Best solution for 1920x1200 gaming?

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Dhampir

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I recently upgraded to a 26" samsung monitor and I noticed in a few games my GTX 285 drops into the low 30s during heavy firefights. My motherboard only supports crossfire so I was debating between 2 4870 2gb or 2 4890 1gb. The 4870s would be the Sapphire Vapor-X models which are 249 just like the 4890s. Which would be a better choice for gaming with AA and AF at 1920x1200?
 
The 4890 1GB is faster than the 4870 2GB. The benefits from going to 1GB to 2GB are very minimal, and the higher clockspeeds on the 4890 are much more significant.

http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/graphics/2009/04/14/sapphire-radeon-hd-4870-2gb-vapor-x-review/1
http://www.overclockersclub.com/reviews/sapphire_hd_4890/
http://www.overclockersclub.com/reviews/powercolor_hd4890/

In every test - even Fallout 3, which in HardOCP's 4850X2 2GB vs 4850X2 1GB was the only one that showed a benefit from moving to 1GB per GPU - the 4890 1GB was faster than the 4870 2GB.

Edit: changed "moving to 2GB" to "moving to 1GB per GPU". Thanks, silent-circuit!
 
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4GBs of video ram would definitely be a bit of overkill at that resolution.

While both are solid cards the 4890s are the smarter buy just based on performance and overclockability.
 
I'm running 1920x1200 with a GTX 260 and it's butter. I can't max all games, but for most games I can crank settings all the way up with at least 2x AA and have smooth gameplay. Weird that your GTX 285 is giving you some problems. Are you sure something else isn't causing the FPS drops?

I would pop in a couple 1GB 4870s. You don't need tons of RAM for 1920x1200. A couple gigs would still be a little overkill.
 
I would definitely recommend the 4890's as was previously stated the 2GB will not net you any real benefit.
 
evil, you're comparing a dual GPU 2GB card to a single GPU 2GB card... not comparable at all. The 4850X2 1GB has 512MB per GPU, the 2GB has 1GB per GPU. The 4870 2GB has 2GB per GPU, and all current 4890s have 1GB per GPU. 1GB to 2GB per GPU is pointless, particularly at 1920x1200, possibly not at 2560x1600 but I'm not certain there. 512MB to 1GB per GPU is very important, however. I would not buy a reasonably high end graphics card with less than 1GB of memory per GPU at this point in time unless I was planning to never run it higher than 1680x1050. Ever..

I do agree with your conclusion, though. 4890 1GB beats 4870 2GB, cause the extra GB is uselss in this case, the 4890s clock higher, and they're a little faster per clock as well.
 
Throwing money at the problem isn't going to fix it. There is something wrong or you have your settings up too high. A 285 is much faster than a 4890.
 
Dozoy said:
Throwing money at the problem isn't going to fix it. There is something wrong or you have your settings up too high. A 285 is much faster than a 4890.
Click to expand...

No such things as settings too high... except for AA, possibly, since after 2x it's pretty much gravy.
 
Well the first game that made me notice the dip was CoD WaW during a heavy firefight. I have everything on high for it and AA to 4x from the ingame option. As far as settings being too high I don't believe that's a valid option for any game right now besides maybe Crysis and Stalker CS. Just seems odd that the GTX 285 isn't fast enough at 1920x1200. Unless maybe my system is bottlenecking it?
 
I play at that resolution with a single 4870 1gb and I have absolutely no issues. I get the occasional framerate issue if I try running at more than 2xAA... but on a 24" monitor I don't really need any more than that. In fact, I can quite often tolerate some games without AA at all.
 
Your machine isn't bottlenecking a GTX 285... so there may be something else going on, as others have suggested.
 
Dozoy said:
Throwing money at the problem isn't going to fix it. There is something wrong or you have your settings up too high. A 285 is much faster than a 4890.
Click to expand...

QFT :D (although I wouldn't say "much" faster)

I came into this thread to reccomend a 275 and I see the OP has a 285 and I'm like wtf?

My 192sp 260 handles 1920 pretty well except for Crysis and Clear Sky. Even those do "pretty good" at mostly high and medium settings.
 
It sounds like something else is stressing your video card. Just today I've noticed problems with my GTX 285 stuttering in GTA IV. By stuttering I mean that the frame rate would quickly drop from 30+ FPS down to less than 20 instantly (below 30fps is unacceptable by my standards) where it would rarely go below 30fps in the same area of the city before. I would go as far as to say that GTA IV is at fault being that it performs like shit on every computer, but I'm pretty surprised being that this issue came out of no where.
 
I've had a number of very severe driver issues with 4890 CrossfireX in the 2-3 weeks I've had them. This is all on a clean install with Catalyst 9.4 under Windows 7 Beta (which ATI supports officially, check their site).

--- Cards don't clock up properly for games / 3D half the time and will often drop down to 2D clocks while still in game, resulting in abysmal performance. PowerPlay is broken and has been for a very long time, and it fucks everything up.

--- Empire Total War doesn't work. At all. Some have reported that it will in SM 2.0 mode (which obviously doesn't look near as good) but I can't even get it to work that way. It hard crashes to desktop whenever I try to start a game from the main menu regardless of settings.

--- Mirror's Edge has multi-GPU related issues despite being out for 2 major driver revisions now, according to rennyf77. I don't have first hand experience with this yet, but if it's true (and I have no reason to doubt him) it's pathetic.

--- Neither FurMark or ATITool's furry cube test will load the second GPU under Windows 7. ATI has been shown to downclock their cards when FurMark is run in the past because their cooling solutions aren't sufficient for a true full load situation.


These things would already be back in the mail if I wasn't going to lose $100+ after shipping and restocking fees. They've already kept me troubleshooting for hours,and that's not something I enjoy anymore; maybe when I was 16 or 17 and had nothing better to do, but I'm 24, I have a job, and I'm headed to law school soon. I don't have the time or patience for this. When I pay $450+ for a graphics solution I expect it working properly out of the box. ATI needs to get their shit together.
 
Sounds like there is something other than the video card that is causing your problems.

I would recommend two 4890's if you feel like throwing money at it will fix it. I never have been impressed with their drivers though.
 
My system was rock solid stable and problem free with the 8800 GTX on my current P45, and stable with the same chip and RAM with SLI and Tri-SLI on a 780i. I formatted, reinstalled, put the new card in. Used the first one relatively problem free (apart from the PowerPlay not clocking right thing) for a couple days. Installed the second once it came in the mail. My experience has been horrible ever since. Yes, I've tried the second card alone to rule out any issues with it. There are none.

When it works right, which is rare, CrossfireX is very fast and scales well, much better than SLI. Sadly, it's also a broken heap of shit.
 
I would say that IMO the 4870x2 is the best solution for the price. I would not really go with the gtx 295 since it is more money, but it does perform better that that res than the x2 but that is with no AA on. So i would say the 4870 x2 since the price are nearing 400 and they are good cards.
 
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