Curious about the 6800 Ultra -- your thoughts?

[Siris]

Well I'll be getting my new laptop soon, a Dell XPS customized to the top by me. Sadley, I cannot get the PC that I had originally planned to build with two 7800 GTX's, 256MB PCI Express video cards, so it has to be one 6800 Ultra 256MB PCI Express video card in my notebook. (have to get it to use in college as well, lol)

So, if anyone here has this card, can you tell me how many units in "Huge" settings (do so through a custom battle) that your PC says it can support without having any loss of video quality with this card?

On my ATI Radeon X700 Pro 256MB PCI Express video card, 1GB of RAM, AMD Athlon-64 3200+, I can support around 6,500 troops on the field at maximum graphics & settings without any loss of video quality.

So I was wondering after seeing the benchmark's of the 6800's at www.tomshardware.com, (along with many other benchmarks), if you have this card, & 1GB to 2GB (my laptop will have 2GB) of RAM, what kind of performance do you see in this amount of units area?

Further more, can you mod your game to have 300 man units, & how does it do with that amount of troops on the field at once?

[Uesugi Kenshin]

I have a 6800GT and can support somewhere around 11k men on the field with max settings. I have an Athlon64 3500 and 1gigabyte of cas latency 2 RAM.

The video card is not the limiting factor for the number of troops you can support in RTW, the cpu and RAM are far more important. The 6800ULTRA is an excellent card and will support excellent performance in other more video card intensive games such as Half Life 2 and Doom 3.

What CPU will you be getting? How much RAM will your notebook have?

[Siris]

2GB of RAM, & the CPU is the best that is offered on their site. I would have gotten an AMD Athlon 64-bit, but I'm going to be stuck with this:

Intel® Pentium® M Processor 770 (2.13 GHz/2MB Cache/533MHz FSB)

The best that they offer like I said. Personally I'd prefer an AMD Athlon 64-bit 4000+ but I dont think notebooks come with that lol!

11,000 men? Getting there, so with my stats & card, I should get around 12,000-16,000+ men?

And yes, I know how important everything is in the over all use of a PC, I have taken college courses for PC's before, so I know my stuff for the most part, just want some intel. on what people's exact performances are with their 6800's if they have them.

[sunsmountain]

Funnily enough, the auto-detect feature never really goes beyond 6400 men on the field before it starts moaning. The biggest problem is video card memory, 128 MB in most cases, 256 MB in a few, and 512 only very rarely.

Now a X800 or a GF6800 would have enough graphics bandwidth/processing power to compensate for any lacking graphics memory, but the auto-detect feature doesnt look at your video card core, all it looks at is:

Processor, (up to 3.0 GHz)
video memory, (up to 512 MB, a little over the top)
and
system memory. (up to 1024 MB)

So simply ignore and go up to 12800 if you have a X800/GF6800 you should be fine.

[Siris]

Well the laptop will have the 6800 Go Ultra, which was clocked faster than the desktop version, but still a far cry from the twin 7800 GTX's that I had planned for my custom built PC that I was going to get.

:embarassed:

Just wondering what kind of higher performance I'd be looking at whenever I get just one 6800 Ultra instead of two of them or two 7800 GTX's.

[CBR]

I honestly doubt you will get more out of RTW with twin 7800's as your CPU will be the bottleneck.


CBR

[Uesugi Kenshin]

Siris I don't think you'll get to 11,000 or 12,000 men, your cpu will limit your performance far before that. Any recent graphics card can manage RTW's effects and such very easily, the major bottleneck is cpu power and RAM quantity and speed.

With my old P4 2.8 I could get to around 6,000 or 7,000 with 1024mbs of RAM and a 9600PRO, so you should probably expect something around that with your computer. However, with your 6800ULTRA you should be able to put all or most of the video settings to max because my computer for example can handle max settings and two armies (huge unit size) of the largest type of archer unit firing fire arrows at each other, I used one group of elephants to provoke the others to fire fire arrows.

Please keep us posted on what your actual performance turns out to be.

[Siris]

Well my current desktop can run it with 6-7,000 maximum settings on everything and Huge units, before it give me the "degraded video performance with more troops" popup.

However, I've played battles with 25,000 men on it that were fairly fast, not much lag whatsoever, so I'm sure that the 6800 will do what I want it to do for me.

My current PC is a AMD Athlon 3200+, 1GB RAM, ATI Radeon X700 Pro 256MB PCI Express video card.

Not sure if I posted those previously in this topic, but this card serves RTW very very well, so I'm sure that the 6800 will be above & beyond for me personally. ~;)

[Uesugi Kenshin]

Is it an Athlon 64?

I know the 6800ULTRA will give you great performance, but it is irrelevant. Any recent card will give you great performance on RTW. The cpu and RAM will limit the performance much sooner than the graphics card will. Because your RAM is probably cas latency 3 and something like PC-2700 and your cpu is only a 2.13ghz I would guess that your performance will be much lower than that. Probably more along the lines of what my 2.8 could handle, although you will be able to have most if not all the graphics options maxed out.

[Siris]

Well I guy that I know, he has a laptop like the one that I will get, but is only 1GB or RAM, & a 2.0 Pentium M; he plays BattleField 2 very easily with it, so I'm sure that mine will do everything that I want it to do:

-All College related things

-Rome Total War

-Battlefield 2

-Battlefield 1942

-Joint Operations Typhoon Rising

-Delta Force: Black Hawk Down

[Uesugi Kenshin]

BF2 is not as cpu dependent, it uses the graphics card much more heavily, while RTW can make just about any processor bleed.

You will certainly be able to play the games, but in RTW I would bet on you achieving much lower troop numbers than I can, simple because your processor is not powerful enough. Please let me know when you do get the laptop, it will be interesting to see how closely the reality matches my predictions.

[sapi]

i agree - using a 6800 with a p4 2.13ghz is probably overkill for rtw, but is just what is needed for hl2/bf2/other graphic intensive gamees