Good evening my friend! Glad to see my efforts are paying off here, I aim to please!
Ahhhhh..... OK. Let me throw out a number of thoughts and some possible advice on the whole Nvidia/ATI thing and Nvidia SLI. I'll try and keep this brief as I know the topic is system specs and performance, but this shouldn't be too far off the mark. Others can throw in their thoughts as well.
Before I get too deep into this, a quick background on myself. I've been building my own PCs for about 12 years now so I'd like to think I can at least talk with some reasonable intelligence on this subject without sounding too stupid. In terms of video cards, I've owned essentially nothing but Nvidia cards since my TNT replaced the old Matrox + Voodoo2 setup I had back in the day. I've had a TNT, TNT2, Geforce2, Geforce3, FX5200, and now my 2x6800 Ultra's. I am by not means an Nvidia fanboy, I just bought what was the most powerful card (in my view) at the time, or in a few cases I just wanted a real cheapo upgrade to tide me over for a bit, hence the FX5200. Am thinking hard about going with ATI my next upgrade cycle in about 1/2 year, but I'd like to see what they can throw up against Nvidia's 8x00 gen cards which are looking pretty impressive.
Now, my thoughts, primarily on Nvidia. Nvidia and ATI each have their strong points when it comes to keeping their drivers up to snuff with modern games, and in terms of recent and older game compatability. I see you've got a real nice new system with that 7950GX2 card in it, which I've read is fast as all get out, BUT it's got a huge number of problems in terms of the reference drivers. If you go back and look at the past 6 WHQL driver release notes, you'll see a ton of bugs introduced and fixed each time for both SLI systems with any SLI card setup, AND moreso for the 7950 series. There are a ton of games that won't work right on the 7950 series, it's getting better over time but you're still going to see that, hence why I'm not surprised you saw that for M2TW. I'll offer that you shouldn't worry too hard about this, even though the 8x00 gen is out, the 7950 is still cadillac class and the last thing Nvidia wants is people who've shelled out the big bucks for that to have a card that doesn't work well and isn't well supported on modern games. Also the Nvidia SLI is still a mixed bag, for the most part it's now a "mature" technology that they've ironed the kinks out of, but it's still got a few teething problems and the developers don't always know how to write well to take advantage of this. Another glimpse into the "bugs" section of the driver release readme will show that there's a hefty amount of "this is a developer problem, not a driver problem" issues. I've experienced my fair share of these with my 6800's in SLI.
The other major aspect for me (and I imagine others) is recent/older game compatability. Nvidia and ATI both kinda stink here, but it would almost seem that ATI is doing a better job of it as of late. I can think of a handful of games that are pretty broken on my Nvidia systems now running the latest drivers over the past year or so. I've experienced the "low earth orbit APCs" bug in Mechwarrior 3, which my friends on their ATi systems don't have. KOTOR2 has been broken for the past 4 driver releases on all Nvidia SLI systems, if you start the game with AA enabled it crashes. You can enable AA in game and it works fine, but every time you exit you have to manually edit the .ini to disable AA. Barf. The original MTW runs like
total crap (pun intented) on my hefty SLI system, the campaign map is dog slow. There's a thread around here stating that the 61.xx drivers will help fix this, the problem being that anyone with an Nvidia card past the 5x00 series can't use them, because iirc the 6x00 series cards came out with the 7x,xx forceware drivers and hence are supported with those on up. I've also had a number of really weird crashes on the campaign map in MTW that I can't pin down, some research seemed to blame this also on Nvidia drivers. My friend running his ATI x800 doesn't have this problem at all, MTW runs smooth as butter and doesn't crash at all.
Please take this with a grain of salt, this is just my experience and thoughts on the matter.
The bottom line to you Aussie is, well... hang in there.
Your video card *is* relatively new, and as such is going to have the usual teething problems. I personally would only recommend you use the WHQL drivers directly from Nvidia.com and NOT anything from Dell. However, if you see a beta driver release on nzone.com and the readme seems to indicate that a specific issue for you might be fixed, by all means snag it. I've just noticed that the non-WHQL drivers are often indeed unstable, certain games will bring this out more than others. Also don't be afraid to get the word to Nvidia about your issues if some troubleshooting can't pin it down. They have a forum, and there's a site feedback link (that appears to be busted now).
Good luck!
Re: Game specs and performance: all M2TW owners post here
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Originally Posted by jabo0511
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