Hi Guys
I'm glad to see you guys becoming regulars, you're support is appreciated.
What is a GPU core?
A GPU core is made up of shader cores (USC) Texture mapping cores (TMC) and Rendering cores. The one to *really* pay attention to is the shader cores.. let's take for instance, a fav of myself and Rob's.. a Nvidia GTX 660Ti.. it has 1344 shader cores.. it also has 112 texture mapping cores and 24 rendering cores.. depending what you do with these parts, they can go from being essential to being window dressing, except the shaders, they always play a big part in what you are doing.
For example, if you were playing a 2D side scrolling game but it has many many effects, realistic fire, realistic waves/water, the texture mapping cores wouldn't be doing much, but I *think* the shaders and rendering cores would.but I find this all hard to translate to you guys as I don't know the inner workings of SMX's that well.
What is a 'good' graphics card?
Well as with most things computer that depends on what you will use it for. there is no use buying a Titan-Z to just play flappy birds and pokemon on emulators. any card *just* below mid-range can do those things comfortably and sometimes passively cooled so silently.
But you want to game right?? with cutting edge visuals and cutting edge engines! .. so yes, that takes a lot of Mister Ed's under the bonnet!
You have many options, asin~ if you are reading this you already know,
but.. 'biggest and best or divide and conquer'?
Rob's two 660ti's will give a 780ti a run for it's money, they are (basically) equal and Rob has got to enjoy that for the last year or so..ahead of when the 780ti came out. He got extra time enjoying his system, he got to choose how he would like to fund his gaming, becuase he bought one then later bought another.
Downsides are this is a more noisy way to game unless you go water.
if you use *excellent* headsets primo noise cancelling etc..then this problem goes away. SLI (and crossfire) has been known in the past to give people problems..but personally after many years SLI'ing I have not run in to a problem that wasn't caused by me ever.
Going SOLO
1 card to rule them all, etc.. This is probably the most expensive way to do things, instead of putting together a few high mid-range cards. but what you get is something simple and elegant in both it's power and it's beauty.
The prestige factor of even owning a top of the range from either AMD or Nvidia is HUGE, and others will come round your house like you own a ferrari and want to see.
..and yes it can totally game. ..but that brings me to the CPU aspect of this adventure.
It's no use buying a high end graphics card if your CPU stops the GPU at the front door everytime it just wanted to be nice and go and make you a coffee, CPU standing there thinking 'what is a coffee?'.
Sorry.. I mean, the data needs to be able to 'flow' and if it can't people call that a bottleneck.. imagine a river the river is data, if there is a narrow point along the river the water finds it harder to pass and so the water slows.
with single cards and many CPU's this is no problem, as long as you have 4 cores, you *should* be good to go.
RAM and textures
simply put.. the more Video RAM you have, the larger the texture = the quicker the load. bit-bus plays a part in this too and also AA.
To wrap up
IF I could.. I would watercool 4 GTX 670's (4GB) or 680's (4GB) and stomp all over a Titan for less than half the cost.. my 3 660Ti's will give a Titan Black a run for it's money, I lose out on high textures, with 2GB of VRam but I have more shader cores.
I have 21 Kepler SMX's the Titan Black has 15, the Titan-Z has 30.
the only downside is the extra noise and set up time.. but if I have a card failure, I can continue with the remaining cards.
sorry if any of that was boastful, I'm just so pleased with the 660ti's and think many would find a great advantage in both cost and usability that I feel gushing to tell you guys.
hope some of this made sense..
Dava :)
Edit:
The 660ti has a 3 card limit to SLI. the 670/680 is 4. 690 is 2 card limit, becuase it already IS two 680's combined on one card.
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