Is a 2880x1800 Resolution Worth Getting Excited Over?
- Thread starter Rob Williams
- Start date
I can't. A second or third GPU will help that situation a lot more than disabling something as minor as Aero. If they're THAT fussy about turning things up to 11, they need to haul out their wallet, not just tweak their system in the most minor ways possible.
madmat
Soup Nazi
Next time you play Max Payne 3 go into the settings and start monkeying around with resolution and IQ settings. They give you a metric of the amount of Vram needed for the game to run at your selection.
It's alarming how much memory you really need to keep from dipping into much slower system ram.
It's alarming how much memory you really need to keep from dipping into much slower system ram.
First and foremost, I don't believe that in-game VRAM meter to be accurate at all. At best, it's a guesstimation, just like how a power supply calculator is (as in, where you put in all of your parts and it tells you what PSU you need). It's just unfortunate that Rockstar takes it upon itself to refuse you certain settings (GTA IV was the same way).
The fact is, and yes, I'm going out on a limb and calling this fact, if you need to turn of Aero in order to im prove gaming performance, you seriously need to upgrade your PC. And - if a game performs crappy because you're running it in windowed mode where Aero remains visible, that sounds like a problem with the game, not Aero. I've played many games in windowed mode and have never found that the performance was degraded as a result (if the performance is ever degraded for me it's because I am running a bunch of stuff in the background). GPUs are now very efficient with memory, and are going to prioritize what it has for your gaming. It's almost as though I need to do tests with this, but with Aero disappearing in Windows 8, it seems pointless.
Anyway, to each their own. There's nothing wrong with turning off Aero if that's what you want to do.
I agree. I keep Computer and Recycle Bin on the desktop and that's it. It does get a bit cluttered when I'm working on content, though ;-)
I have played a number of games that break Aero, either refuse to load in window mode with Aero, or when you tab out, you see the classic interface (Dungeon Siege III is the latest example). Running a game in window mode though does kill performance, but as a result of Aero? I doubt it.
More often than not, that's done on purpose, and other times, it's because of compatibility issues.
Yup, and if Windows 8 wasn't doing away with Aero, I'd be up for testing that out ;-)
A proper test would be doing it with lower-end GPUs, and at the moment I am rather swamped and can't undertake a project like this.
I'll try it out later with Skyrim and a few others if I can. Though I'll run into multi-GPU issues (for some reason, the second GPU is disabled when a game is in Windowed mode).
So I ran Skyrim through some benchmarks with surprising results (for me at least). For the test, I disabled crossfire due to issues with window mode not using the second GPU. Quality was set to max with no AA, 1650x1080 resolution... the reason being because there are a lot of mods running (I normally run 1920x1200), and I wanted a wide range of frame rates to make sure everything was in order. Also, ENB was disabled due to issues with FRAPS only recording at 30fps.
Disabling Aero does increase performance, in both fullscreen and windowed modes. In my defence though of suspected lower performance in windowed mode, that's because of crossfire not working. Though I am kind of suspicious they all have 21fps as the minimum, was expecting at least some variation.
I'd eat my hat if I had one... but meh. So go disable Aero folks... what this has to do with Macs and Retina display I don't know, but that's where the conversation led.
Disabling Aero does increase performance, in both fullscreen and windowed modes. In my defence though of suspected lower performance in windowed mode, that's because of crossfire not working. Though I am kind of suspicious they all have 21fps as the minimum, was expecting at least some variation.
I'd eat my hat if I had one... but meh. So go disable Aero folks... what this has to do with Macs and Retina display I don't know, but that's where the conversation led.
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What's with that performance? I get over 100 FPS at max detail at 1920x1200 on a 580. I understand that 580 != 5870, but the performance differences of those cards aren't -that- stark.
If I do find time, I might do similar tests over the next couple of days. AMD cards aren't optimized for Skyrim to begin with, and that game as a whole isn't optimized, so I wouldn't resort to eating a hat based off of just these results.
Even so, if you need to turn off Aero, upgrade your PC.
If I do find time, I might do similar tests over the next couple of days. AMD cards aren't optimized for Skyrim to begin with, and that game as a whole isn't optimized, so I wouldn't resort to eating a hat based off of just these results.
Even so, if you need to turn off Aero, upgrade your PC.
Shit load of mods... really, that's what's doing it (2x and 4x texture replacements, mesh replacements, foliage replacements, water replacement, physics tweaks, etc etc). If I removed/disabled them, performance would go way up... but that means me going through and selectively deleting things and changing configurations and all that malarkey. Max frame rates were in the 70-80 range in various scenes, so the cards can push it, it's just the extra textures and particle effects really put a strain on things.
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Yeah don't bother doing that, seems complex. It's not like it's just checkboxes.
Edit: And not to mention I still don't think it's the best sort of gauge, that game. I could be wrong, it just strikes me as unoptimized (the developer behind it doesn't help).
Edit: And not to mention I still don't think it's the best sort of gauge, that game. I could be wrong, it just strikes me as unoptimized (the developer behind it doesn't help).
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madmat
Soup Nazi
So I ran Skyrim through some benchmarks with surprising results (for me at least). For the test, I disabled crossfire due to issues with window mode not using the second GPU. Quality was set to max with no AA, 1650x1080 resolution... the reason being because there are a lot of mods running (I normally run 1920x1200), and I wanted a wide range of frame rates to make sure everything was in order. Also, ENB was disabled due to issues with FRAPS only recording at 30fps.
Disabling Aero does increase performance, in both fullscreen and windowed modes. In my defence though of suspected lower performance in windowed mode, that's because of crossfire not working. Though I am kind of suspicious they all have 21fps as the minimum, was expecting at least some variation.
I'd eat my hat if I had one... but meh. So go disable Aero folks... what this has to do with Macs and Retina display I don't know, but that's where the conversation led.
It has nothing to do with macs and centers on the question about 2880X1400 being something to be excited about. My stance is that it's not on small displays but on larger displays, yes. It will eat up Vram though in games. That led to discussions about the desktop remaining resident in Vram which led to Aero being a detriment of performance which, ultimately, led to you checking that claim. Tall about 6 degrees of Kevin Bacon.
And here we are. :techgage:
Thanks for the quick benchmark BTW.
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