Sunday 15 April 2012

Updated the Shiny

Recently CCP offered some Nvidia display cards for Eve Online PLEX.

This was generally well received by the residents of New Eden and the available batch of cards was sold out in less than two minutes.

My ISK is tied up at the moment but it made me think about my own display card, and how old it was.

The card was a 8800GTS 320Mb PCI-E which was about four years old.

For Eve Online it's not too bad, in space it was mostly fine, but for the Captains Quarters (CQ) it was woeful, not that I use the CQ anymore.

The clincher was when I searched for the card on Ebay and found that on a good day with a trailing wind it's probably worth $50.

Time to get a new card then.

The cards that were on offer from CCP are the Nvidia 560 models, also during a recent Nvidia Eve Online technology demonstration they mentioned the 560 is the most used card in Eve Online.

I went searching for this card and found some Gigabyte 560 Ti 1Gb PCI-E cards for a good price, bought one and two days later it arrived.

Installation is quite straight forward as it was simply a case of remove the old card and insert the new as my PSU and display card power cables are compatible.

Testing!

In Eve Online the difference is noticeable, for example I can now run all settings at High, and the frame rate is also consistantly higher than before.  I tried out the CQ to see what the difference is, the frame rate is much higher than before but well below that of being in space, I switched off the CQ again.

I'm not sure how it will go in major fleet battles as client lag can also be caused by non-display card issues, but even on the normal low graphics settings across the board which are typical for the big fights I'm hoping for an improvement.

Time will tell but at the moment I'm very happy with it.

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