not to run DDR2 :)

I think it's funny that GPU processing power are ahead of most modern CPUs. In fact I believe it was Folding@Home that had some sort of processing code that utilized GPU for it's clock cycles which got a vast amount more done than on the CPU alone.

Yeah, the CPU is amazing for most things, and out of order processing, but the GPU is simply the bees knees when it comes to parallel in order processing. Graphics and most data that has a base repeatable pattern, like video decoding and compression, benefit greatly from using a GPU. I just wish more programs would thread for GPU/CPU parallelism.


This will be moot with AMDs Bulldozer core and the new Intel (Sandy Bridge, Haswell, Rockwell) APUs coming out early next year...

I remember using Win7 during the beta as well. It wasnt to bad. I had alot of conflicts with the system, but I thought they would be ironed out when I purchased the retail version. DAY 1: Both my integrated sound and sound card WAS NOT supported. When I go to install the driver, Win7 REFUSED to install them. #()!*$"@#) WHAT? Moving on... bought a new sound card. The first 2 months, at least 10 applications I wanted/needed to use were unusable on Win7. Either they refused to install/load or just were not compatible. Again... WHAT???... The final straw was when I tried to play a few PC games I bought from eBay. 8 games made in the last 5 years... ZERO WORKED.... Same exact results with my ATI 9600 and HD3650 cards, all updated drivers, all updates for Win7. Albiet, most of these problems were on the x64 version. My friend's x86 install actually played a few of the games and ran most of the apps. But still.................... more dots....

Soooo.... stable? HAHAHAHA... right. It's hilarious because I never had any of these problems with Vista, yet Vista is dogged over and over... AND OVER... for stability issues. Not that... I use Vista much... I still prefer XP. I just never had a big issue with Vista.


Edit for better explanation: When apps and games loaded, errors, system crashes, black frozen screens, and autorestarts.

Sounds like those are gonna cost an arm and a leg.
Luckily that should mean the previous line of hardware such as i7s should be rather cheap in time.

The x64 version of Windows 7 requires certification for the drivers. Most likely the drivers you were attempting to install had not been verified. Especially if this was during the beta period. Most problems were solved by using the x64 Vista drivers as they were 99% compatible with Windows 7 x64. The version number received only an incremental increase in order to facilitate driver installs from Vista to prevent exactly what you encountered.

All this information was on the MSDN and MSFT beta pages for months though. :( Sorry you had a crappy time with it. Chances are, that software wouldn't have worked with Vista either though. They are pretty much pin for pin compatible.


The compatibility layer for Windows 7 wasn't implemented until the final stages of Beta as well, so you may have gotten the Alpha version of that bit...

Actually, the MSDN pages were how I found out I needed specific hardware from pre-made lists. These lists still seemed to hold true after the retail for me though =(. I did, however, attempt to use vista drivers and found the same results. Well, that or the OS just said "STOP RIGHT THERE!!!". I've been thinking about going ahead and partitioning for Win7 and seeing if any of these issues are fixed yet. Especially for FFXIV. I actually enjoyed most of the Win7 environment and would prefer to use it over XP.

Also: Vista only takes 848 megs of the 4gigs I currently have at startup. You can tweak a few things to get the startup to a minimum if you really need that RAM space free. I'm sure there must be an unattended version of Vista out there with some of the un-needed BS ripped from the kernel. I'd rather not go looking for one though, I don't mess with pirated/altered software anymore. ACTA etc. /shrug

This game is, from a graphics standpoint, is already optimized pretty well, at least in comparison to how this game is CPU optimized atm. In any non-CPU load situation (not in town) you can get a good, 40+ FPS with any midrange video card. So I don't think this game is catering to the lowest-common denominator, or the highest-common denominator at all. It's just when things get CPU limited the way they do right now, everything goes out the window. It's not being optimized for the future at that point, it's using what resources we currently have very wastefully.

I mentioned earlier than graphics performance can definitely be subjective. What kind of FPS are you getting in town, like the adventurer's guild, on your machines?


The problem is, Crossfire isn't working like it should atm. I can't comment on SLI since I don't have more information on it, but the game isn't properly utilizing Crossfire setups, and I'm 99% sure it's not CPU limitations if someone like Jaerik is experiencing them. Please see these screenshots again:
Picture 1, High Settings
Picture 2, Low Settings
This is on a Athlon II X4 620 @ 3.12 GHZ w/ a Radeon 4850 @ 685/1153. It's not high end, but it's definitely definitely not a low-end setup either. If that's not being CPU bound, then I don't know what is.

idk, but win7 runs way faster than xp and vista on my pc, i have been done several tests by fixing laptops and desktop computers, the performasnce on games with windows 7 is super fast as well compared to vista, vista eats a lots of ram too, there is several test that windows 7 is even faster than os X snow leopard