Discussion on the 7950 GX2

I'm fairly certain there are no options out there that are going to let you achieve that, Tebos.

There is a couple, will have a look through my "geeky" mags tomorrow for you.

I've had a Geforce 7950 for over a week now; it replaced a 6800 Ultra. The framerates I now get in EQ2 are simply amazing. Nvidia's latest beta driver (91.31) contains SLI settings for EQ2; the minute I got both GPUs to work (had to return the first mobo I purchased because it wouldn't work with the 7950), I went from roughly 25 fps in South Queynos to 45 fps. Which, of course, led me to turn on environment and character shadows for the first time ever. (They're kinda nice. But they brought me back down to 20-25 fps, o'course.)

I'm using a 2.0 GHz Opteron 146, overclocked at the moment to 2.8 GHz on air (using a Thermaltake CL-P0268 heatsink/fan) installed on a Gigabyte K8N-SLI motherboard. I've got 2GB of DDR4000 running at 466 Mhz. I'm not kidding when I say my framerates have effectively doubled since I put in the 7950 and took out the 6800 Ultra. I run EQ2 at 1600x1200 with most of the "eye candy" turned on except shadows ('till now :smileyhappy. Finally, I can enjoy smooth performance in EQ2 without cranking the graphics way down! IMO, overclocking a $200 Opteron is the best way to achieve $1000 AMD-FX speeds.

The downside to purchasing a 7950 is that vid cards supporting Directx 10 are coming in the Fall. However, since DX10 will only be available to those who upgrade to Windows Vista and there aren't any games I'm aware of on the immediate horizon that take advantage of DX10, I'm more than ok with waiting till later to upgrade to a DX10 card.

One more thing--according to www.nvnews.net nVidia will provide a driver enabling full quad SLI on the 7950's in late Summer. I've read forum posts from a lot of (apparently rich) nVidia geeks who managed to get quad SLI to work already with a lot of games (not EQ2 though).

There--you've got my $0.02!

Jeeshman

Waiting for Tebos to post about his 7950 GX2 experience

Sounds great, Jeeshman. I can't wait to get mine. Thanks a lot for the post.

Once you installed the new drivers, did you have to configure the card to get it to work?

The 91.31 drivers are now released as WHQL, as of this past weekend. You might want to upgrade if you are still using the beta ones!

Thanks for those who post who purchased the 7950, and your experiences! I hope to hear from the others who are getting it or have it as well.

DirectX10 wont be mainstream til a year from now, (games dev'd w/ all the DX10 SM 4.0, etc) goodies. I useally upgrade my video card each year anyway.

Also waiting on the new Intel Core Duo 2 (Quad-Core) , which comes out in Jan 07 im guessing. Its doing amazing things in beta atm.
Message Edited by DarkfiendLightbearer on 06-27-2006 04:36 AM

I have one of these beasties but and it lets me see Eq2 very beautifully for all of about 30s, then crashes and reboots my system...

Sounds like power, N3xus0n3.

--Ruab

Nope, got it sorted. Was a memory issue. I'm not overly impressed with the performance increase though ( i went from x800xt AGP). My frame rate has not drastically improved, it only minutely improved.

What CPU?

--Ruab

My results with the XFX 7950 XXX Edition are:

Under Windows 2000, there is no nVidia Control Panel available with the 91.31 WHQL certified drivers. This is the new browser based configuration utility that allows you to choose multi-GPU. Because of this, the game played like I had a single 7900GTX, but with slightly more performace. Running a single 7900GTX granted me to play the game on VHQ preset smoothly, however, when playing the game with dual 7900GTX's in SLi mode, that allowed me to play the game on Extreme Quality smoothly, as long as shadows was disabled. I could not max lighting and distance vector, otherwise, the game would bog down below 10fps. Having shadows turned on with the 7900GTX's also resulted in game freeze, but this was due to the OC'd 7900 series card defects.

So currently, I cannot capitalize using the 7950 card under Windows 2000. To bad, because Windows 2000 has much better memory management.

My system is a dual-boot system, so I proceeded on with go old Windows XP (yeah right!), and was able to configure the video driver with the browser based nVidia Control Panel. I choose what I normally would use in my prior SLi configurations in the past, and that being 8xS AA and 16X AF along with either SFR or AFR. Problem was, the game was a slide show on any setting above Balanced. I am going, oh great...what's up with this?

I decided to switch from SFR to Auto, and fired up the game. Immediately noticed the character select screen was fast. Once in the game, I took the setting from Balanced to Extreme Quality, and it was smooth as butter. Having shadows turned on did not freeze the game, which is now a bonus since I was unable to achieve that with the 7900GTX's. So the 7950 reference boards do not have this flaw. I ended up turning all lighting up to max and distance vector to max settings, and the game runs between 12fps and 20 fps in the most demanding zones. The cool thing about the 7950's...there are no pauses, hiccups or hesitancies when making turns or running through QH or East Freeport. Prior cards of mine ran the game pretty smoothly, but there were moments of those type of effects in certain zones.

The 7950's will only get better with performance once nVidia develops more mature driver sets for these cards. I went with the fastest reference card in the XFX 7950 XXX Edition, and I am not disappointed with that decision, regardless of the cost.

The rest of my system specs:

AMD FX-60
2GB RAM
A8N32-SLi Mobo
Raptor Drive
Other Goodies!

There ya go...

Edit: Forgot to mention...I run the game on 1920 x 1200 resolution with a Dell 24".
Message Edited by Tebos on 06-27-2006 09:13 PM

Sweet, nice to see you got what you wanted Tebos.

Any other games you play (or you sad like me and eq2 is the only thing played atm), and how does it perform in those?

Have you updated your drivers and changed your settings like Tebos describe in his post above?

I too am going from a x800xt AGP and am hoping for a decent improvement.

Please let me know how you get on.

i can run eq2 on extreme performance (with about 20fps) with my Nvidia 7900GT sli config.
new rig but seems nice on all my games.

I'll take it you meant extreme quality? :smileyvery-happy:

--Ruab

I am building new system and that the card i am getting... in 1 of the 2 slots on the board:
EVGA 01G-P2-N592-AX GEFORCE 7950GX2 1GB DDR3 PCI-E

Down the road i will get something nicer or better or the same if my financial permits. I hope it worth the money.
All i have to go is getting 2 more GB of Crosair RAm to max out my 4 GB system but someone told me i dont have to at moment. 2 GB is good enough for now. I want to run on MAX graphic with 1600x1200 or better though. What do you think? I appreciate any thought and opinion.

Mines coming tommorow did not get the XFX version though, got the gigabyte one. upgrading from a single 6800gt so should see good improvement, and now that the 91.31 drivers are out will be able to use sli in game. was 559$ at newegg.

Also using p4 d 950 oced to 4.2 ghz. (pentium d oc so easy). get about the same performance as a fx 57.
Message Edited by jambri on 06-29-2006 10:22 AM

Wasting your money going with 4gb of RAM. I sue 2gig and have never run out of that yet (using EQ2, WMP, IE7 and Ventrilo at the same time).

Also using 2gig (2x1gig) will allow you to use the faster 1T settings (some reckon upto 20% quicker) whilst using 3 or more sticks reduces you to the low speed setting of 2T. It also gives you more overclocking headroom if you choose to go thtat route.

Are there any special requirements for the 7950?

Will my motherboard be suitable for it? It's a ASUS A8N-SLI SE: DUAL DDR, S-ATA, 2 x x16 VGA, 3 PCI.

Should be fine I would've thought.

Cheers.

Should be fine with that motherboard. I have the ASUS A8N32 SLi. Just need to have the most recent BIOS firmware. You can get that at ASUS website.