What gfx card for budget upto £80

Does your motherboard have a PCI Express slot for a graphics card?
I haven't used either of these cards, but just to help get the discussion going I had a look at my local store, and these two cards looked like they might be interesting. They might be closer to £100 there but I'd reckon the graphics card is worth waiting a bit longer for if you can stretch the £80 up a bit?

The cards are ATI HD6790
http://www.ple.com.au/ViewItem.aspx?InventoryItemID=608034&CategoryID=468

and Nvidia GTX550
http://www.ple.com.au/ViewItem.aspx?InventoryItemID=606558&CategoryID=467

Hopefully those pages let you view the Extended Specs tab, as they both seem to be happy with 400-500 watt PSU's. Hopefully they would let you run EU at nice settings, as well as handling most other games you threw at them. :)

 

PS: I like both ATI & Nvidia cards, but if you are optimising for EU then an Nvidia card might be a better match with the CRYengine graphics?

 

There's a coincidence! I am using the ASUS Nvida GTX550 ti. It has a Gig on board but still takes shared system memory (Something that EU does not seem to cope with very well). I can run with all the EU graphics settings maxed (it does look a lot different) but if there are lots of avatars about it will crash out with a memory error, unfortunately my MB only allows 4 GB of this and once I get to about 75/80% it's goodnight from me! I will be upgrading the MB at some point to allow more system memory, I may just get another PC that is more suited to the graphics card! The ASUS card came with software to allow overclocking of the card, I did experiment with this but it did not seem to make much difference to EU. Also included was some image capture software that I have not tried but probably should. If I recall it was a little over £100 a few months back, different versions are available for different video outputs so get one that matches your existing screen, it is a PCI express card and takes up two slots.

With your 8GB of RAM you should not hit the memory problem until about 7GB is being used by EU, for all I know it may never take that much but I would not bet on it!

I have never used an ATI card so cannot really comment on this.

 

My motherboard uses DDR3 RAM and the graphics card has DDR5 so I don't think you'll have any problem there.

Interesting to see on the EU loader screen it lists suggested hardware for different quality settings, and for Very High settings the suggested hardware is:
"Graphics Card (with latest drivers): NVIDIA GeForce 285 / ATI Radeon 4870
or better"

Bunny used a GTX280 for quite some time, and the game looked nice on high settings and ran well. The card unfortunately developed a fault where it pulled excessive current, and the fan jumped to 100% but still was overheating ingame. I blame the vsync being switched off in the windows Nvidia driver, as over time I think the very high refresh rates seen at the login screens damaged the card.

Today Bunny tried playing on this comp, which also has a GTX280 card with vsync forced ON in the driver software. She said the game looked and played well, on high settings. Screen size would also play a part here, I think the game on this comp was set to play at 1280 x something res, but this card might struggle a bit at higher resolutions.

I think the current cards in your target price range would be superior to the GTX280, which is a few years old now, so they should easily be able to handle EU's graphics demands.

Something that helps in Windows 7 (and probably Vista, not sure if XP has this option) is if you right click the game shortcut icon, or whatever you click on to launch the game, and select Properties. That should open a window with a row of tabs across the top, if you click on Compatibility and then click to tick the box for Disable Desktop Composition. Click Apply and OK.
When you launch the game now, a window pops up saying that the colour scheme has been changed to Windows basic. I think this relates to the Aero desktop thingy. After you exit the game the desktop colour restores and the Aero enhancements restore. This seems to help with EU & WoW, and possibly other games.
If I don't disable the desktop composition then the game runs slower, and I usually get a warning message after a while whining about running low on resources, or that the computer is running slow.

 

Interesting info Burgerman, I tried the disable desktop Composition option as from what you say it could help with the memory issue I have, unfortunately I noticed no difference in game however I did not get the pop up window about the colour scheme change. I have a feeling this may only take effect if EU is run full screen (something I do not often do), another possibility is that it needs to be set for the application that the ClientLoader starts.

Nice to know Bunny was in game, hope she enjoyed it :).

 

Turning off some of the windows eye candy is a good idea, and should help improve game performance.

I'm not familiar with the 5450 card, and I don't mean to dis your card Nexus7, but I think it might actually be letting you down a bit when it comes to game graphics. It might be worth sniffing around a bit comparing cards while you save up, and then treat yourself to a more powerful card.

I thought these two pages were interesting,

http://www.pcworld.idg.com.au/review/pc_components/ati/radeon_hd_5450_1gb/336827

http://www.hwcompare.com/384/geforce-gtx-280-vs-radeon-hd-5450/

 

Hellooooooo :-)
Has been a long time since I have been here. New forum in my favorite colors lol. Graphics cards Hmmmm. After burning up one graphics card and having so many problems with EU overheating the puter I am really afraid to put it on my present machine. But in all due respect I must say the newer graphics cards do seem to be able to finally handle EU. Seems the game was way ahead of the hardware :-( Anyone here getting rich in this game yet?? hehehe

 

Welcome back Bunny :).

I think it may be more accurate to say that Cryengine is ahead of the game when it comes to graphics. I seem to remember most reviews at the time Crysis was released saying you needed something pretty hefty to run it properly. Nice that EU took that on board though.

I do understand why there are memory issues. When you think about how many colour/texture combinations there are and how many different items these can be applied to. The software has to work out what an avatar/item looks like before it can present that to the graphics card for display.

I'm doing quite well on the global front at the moment but that is very different to getting rich, however I am working on it ;). Watch this space!