Help me find good games that justify better GPUs

[tyl998]

I like my 1920x1080 resolution, thank you very much Not everyone is rich enough to have the absolute best at everything. I don't want to spend 80% more than someone else just to have a 10% increase in quality (numbers are random, but the sentiment is there about diminishing returns).

 

[Vdubchaos]

I like my 1920x1080 resolution, thank you very much Not everyone is rich enough to have the absolute best at everything. I don't want to spend 80% more than someone else just to have a 10% increase in quality (numbers are random, but the sentiment is there about diminishing returns).

Agreed

Even if I was rich, I can't justify spending DOUBLE the money for 5-10% difference. I'm sorry.

I ALWAYS focus on Best bang for the buck....

 

[BFG10K]

I am not oblivious mind you. My mind just doesn't work like yours - I look at a game from an artistic/realistic perspective. I place more emphasis on artistic representation of the game, and very little on exact geographical accuracy of "line smoothing". Beyond 4AA, the visual differences have such minor impact on visuals, that they are almost irrelevant to me in motion. Make the game more realistic/visually appealing and then we are talking.

Okay, “oblivious” was too strong. Maybe “aliasing doesn’t bother you” is more accurate.

Question: Do you focus your attention on the fact that every single brush stroke is visible in this Van-Gogh painting below? IF this was an actual game, would the fact that these brushe strokes aren't perfect irritate you?

A more analogous comparison would be if the canvas was damaged with visible tears, creases and/or holes. You honestly can not tell me that such things would not affect the image overall.

As for your Crysis screenshots, they don’t take into account the massive aliasing the game has during movement which visibly distracts from the game.

In the future videocards may be able to do ray-tracing in real time and then rasterization as we know it will be obsolete.

LOL, you do know AA isn’t a solved problem with ray-tracing at all? Ironically the only way to do it is with super-sampling because a ray either hits or it doesn’t.

You think your wine-glass image will look that good when rendered with lego bricks and bees?

Absolution75 brought a good point. Discussing resolution by itself without considering the viewing distance is not entirely accurate. The iPhone 4 has a low resolution but 3x the pixel pitch of a 30 inch monitor.

Pixel pitch is only relevant in the context of resolution. Having a tighter pixel pitch by itself doesn’t increase detail levels, it just makes everything smaller.

(2)no current game can max out 720P area of pixels since alternative techniques to rasterization such as ray-tracing have already shown what is possible within the scope of just 720P.

It’s not “just” 720p, it’s 720p with massive levels of AA and filtering which are done offline because they’re too slow to be done in real-time.

 

[BFG10K]

Even if I was rich, I can't justify spending DOUBLE the money for 5-10% difference. I'm sorry.

Uh, what?

1920x1080 = 2073600 pixels.
2560x1600 = 4096000 pixels.

The latter has ~98% more pixels; where does your 5-10% come from?

 

[happy medium]

Uh, what?

1920x1080 = 2073600 pixels.
2560x1600 = 4096000 pixels.

The latter has ~98% more pixels; where does your 5-10% come from?

I think what he meant was it dosen't look 98% better to the human eye.
I have seen these 2 resolutions side by side and the difference did not wow me. It does look a little nicer but ,not 700$ nicer.

 

[nitromullet]

I think what he meant was it dosen't look 98% better to the human eye.
I have seen these 2 resolutions side by side and the difference did not wow me. It does look a little nicer but ,not 700$ nicer.

I'm pretty sure the difference would be somewhat noticeable. At the same pixel pitch 1920x1080 is usually a 23" LCD and 2560x1600 is usually a 30" LCD.

 

[tyl998]

I was more referring to less and less FPS gain per dollar spent as you go higher and higher.

 

[busydude]

I was more referring to less and less FPS gain per dollar spent as you go higher and higher.

People who spend $1K on a monitor are doing more than just playing games.

 

[nitromullet]

I was more referring to less and less FPS gain per dollar spent as you go higher and higher.

Well yeah, there are always diminishing returns at the high end. I don't think anyone is disputing that.

 

[Absolution75]

Well, that is kind of the point. No one is saying that you can't play games with lesser hardware than top of of the line. It all depends on where you draw the line based on your wants, budget, etc. My issue is with the notion of someone assuming "good enough for me" means "good enough for everyone".



...but some people do.

Yeah - so you should expect to pay a price premium. An ATI 4870x2 isn't exactly state of the art anymore. WOW can/is also a fairly graphical intensive game. I still drop into the teens for fps with large numbers of people visible. It is also CPU bound at certain settings - but probably not Ultra quality.

The concept of expecting to play with massive amounts of AF/AA (more so AA) at a mid-range budget seems rather odd to me. Especially since it was not until gf6 that playing with AA or AF was even plausible at resolutions such as 1280x1024.


So what are we arguing about? This argument seems rather pointless. The people who say AA matter are probably running low DPI + large monitors. The people who say it doesn't matter either don't care about aliasing or are running higher DPI monitors where you won't be able to notice the aliasing as much.

 

[RussianSensation]

The concept of expecting to play with massive amounts of AF/AA (more so AA) at a mid-range budget seems rather odd to me. Especially since it was not until gf6 that playing with AA or AF was even plausible at resolutions such as 1280x1024.

So what are we arguing about? This argument seems rather pointless.

My view is that artistic in-game visuals are the most important factor in advancing video game graphics in the near future, far more so than advancements in resolutions or AA/AF. I have provided examples of how something can be made visually stunning through ray-tracing despite a lower resolution than 2560x1600. Even at 720P, ray-tracing looks visually superior over rasterization at 2560x1600 16xAA. I have also provided examples of how modern games look vastly superior compared to older game, even without AA/AF, due to higher artistic details (i.e., polygon count on character models, facial features/animations, dynamic lighting effects, etc.). It is games like Crysis, Metro 2033 and STALKER:Cop that continue to push the envelope of graphics, not Call of Duty 4 with transparency anti-aliasing.

Therefore, I agree with OP's viewpoint that not a lot of games push the artistic envelope, which more or less leads us to either using high elevels of AA/AF or using a higher resolution monitor as the primary differentiators between a mid-range ($200-250) and a high-end videocard ($500). In the past, however, the main differentiator between a mid-range and a high-end videocard was not just AA/AF or the ability to run at 2560x1600, but also the amount of in-game visual settings one could maximize (i.e., could you turn on HDR, soft shadows, dynamic lighting?). With today's games, you can generally max out almost all in-game visuals in the control panel, outside of extreme tessellation and Depth of Field cases. You can most definitely play the majority of games at 2560x1600 0AA even on a GTX285. Before, you were more or less forced to upgrade your videocard every 2 years to continue to play games. Today, gaming hardware has far surpassed the software, which is mostly still stuck in DX9/10 land.

This implies that most games just aren't demanding enough from an artistic perspective. If games were demanding artistically, you would not be able to turn on any AA at all. Outside of Metro 2033, can you name even 1 game that looks better than Crysis from 2007? I can hardly come up with any better looking game even 3 years after its release (pretty shocking!). PC gaming graphics have stagnated and we need another revolution (which likely will come with the next gen of consoles).

The fact that some reviewers are now pushing super-sampling in reviews and comparing cards almost exclusively at 2560x1600 only proves the point that PC gaming graphics have stagnated since Crysis, while the hardware has made gigantic leaps during the same period of time. I think NV and AMD are realizing this and are therefore pushing 3D gaming and multi-monitor gaming in order to sell videocards. I can't find the exact Jon Peddie article right now, but I remember reading that in the last 2-3 years the market of discrete desktop GPUs has shrunk almost in half from its peak. While I imagine the economy has taken some toll, or some users switched from using desktops to notebooks or jumped to consoles, I wouldn't be surprised if the average PC gamer takes a lot longer to upgrade a graphics card now than say in the period from 2002-2008.

 

[nitromullet]

Yeah - so you should expect to pay a price premium. An ATI 4870x2 isn't exactly state of the art anymore.

I guess I should have specified, the bench is from two years ago. Hence it having a GTX 280 against a 4870 X2. At the time, the 4870 X2 was the single fastest card you could buy and the GTX 280 was NVIDIA's fastest card as well.

...anyway, the whole point in posting that was because someone previously posted that they weren't even able to let a 4870 stretch its legs. I was showing that I could bury a 4870 X2 in WoW two years ago.

WOW can/is also a fairly graphical intensive game. I still drop into the teens for fps with large numbers of people visible. It is also CPU bound at certain settings - but probably not Ultra quality.

Terokkar Forest (this was pre-WotLK), where this was benched is definitely gpu limited. I actually just re-instated my WoW acct and pre-purchased Cataclysm, so I've been playing a bit of WoW lately. Even with a GTX 580, Terokkar Forest is pretty needy. Generally I average in the 30s, but I'll dip into the 20s if I turn around very quickly on a flying mount. This is of course at 1920x1200 8x super sampling AA/16xAF with vsync and all settings cranked.

 

[Absolution75]

Terokkar Forest (this was pre-WotLK), where this was benched is definitely gpu limited. I actually just re-instated my WoW acct and pre-purchased Cataclysm, so I've been playing a bit of WoW lately. Even with a GTX 580, Terokkar Forest is pretty needy. Generally I average in the 30s, but I'll dip into the 20s if I turn around very quickly on a flying mount. This is of course at 1920x1200 8x super sampling AA/16xAF with vsync and all settings cranked.

Indeed - though what resolution does/did he play at? I could hardly stretch my 4890's legs when I had it - though I played at 1680x1050 & always 4xAA. If I played WoW at the time, that'd be a different story probably. 8xAA & 4xAA have marginal difference imo at that resolution (20.1" monitor), the performance impact from going from 100+fps to usually something quite a bit lower isn't really justified imo.


Even so, 1920x1200 is still a very large resolution. Expecting 8xAA at reasonable FPS isn't reasonable in and of itself. A few years ago, people were going 1920x1200 because they said they didn't need AA at that resolution.

The fact that some reviewers are now pushing super-sampling in reviews and comparing cards almost exclusively at 2560x1600 only proves the point that PC gaming graphics have stagnated since Crysis, while the hardware has made gigantic leaps during the same period of time. I think NV and AMD are realizing this and are therefore pushing 3D gaming and multi-monitor gaming in order to sell videocards. I can't find the exact Jon Peddie article right now, but I remember reading that in the last 2-3 years the market of discrete desktop GPUs has shrunk almost in half from its peak. While I imagine the economy has taken some toll, or some users switched from using desktops to notebooks or jumped to consoles, I wouldn't be surprised if the average PC gamer takes a lot longer to upgrade a graphics card now than say in the period from 2002-2008.

Agreed for the most part - there are a few exceptions (Batman, etc)