I’m not sure where the best place for this to go would be, so I placed it in “General Discussion”
Some people might be thinking “why does it matter what card you get, go out and by any decent card!”
However, there was once a topic discussing issues with certain AMD cards, and really bad performance, so that is a concern.
I’m not sure if there are any issues now (the topic was at least a year ago I believe), but I just want to make sure what people have had good success with!
Currently I use a laptop with a 1GB GT550m, and so far I’ve been able to do what I need to, though the world is sometimes a bit slow, and I had to optimize the shizz out of it, or else it would be 1fps… (granted I’ll have to see how these new cards fare, but I’m hoping much much better :P).
Yeah, I’ve always, for some reason, preferred Nvidia.
I have been reading up and seeing a lot of benchmarks where AMD cards were outperforming Nvidia cards I.e., Radeon R9 380 > Geforce GTX 960 and R9 390 > GTX 970, etc. So I’m not sure what’s better, but I don’t really game, and JMonkey is more important than overall gaming with DX11…
Yeah, thats’ the problem, I don’t want to buy a 200-300$ card and get 1fps in JME…
Do you have any recommended cards you think would be good? I hear the next series of GPUs are going to be much better, so I don’t want to spend THAT MUCH right now, and would rather wait for a really good card later.
But, at the same time, I’m not sure what we really need for JMonkey…
Also… For what it’s worth, I might be getting a 4k monitor, so I’m not sure how much better of I card I would need.
Others will have their own opinions. I always feel like nVidia performs better outside of benchmarks… it just feels more solid. That could be a decade+ of horrible experiences with ATI cards talking, though.
For me, in the U.S., when I upgrade I usually just buy the best nVidia card I can find for $200. That’s right at the point where the price curve starts to climb faster than the benefit. This is desktop. I don’t know what pricing is like for mobile GPUs.
In hardware, the price to performance curve looks about like this:
…and that yellow area is where I try to buy as a general rule. The few times I’ve tried to jump up the curve, I always have buyer’s remorse. Because in general, we are just renting a spot on that curve. As time and tech move forward, we slide off the back. The inflection point let’s me upgrade sooner and stay in the sweet zone.
I’m looking for a desktop card not (not sure if I confused you), so 200$ works. IT seemed the AMD cards were double the VRAM from 200-300$, but that didn’t really double FPS or anything, nor do I know if the 20-30fps gain is worth 100$, but not sure how our games would compare to the graphical detail of high end games that you see in bench marks…
Also, I was looking at the GTX 960, since that’s at the 200$ mark, and just wtf is this…
I have a lot of computers. The four workstations in my home office here (two are non-functioning at the moment) all have EVGA. The two I use for development are running GTX 460s. My wife has some EVGA in hers but I don’t remember which.
When my kids and I built a computer lab in the basement, we put GTX 650s in those machines. Nice boxes. AMD 6 core systems running Linux Mint. I had them build their own computers.
I was kind of thinking about buying an AMD card as well, with the Nvidia, to see if I can get it working with JMonkey and test it lol .
I was checking out this page
it seems that MSI overall has really good stats. The ASUS looked promising, but didn’t seem to do well in the benchmarks. Have you ever dealt with MSI? I hear some people really like them, I like their cards. I heard their coolers are great, but read 1 review on Newegg that said it was crap… So idk .
I hear ASUS support is crap too… I’m looking at an ASUS 4k monitor, which one person claimed was the best one out, so idk… Granted this Monitor is ASUS.
Pivot ftw… Portrait mode = <3 for coding Hmm… I like the new feature with the forum, except it says the monitor, costs 46799 and not 467.99
A lot of people complained about “milky white hue” instead of black, or that blacks just didn’t look like black. I heard there’s a setting called “ASCR” some sort of “Contrast” thing, that will mess with that, but one review said that he had the issue with 1080p, and then when he bought a Asus 970 GTX, and used this at 4k, it was deep black. Anotehr user said they have 950… So I’m not sure if a Good GFX card is needed or if ASUS cards are the safe bet LOL >(.
Well my GTX 760 seems to be working as intended but other cards that I tested weren’t quite as good, especially in the lighting department. My old HD 7750 and two (reasonably crap) integrated intel laptop gpus have huge problems handling light sources since everything is either compeltely black or lighted. A friend’s R 280 has some problems with the dlsr renderer, as completely transparent quads mess up shadows.
I’m using a Nvidia GTX 970 and it works good in most games and in JME, but that is as long as you don’t write bad code. I think my previous card was a GTX 760 or something and that worked quite ok as well. I did however upgrade since my last computer was anno 2010 and wanted some more general speed.
I don’t know if you’re coding for your own computer or if you’re writing for the general market, or doing mobile games, but you can get a grip of what the market look like at Steam http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/videocard/
@KonradZuse
Having the best possible card is a nice experience for gamers, but not for you.
First: JME does not supports latest GL features.
Second: Having just common graphics card you are able to see on every level of development how your game will work in most cases.
In my opinion GTX 750 is enough for today. The gpu is fast enough to give me smooth gameplay with 80-120 fps using my deferred rendering pipeline, and slow enough to notice when I spoil something.
I’ve read that in a magazine yesterday. Unfortunately the magazine article is hardware and in German…
In the same article there is a statement that “in some cases NVIDIA cards are faster under DirectX11 than under DirectX12” because of the lacking support for some DirectX12 features. But there is no link posted that has a prove.
Like others said: One advantage of weak hardware is that you can see how it fails under jME. For example: In my other 6 year old computer I have an AMD card that has massive graphics errors with jME shadows. Yes, OpenGL under AMD were a mess back then. Don’t know how good AMD is today. They should have made a decent amount of money with consoles. And their workstation cards (“FirePro”, former “FireGL”) at least should have good OpenGL support for CAD.
My personal opinion is different: Use a really good graphics card on your dev machine! Because you can optimize the code later but will need to see things running now. Traditionally development machines for 3D are quite beefy (“beef-cake!!!” :chimpanzee_wink:). But you could use your mobile GT550 as weak hardware to see how on actual low end user machines your game will run. So during optimizing step it will be good.
If it comes to performance per dollar - it’s currently the GTX960 which costs few dollars and is a little bit stronger than the GTX760. Also, this card often has passive cooling - and thus is silent.
I would like to buy a GTX980 (but GTX970 was the greatest scandal in NVIDIA history, I noticed that when I almost finished buying that one). Currently I’m a bit insecure because of the Oxide versus NVIDIA thing (no ACE). Maybe I wait until the next generation of NVIDIA is out.
