Yes you would either need to create an emergency reflash disk prior to flashing (and verify that it works) or you would need a second graphics card to reflash the 6950 back to stock. Dissapointing that the new revision only has a single bios. Hopefully the manufacturers will create a version with the rev. 2 reference design but with a 2nd bios as well. AMD is probably doing this primarily because they are losing out on so much money from people flashing the cards.
TERA doesnt benefit from Crossfire because it doesnt have a crossfire profile to actually have crossfire enabled for the game. That would change once the game comes out or is almost out. Same thing for SLI. Except it is a bit easier to add in a custom SLI profile to enable a game to use both graphics cards than it is to add a custom crossfire profile.
Game has been out in korea since january and still nothing. I wasn't going to keep a second gfx card while En masse sits with their thumbs up their arse. They are too busy covering the Elin's legs instead of doing something really useful like enabling Xfire/SLI.
I dont think enabling Xfire/SLI is that important. The elin thing is either but to many ppl QQed about it I think them leaving the Elins alon will hurt the game more then not enabling Xfire/SLI
anyways about 590 its really not worth it unless your planning to play games in 3D sicne thats the main selling point
if u can afford a 590 u can afford the glasses and monitor for 3d or u should just give to me all the money haha
Xfire/SLI is needed for triple-screen TERA gaming. No single GPU card is sufficient to reach 60 fps with it. Do I need to point you guys to the relevant threads again ?
So... I've decided to sell the card after all. The performance is not quite up to snuff (given the price tag) when compared to my killer 8800 GTX Ultra Superclocked. Plus, it stutters at times when playing Planetside. DX11 is completely unnecessary, etc, etc. I can return it, but who has the time, plus there's a restocking fee I believe. Kijiji it is. The funny thing is, my initial gut feeling was: all these new cards won't be that much better than my 8800, but everyone and their dogs told me otherwise because none of them have tried an 8800GTX Ultra and compared it to the newer cards.
Thats odd because I had a normal 8800 GTX, and the superclocked version really isnt THAT much faster than a normal one. The new cards are far and above better than the old 8800 I used to have. Now I didnt do a side by side test, but here is my list of cards from the 8800 on up and my experience with them: 8800GTX - fast and nice 4870 - a small upgrade in performance in most games. 4890 - I felt like wasting money. small upgrade because of the much faster clock speeds I OCed it to GTX470 - when my 4890 died after 9 months of 24/7 massive OC. small performance boost from 4890 6970 - bought a new computer so sold the 470. small performance gain from the 470, I can now run higher levels of AA smoother. from the 8800GTX to the 6970 I run now, I would say performance is up more than 3x. Sorry that it didnt work out for you though :/
Rubius are you actually comparing performance based on Planetside? If so yea you're not going to see much difference. I had an 8800 Ultra (Not super clocked) and even my GTX 470 before was far and away a nice performance boost. I was running SLI 470 and upgraded to ATI 6950 (Firmware upgraded to 6970) just last weekend and the performance AND appearance is a night and day difference. I was amazed. I admit I've been an ATI hater from back in the day of their issues running multi monitor setups. This is my first AMD/ATI card since then and I'm blown away. Bottom line is if you're still playing old games you're probably not going to see a major performance boost with the newest cards in a lot of cases. With this new 6970 I finally feel like I struck a nice performance balance between GPU/CPU bottlenecks (i7-2600).
You also need to consider the rest of your system, what's your CPU like? Is it overclocked? Is there a bottleneck somewhere in your system that no matter what kind of graphics card you upgrade to it won't "show" because its being limited by another piece of hardware?
@Retsah: I made sure to run multiple benchmark tests. Sogetsu is probably right, I have a bottleneck in my system somewhere, and unless I upgrade that, I'll be stuck with the same peak performance no matter what. The thing is, I'm not ready to upgrade my whole system yet (or have a real need to). Anyways here are some test results. My 8800GTX (not the ultra version, which would be higher) Same settings, with the 6970. Running it on Windows 7 I know it's not the latest 3DMark, but I could care less for DX11. Tessellation is nice, but comes at a cost. Games look great as they are in DX9.
You haven't answered my question. Do you have a motherboard with PCIe 2.0 slots. My 6950/70 was getting half the benchmark it should have due to that. Furmark -> Fullspeed results because such a small test it was fitting entirely inside the card's RAM Unigine -> Halfspeed because of my motherboard and its PCIe 1.0 slot running at half speed compared to 2.0 Once I upgraded to my ASUS with 890FX chipset, I obtained normal results for my graphic card.
you have to remember, 3DMark 06 is HEAVILY biased toward Nvidia cards as well. Just like 3DMark 11 is somewhat biased towards AMD cards. You cant use that as a real measure for performance. I will run a 3DMark 06 tonight when I get home and see what kind of score I get in Windows 7 with the same card.
Don't get the 470 or 460. Get the 560 TI if you plan to go back to Nividia for price/performance. ATI is dominating the market on price/performance, but a lot of games are usually designed for the Nvidia architecture. That is why ATI cards have such a hard time in games at times.
Yup, this is the board I have. It has its fair share of problems... I won't be going Asus for boards again. Possibly, but those scores reflect actual performance of the two cards in games.
Well, if that's any consolation, I won't be going ASrock ever again. The replacement board I got for the server froze randomly about once or twice a week. I have disabled the onboard graphic card, running only on the two HD 5450, and I'm crossing fingers ever since. No freeze yet running 24h/24 7/7.