Will this video card make the difference?

I am currently playing Rift, and I want to 5-box it.

My current (only) rig is running a Q6600, 8GB RAM and Radeon 5770 1GB right now - this machine can not handle 5 Rift clients comfortably, I've done trial accts twice and fps is not playable even at low quality render on all five :( I run two monitors that are not the same size, I think that’s part of my problem but won’t give up viewing space.

Looking at a shiny new XFX Radeon 6950 2GB and new PSU to replace the 5770 – Will this 5 box Rift?

Anyone have experience with this combo or similar setup? Will this run Rift at 45+fps on the main with at least Medium graphics, 15+ on the slaves (low graphics, NOT low quality rendering) while closing rifts and doing instances? Will this be able to handle running through Meridian without lagging and dropping follow?

I am looking at building a second box to be my new main with at least i7-920/radeon 6950, but that is still in the hazy future, and I kinda want something to buy like tomorrow at Fry's - I have a serious upgrade itch :)

I am looking for opinions on this, or alternative ways to do it - so please be honest, help me decide, and tell me if a Q6600 and a Radeon 6950 2GB will run 5 Rift clients or not.

That card will run them fine, the issue you will likely run into then though will be getting CPU bound and still suffer unplayable framerates.

Just as Knytestorme said...

Open up your Task Manager and look at your CPU usage while playing. If you're pinned at 100% then a video
card, most likely, isn't going to magically take load off of your CPU. Upgrading a video card is usually done so
people can play at higher video settings which, in turn, raises the system load overall.

Remember, with RIFT (by default) your background game FPS is severely lower than your foreground FPS; so,
if you're going to be looking at your Task Manager and the game window isn't in focus you might be getting
wrong readings.

Shoot, I was afraid you all would say that... running 5 Rift windows, with one game window focused and task manager in the background the cpu cores were all pegged at 100%. I was hoping the graphics card would make a difference since that same situation was giving only 3-5 fps in the city, and maybe 18-20 fps in deserted parts of the world.

Sounds like I really need to put together an i7-920 box before springing for 3 more accounts. I would love to get a 2600k system, but I don't think that's in the budget i have for this.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by wyofiddler

Sounds like I really need to put together an i7-920 box before springing for 3 more accounts. I would love to get a 2600k system, but I don't think that's in the budget i have for this.

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I did not check the actual numbers but over here (EU that is) 2600k systems go for less than an older i7 920 and offer considerably better performance. Moving up from an Q6600 to i7 you need to replace motherboard, CPU and RAM its quite the same for an upgrade to 2600k.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by wyofiddler

Shoot, I was afraid you all would say that... running 5 Rift windows, with one game window focused and task manager in the background the cpu cores were all pegged at 100%. I was hoping the graphics card would make a difference since that same situation was giving only 3-5 fps in the city, and maybe 18-20 fps in deserted parts of the world.

Sounds like I really need to put together an i7-920 box before springing for 3 more accounts. I would love to get a 2600k system, but I don't think that's in the budget i have for this.

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the newer sandy bridge i7s are way better. In fact the i5 2500K would be better than the 920. They are cheap as well. google Sandy Bridge.

I just bought a 2600k (not overclocked yet, so the 'k' is not necessary). It was cheap and runs much better than my old quad core (1st gen). Can't go wrong with one of those.

As per the other thread about tweaks, limiting the culling distance helps to improve both CPU and GPU performance, so that's good to try. I haven't done that myself - I run my main window fullscreen at 30 fps and all others at 10 fps. My main runs with nice graphics and the others at low quality.

Personally, I'd look at nvidia cards over ati for Rift. People have reported problems with both, but nvidia cards seem have much less frequent problems. I 10-box using 2 machines. One is nvidia equipped, the other ati. While I needed to do a lot of measurements and performance tuning, the nvidia machine never had any problems with crashes, black screens, etc. The ati machine had serious problems from day one and took a whole lot of tweaking to get it to run Rift properly.

Something else to consider is video ram. Just as an experiment, I tried to see how many sessions I could run on a single PC. 6 ran ok. Not great, but ok with decent graphics levels. As soon as the 7th account loaded, I was dead in the water. The bottleneck was not the CPU or the GPU, it was video ram.

Something you can try in Rift is setting your rendering options (Video->advanced I think) and make sure the ground clutter and detail objects sliders (range and amount) are all set to minimum. There are ways to drop those from the minimum slider setting down to actual zero as well (via the CFG files). The amount of objects on the screen is the primary CPU loading factor for Rift judging by what I saw in resmon while I was playing with the sliders. Most of the rest are almost entirely GPU-loading options.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by jca

Personally, I'd look at nvidia cards over ati for Rift. People have reported problems with both, but nvidia cards seem have much less frequent problems. I 10-box using 2 machines. One is nvidia equipped, the other ati. While I needed to do a lot of measurements and performance tuning, the nvidia machine never had any problems with crashes, black screens, etc. The ati machine had serious problems from day one and took a whole lot of tweaking to get it to run Rift properly.

Something else to consider is video ram. Just as an experiment, I tried to see how many sessions I could run on a single PC. 6 ran ok. Not great, but ok with decent graphics levels. As soon as the 7th account loaded, I was dead in the water. The bottleneck was not the CPU or the GPU, it was video ram.

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I have been running RIFT with ATI cards, first with a 4890 and now with a 6870 and have never experienced any of the issues people have reported with ATI cards.

With the 4890 I was using a Core2Quad and now I have a 2600K paired with the 6870.
Main is 30 FPS and the slaves are 10FPS.

Not saying they don't exist, just that not everyone with an ATI card will have issues.

My GT460 on my alt box runs 4 Rifts at 1680x1050 (ISBoxer resized) at 30fps on all 4. Low-quality renderer, ground clutter and detail objects set to zero/zero.

Try tweaking your rift .cfg file. There are a lot of tweaks available that aren't in the in-game video settings (allowing rift to use all CPU cores, configuring occlusion and adding VFX culling, etc). Google, "Rift tweaks" and you'll find a bunch of stuff that will help you perform better.

My system can run 5 on high settings easily, but the first thing I do when I install any MMO is disable all the optional settings and tweak everything to minimum. The only settings I leave on medium are particle density-like effects and view distance. I'd rather run smoothly and not see frame rate loss in big PvP fights than see sparkly water and my shadow following me around the rest of the time :P

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Apatheist

Try tweaking your rift .cfg file. There are a lot of tweaks available that aren't in the in-game video settings (allowing rift to use all CPU cores, configuring occlusion and adding VFX culling, etc). Google, "Rift tweaks" and you'll find a bunch of stuff that will help you perform better.

My system can run 5 on high settings easily, but the first thing I do when I install any MMO is disable all the optional settings and tweak everything to minimum. The only settings I leave on medium are particle density-like effects and view distance. I'd rather run smoothly and not see frame rate loss in big PvP fights than see sparkly water and my shadow following me around the rest of the time :P

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That reminds me, I never redid the Rift tweaks after reinstalling Windows and Rift.

Tonight's project I guess. :)