Hello
Neil,
Thanks for the clarification.
You are welcome, keep it up!
I have never used DDD's driver, but I know for sure that iZ3D driver can also show which DirecX version is used. Just turn the "Show FPS" feature on from the profiles menu of the driver panel. But use it just for checking, I suspect it slows things down a bit (as does the laser sight
). And another observation - FRAPS works with iZ3D in all games, when using anaglyph output (which is good because all 3D drivers support anaglyph output).
tritosine, I don't want to offend you but ... wake up man, stop living in the good old Athlon days. I also used many AMD CPUs throughout the years (actually before my current Intel machine, my previous Intel one was based on Pentium MMX 233MHz (OCed to 266MHz
)) but since s754/939, AMD is always behind Intel (when Core2 architecture was released). Yes, in terms of Performance/$ they are much better, indisputably, but in terms of peak performance Intel is in the lead. Just check out some clock-to-clock comparisons in SuperPi, wPrime, Cinebench, Sisoft Sandra, x264 compression, WinRAR/7-Zip benchmarks, BOINC Benchmark, PPD in SETI@home, Folding@Home and so on... Now factor in the fact that Intel CPUs overclock better and there you have it. Oh, there's something for the extreme users that Intel has, and AMD doesn't - 24 frickin' threads (google "SR-2"), this baby is unbeatable in crunching/rendering/transcoding (but it has it's price).
In games though, the difference is often very small to justify the extra money for Intel system, but most power users rarely use their PCs for gaming only (that's what consoles are for (and come to think of it, none of the consoles use AMD CPUs
)). Here, we're talking about benchmarking of video cards, and therefore, we must eliminate all other possible bottlenecks. For the past few years Nvidia cards have been more CPU-dependent than ATI/AMD cards. That's why to eliminate all doubts, the usage of LGA-1366 Core i7 overclocked @4GHz at least, is recommended (using i7 980X for this purpose would be overkill though).
Don't get me wrong, I'm not some stup
ed fanboy, I always love good competition because we all benefit from it. That's why I have high hopes on the upcoming AMD Bulldozer architecture, but I'm little skeptical about it beating the LGA-2011 Sandy Bridge (which probably won't be that much faster than LGA-1366 Nehalem/i7, clock-to-clock).
tritosine wrote:You call yourself self respecting gamers with intel cpus and lcd screens?
Please, don't insult me. I would never use LCD monitor, ever. I'm a proud CRT (professional 22" one) owner and my next display probably will be 2011 Plasma 3DTV. LCDs can't get even close to these black levels (even the LED-backlit ones, with their blooming) and response times, not to mention viewing angles and color reproduction (especially on the most popular TN panels).
Peace
(and excuse me for the off-topic)