New Vid'ya Card

So, thanks to the generosity of friends and family this holiday season, I was able to accumulate enough gift cards to NewEgg to allow an upgrade for my video card. Here's the result...



Link below:
Sapphire Radeon HD 5770

Tom's Hardware and several other sites have reviewed it favorably. The things that hooked me on it were its modest size (not a behemoth like several of the other cards) and its energy-efficiency. A side benefit of that is my current power supply should have plenty of juice to run the new card. Some of the nVidia offerings, in addition to being freaking huge, required some hefty power inputs (some having dual 6-pin VGA power connectors). The 5000 series Radeons really seemed to offer the best mix at the price point. Oh, and they are DX11 compatible for later on (that requires Windows 7, though)).

All in all, not a bad option.

I attempted some performance scaling based off the graphics benchmarks charts on Tom's Hardware. For example, based on the Fallout3 FRAPS demo at the resolution I run on my computer (1680x1050):

Fallout 3 - 1680x1050, 4AA, 8AF, low quality
7900GS (256Mb) -> 38.5 FPS
8800GTS (320Mb) -> 100.6 FPS

Fallout 3 - 1680x1050, 4AA, 8AF, very high quality
8800GTS (320Mb) -> 17.5 FPS
5770 (1024Mb) -> 68.40 FPS

Granted, there are probably some CPU/memory/etc. differences between the two test runs in addition to the change in quality levels, but if I just look at the scaling...

8800GTS = 2.61X performance compared to 7900GS
5770 = 3.91X performance compared to 8800GTS

The product of the two is (2.61) x (3.91) = 10.2X, which means a Radeon HD 5770 (a current "low to mid range gaming card") has approximately ten times better performance than my current card. Granted, real-world scaling probably will have it running perhaps 4-6X performance, but still... Damn.

Also, the new MMO's (STO, The Old Republic, CoH: Going Rogue, etc.) all have updated graphics engines that I am pretty sure will bring my current card to its knees on anything approaching middle to higher levels of detail. We'll see how it turns out, as the Catalyst drivers for the Radeon HD 5000 series are notoriously cranky.