Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[InflatableMouse]

If you're looking for a nice videocard and are considering a passive GT6xx card, you may want to reconsider. The cards are quite a bit more expensive than the GT430 and are in fact just rebranded 430's. Don't fall for it, just buy the much cheaper GT430 or find the ATI equivalent if you like. What's worse is that Nvidia (more than ever before) screwed up this rebranding scheme, it's a complete mess. On top of that OEM's are allowed to rebrand the Fermi's into 6xx series, some are 64-bit, some 128-bit (memory bus). Others have higher clocks and yet others are at stock speeds.

Buy a GT430 while you can or wait for a Kepler version.

[glynor]

Yep.  Nvidia is often shady at the low end (though AMD is also guilty almost just as often).

They've rebranded the 430 twice now.

The 430 was rebranded (and slightly tweaked, to make it slower) as the GT 520, which is now called the GT 610.  And the GT 620 and 630 are straight rebrands (meaning, completely identical in a new box with a new number) of the original GT 430 and 440.

Base-clocks and memory access width are almost always a wreck on low-end cards.  The GT 430s were just as bad when they were the brand-new top-of-the-crappy-cards (and the generation before that, and the one before that, all the way back to the TNT2 cards).  And, whatever you do, do NOT buy a GPU in a brick-and-mortar store unless you know what you are doing.  They often have really, really, really old cards selling for almost their original list prices.  I seriously saw a 8800 GT in a store a few months back with a $200-and-something price tag on it.  I about snorted coffee through my nose.

[jmone]

I'm stumping up for a new GPU to be able to handle madVR's new Jinc3 + AR algorithm.  Looks like the Asus ENGTX660-DC2-2GD5 GF GTX660 DirectCU II PCI-E 3.0, 2GB fits the bill for raw GPU power, low power draw and is quiet (as fans driven ones go).

FYI - the 550Ti does NOT cut it on 1080/60i material (the cut off seems to be 1080/50i and even that has the GPU at over 90%).

[InflatableMouse]

Does a 660 really do jinc3?

And if it does, won't the fans in no-time ramp up to full speed?

I have  a Asus GTX 580 DC II in my main pc, jinc managed to pull 100% gpu and ramp up the fans to 100% in a matter of seconds. Mind you the airflow in my case is as good as it gets in a full tower case.

A DC II is anything but quiet at 100% fanspeed. I'm pretty sure that's not what you want in a HTPC.

[Sandy B Ridge]

I have  a Asus GTX 580 DC II in my main pc, jinc managed to pull 100% gpu and ramp up the fans to 100% in a matter of seconds. Mind you the airflow in my case is as good as it gets in a full tower case.

Yikes!

I'm considering the 650Ti due to power constraints and cost. I might hang back for a while.

I guess upscaling/deinterlacing 1080i60 content to a 1080p screen (which will be the most I will tax the card) is different to upscaling 1080i60 to 1440p60. From lurking in doom9 MadVR forum it seems that those that struggle are in this latter group or have complex avisynth scripts co-running in the chain.

SBR

[InflatableMouse]

Honestly .... I can't tell the difference between Lanczos 4 taps and Jinc 4 or even 8 taps.

I've tested with bad sources, good sources, 480i and p and 720p. I've made screenshots, had my nose against the screen. Switched back and forth. I can barely spot a difference and if I think I do, I can't decide which one is better. At 4 meters distance, not a chance I can spot it. In between I would switch to nearest neighbor and bilinear to make sure the changes are really doing something.

With that in mind I don't think its worth to upgrade if you have a card that can do Lanczos 4 taps. If you don't have a card yet, of course go for the best you can get.

My 2 cents.

[jmone]

I had the HTPC just running the i7-2000K 3000 IGP so could only use M-N for the scaling (anything with TAPS was way to much for this) but have now just managed to wedge the 660 into the little Shuttle case.  So far so good, as reported in the MadVR thread over at Doom9, 1080/60i material took 52% GPU utalisation on this card with Jin3 AR.  After almost an hour the temp is in the low 70c and fan speed is low 60% mark. It is quiet as Nevcairel suggested but I'm not one that is annoyed by some fan noise (and I think most of the noise is the Shuttle Case Fan anyway).

[InflatableMouse]

Sounds good.

1080i is something I don't have and can't test but I suspect the load on that will be a lot lower than on sources that require more upscaling.

[jmone]

The issue was the additional overhead of GPU based deinterlacing pushed my 550ti to hard when also using Jin3 AR.

[mojave]

jmone, I have the 550 ti in my HTPC and the GTX 660 in my work computer. Any reason to switch the cards for 1080p content?

[jmone]

My 550ti is in the "work" computer and is maxed out when using Jinc3 AR on 1080/50i and 50p (eg this is it's limit) and is pushed over the edge on 1080/60i but there is no probs on 1080/24p.  So if your 1080 stuff are from movies are you fine (eg traditional 1080/24p BD) but if it is Interlaced stuff (eg Music Videos, TV Shows then they may be 1080/50i or 60i) and this is where you may run into a loss of head room on the 550ti and swaping the two would make sence.

That said, first check if you even have a preference for Jinc3 AR to the other scaler options (or try Jinc3 with AR OFF).  Unless you have a preference for Jinc3 AR then the 550Ti is fine (for now) on all content.

[dragon76]

If you're looking for a nice videocard and are considering a passive GT6xx card, you may want to reconsider. The cards are quite a bit more expensive than the GT430 and are in fact just rebranded 430's. Don't fall for it, just buy the much cheaper GT430 or find the ATI equivalent if you like. What's worse is that Nvidia (more than ever before) screwed up this rebranding scheme, it's a complete mess. On top of that OEM's are allowed to rebrand the Fermi's into 6xx series, some are 64-bit, some 128-bit (memory bus). Others have higher clocks and yet others are at stock speeds.

Buy a GT430 while you can or wait for a Kepler version.

I just saw GT 630 Kepler edition (from Asus and Palit). Very confusing, but does it perform better than gt 630 Fermi that also is in production and being sold along with GT 630 Kepler?

[Lonx]

I'm hanging out for the GT640 Kepler. So far I've only found Zotac to be releasing them in a passive configuration which I'd prefer. Case is a Lian Li PC-A04 so it has decent cooling... although that is debatable when all the drive bays are full. Therefore it might be worthwhile for me to consider something with a 'quiet' fan. Decisions decisions.

[6233638]

Shouldn't there be lower-end 700-series cards coming out soon? The high end cards have been out for a while now.

[InflatableMouse]

The 710 is Fermi architecture, previously known as a GT620. The 730 is a Kepler, previously known as the GT640. I don't know which one exactly you mean but as far as I'm aware, all the new low end 700-series are rebranded 600-series. Note that the GT 430 was also a Fermi based architecture. So basically, Fermi is 4 generations old with the 710. They just keep rebranding it with minor updates at best.

Typically, the old midrange is cheaper than the new low end. While its true they can be slightly faster, with faster or more memory, wider memory bus and higher clock speeds and die shrinks, its generally not enough to be able to turn Madvr up a notch. IMO there isn't anything in the new low ends that would make it worthwhile over the older midrange. Maybe if they would come with half the power consumption but I haven't really looked into it.

I'm still at a GT430 and it runs Madvr with medium to high settings. No low to midrange 600-series or low end 700-series will do any better. Maybe a notch on one particular setting but nothing major and certainly not enough to make a visual impact.

If you're looking at building a new system, by all means pick the latest greatest but if you're looking at an upgrading a 430 or HD4000, I wouldn't bother and stick with what you have.

[6233638]

For what it's worth, I have a cheap GT610 that I bought as a temporary solution when my main GPU died and I needed something cheap with HDMI.
It's apparently a "re-branded" GT520... which is probably a GT430? (guessing here)

Well it may be a "re-branded" card, but the video decoders were updated. It can do hardware decoding of 4K which my GTX570 cannot.

[InflatableMouse]

The problem with rebranding is that it gets very confusing because (some?) hardware vendors can rebrand differently than Nvidia would. I never knew the details on this or how it works but its confusing as hell.

I guess its a hit and miss, but in some occasions they do make something useful out of that depreciated hardware .