GFX card advice

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Blackmist

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Im looking for a GFX card in the budget of R1000 and under, is it possible for any gfx under R1000 to play BF3 on medium at a resolution of 1600x900? medium with out AA and the MSAA or thingy. My specs are phenom ii x2 565 BE(hoping to unlock other 2 cores if not still worth it) 4GB DDR3 ram, MSI 760GM-P23, 250GB HDD, 420W PSU all i need is medium for BF3 :) And google is all that helpful peoples looking for eith high or ultra or lowest and ussually not the res i have
 
MSI Radeon HD6770 1GB GDDR5 @ R1119
or
KFA² Geforce GTX550 Ti 1GB GDDR5 @ R1167

Both cards are evenly matched and both can do BF3 at 1080p with high settings and 2x AA. So for your resolution, you might be able to manage Ultra settings with 4x AA. Both cards also need a PCI-Express 6-pin power connector, but if your PSU doesn't have one and you use a two-molex-to-6-pin adapter it should be fine.

Frame rates on High should be in the mid-60s, with Ultra dropping average rates to around mid-40s.
 
Last edited:
Thanks i think ill go with the 550Ti as most sites are saying its slightly more powerful :D
 
Are you willing to get something 2nd hand?
There are some good deals on more powerful cards.

Otherwise +1 to Wesley.
 
NAG - Wesley said:
MSI Radeon HD6770 1GB GDDR5 @ R1119
or
KFA² Geforce GTX550 Ti 1GB GDDR5 @ R1167

Both cards are evenly matched and both can do BF3 at 1080p with high settings and 2x AA. So for your resolution, you might be able to manage Ultra settings with 4x AA. Both cards also need a PCI-Express 6-pin power connector, but if your PSU doesn't have one and you use a two-molex-to-6-pin adapter it should be fine.

Frame rates on High should be in the mid-60s, with Ultra dropping average rates to around mid-40s.
Click to expand...

Hmm, I'm running a 6950 2gb @ 1080p and basically play on Low detail to get solid FPS.
Derps my herp :mad:
 
Conack said:
Hmm, I'm running a 6950 2gb @ 1080p and basically play on Low detail to get solid FPS.
Derps my herp :mad:
Click to expand...

In single or multi-player? The rendering engines for each are slightly different because the MP is CPU-dependant, whereas the single-player runs just fine on most systems that meet the requirements.
 
Conack:
I upgraded a friend of mine's HD5770 last week with a MSI HD6950 2GB, and it basically allowed him to go from low detail 1024x768 to high detail 1920x1080 with a higher framerate in BF3!
Then again, he is using an overclocked i5 750 @ 3.4GHz.

So Wesley has a very valid point, that your CPU is perhaps too slow. Could you tell us what game you're playing that is so slow and what CPU & RAM you've got?

Lastly, rather create your own thread, than to derail this one!

Wesley:
Are you sure the framerate would be acceptable with those HD6770/GTX550Ti cards in BF3 at 1080p?! I suppose you would be able to get 30fps @ 1080p (on high detail), which is barely playable.
The HD6950 is quite a bit better than those cards, but then it also costs 2.5x more.

Blackmist:
At 1600x900 without AA, I suppose they (HD6770/GTX550Ti) would do just fine for BF3, however your CPU and RAM might bottleneck the performance in BF3, because BF3 is quite a CPU intensive game! I'm not entirely sure how much RAM BF3 needs, but it shouldn't permanently affect the framerate, but it could definitely make the game stutter every now and then. So perhaps just close as much applications as possible before launching BF3 and close the browser too once BF3 has launched.

Using the 2x molex to 1x 6-pin PCI-E should be used as last resort, but it should work just fine in most cases ;)
If you're going this route, try to use it on a cable that doesn't have a HDD/fan connected to it. If you have lots of spare power cables, use 2 different cables to connect to the 2x molex adapter - because the cables might be on separate PSU rails (but this is unlikely with dual rail PSU's).
 
Pada said:
Wesley:
Are you sure the framerate would be acceptable with those HD6770/GTX550Ti cards in BF3 at 1080p?! I suppose you would be able to get 30fps @ 1080p (on high detail), which is barely playable.
The HD6950 is quite a bit better than those cards, but then it also costs 2.5x more.
Click to expand...

Well I did mention they'd be able to run 1080p BF3 with 2x AA, because the game chews up RAM like Crysis 2 did, although its very nicely coded. Tom's Hardware went through a very comprehensive test session before the BF3 release and judging by the performance in the high quality tests, both cards should average just over 50FPS on high settings at 1600 x 900 resolution.

I do retract my statement about Ultra settings being playable though. Since I don't actually own BF3 (and don't plan to without a 4MB line) I can't give thoughts on my own experience with the game. Humble apologies everyone.
 
Hehe, no hard feelings Wesley! You've corrected me a bunch of times already, so your input is really greatly appreciated!
 
Thanks for the input folks.

My backbone is: i5 2500K (Non-Overclocked), 8gb DDR3 - which I think is pretty reasonable. So why the 6950(2gb) isn't coping really gets my goat. I got it pre-flashed to 6970 and thought maybe the firmware wasn't optimal since the buddy I took it over from used it to farm Bitcoins and some of those ROMs seem custom made for that.

I flashed it back to the standard 6950 and FPS just took a bit of a drop and try as I might I haven't been able to get it back to 6970 again...(ran the ATI-winflash tool from cmd and all, but the one flash is bricked - so it's running on the backup flash - standard 6950) - flashing regardless though, it just pains me that I've got to jam BF3 with FPS dropping below 60 (occasionally) even on Low detail when playing Close Quarters.

Standard Battlefield 3 MP I can play on medium in general with decent performance, but I don't want to keep chop and changing quality settings and prefer to have as high fps at all times as possible.
 
Conack:
Do you have a decent PSU?

Perhaps you should run MSI Afterburner and Windows Task Manager in the background to determine if it is the GPU or CPU that is maxing out during the BF3 gameplay.

Also make sure that the GPU speed, graphics memory and GPU core voltages are what they should be - when comparing to a stock HD6950. You can check these in MSI Afterburner.
 
Hi Guys would you advise me if the AMD Saphire 7750 1gig GPU is any good? Its in a similar price range.
 
Raphael123 said:
Hi Guys would you advise me if the AMD Saphire 7750 1gig GPU is any good? Its in a similar price range.
Click to expand...

Its a good little card, quiet and efficient. There's limited overclocking headroom though, so if you can find the HD7750 with stock clocks at 900Mhz and the extra power connector, that'd be the one to go for. Otherwise, I think you'll find it performs at the same level as the HD6770.
 
Is there any place in SA where you can get 2nd hand cards?
 
i got my gigabyte gtx 550 ti oc edition second hand for R1100.it's a decent card.it's paired up with an overclocked q6600 3.0 ghz( i know its crap) and 8 gigs ddr 3 ram. there are a few dips in bf3 especially in caspian border but they not game stopping.dips are between 31 -39 fps and they r for a few seconds at most but mostly you maintain a frame rate of 40 - 60 fps sometimes it even jumps to about 70 fps for like a second then back right down. this is on high settings with aa off and fxaa on. texture quality is the only thing on ultra. the card plays metro and other smaller maps nicely. if you do decide to get a second hand card check and maybe change the thermal paste on it. i had to pretty much do that for my card cause it was sitting on some high load temps. check gumtree.co.za thats where i got my card from
 
Pada said:
Conack:
Do you have a decent PSU?

Perhaps you should run MSI Afterburner and Windows Task Manager in the background to determine if it is the GPU or CPU that is maxing out during the BF3 gameplay.

Also make sure that the GPU speed, graphics memory and GPU core voltages are what they should be - when comparing to a stock HD6950. You can check these in MSI Afterburner.
Click to expand...

Been using MSI Afterburner to overclock to 880 / 1325 which bumps up the performance a little. GPU does max out when the going gets rough. CPU doesn't seem to be the bottleneck either.

Will have to test another card as I've already reloaded Windows as well on another drive for testing purposes.
Thanks for the advice :)
 
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