Stevies Sapphire Vapor-X 7770 review

[stevie lee]

Far Cry 2

Run, drive or swim around a war torn nation, setting everything on fire while tracking down an arms dealer who’s supplying everyone with guns.

Its shiny, got lots of fire effects and has ambient chickens running about, what’s not to like?

Benchmark was run using the inbuilt FC2BenchmarkTool.exe program found in the \bin folder.
Patch was version 1.03
Test was set to run on the Ranch Medium test, with the following settings

Low





When i did the testing on the 7770 I forgot to remove the anti-aliasing. The results obtained where pretty much the same as what he 4870 scored. So I had to rerun the test again. It showed that 2x anti-aliasing removes 10fps incase you wanted to know.


Medium






High






both the 4870 and 7770 play very nicely looking on all setings but it did feel smoother on the 7770.
the 3300 looked identical to the 7770, you have a lot more time to enjoy what the scenery looks like, because thats all youll be doing. but it does play, and thats the point.

[stevie lee]

LOTRO
Lord of the rings online, MMO game, follow in the footsteps of the fellowship.

Once again I’m using FRAPS tool. Benchmark is my main character Billee the dwarf champion running around outside his very own Kinship house, running around detailed housing items, water, trees, grass, everything apart from fire.

I’ve limited the run to 30 seconds, because that’s the limit on movie recording in free FRAPS.

Low

Settings changed to very low, sync to refresh rate turned off, because the FPS was a constant 60.





Medium

Settings changed to medium.




High

Settings changed to high




aslong as you are the ony person in the area, no monsters and not doing anything, it runs just about on the 3300 onboard graphics. the others, just put it in high settings, it looks prettier the higher you go.
most of the glitches and slowdown, stuttering and laggyness is either caused by your internet connection or the fact that since a major update earlier in the year the game itself severely lags at random intervals for no apparent reason.

[stevie lee]

EVERYTHING TO THE MAX

And now the results everyone has been waiting for. Drum-roll please...

Everything turned up to the maximum possible settings just to show how large my e-peen is and how capable the card is if you push it to the MAX!

This is a comparison between high and with everything ramped up to the MAX!.

I’ve run it on the 3300 onboard, well, just because it will lay to rest the eternal question “will it run crysis?” once and for all. Mainly because if on-board graphics from a 4 year old chipset can run it, logically everything released afterwards can too. Or at least that will be my ambitious goal.
There is also the average FPS from all tests, so you can see what effect ramping up the settings has on the game.

Gadzooks it the results!


UNIGINE
MAX! settings are set to 1680x1050 DX11
Shaders: High
Texture Quality : High
Filter : Trilinear
Anisotropy : 16x
Ambient Occlusion : On
Refraction : On
Volumetric Shadows : On
Tessellation : Off



I then re-ran the test with tessellation on EXTREME and that uses up the card to make very sexeh looking pleasing visuals in-front of your unworthy eyes.



I mean just look at the difference with it on and off.



The steps actually look like steps, the dragon has shiny bits, the holes are holier, the cracks are crackier. From this alone I would say if you don’t have a DX11 tessellation capable card, go buy one. The average FPS goes down by 13FPS, but who cares? You get sexeh dragons!



Far Cry 2

turn up everything to ultra high and pretend you are watching an Attenborough documentary. which reminds me, i need to take a video of the test. i got lost in the drool inducing nature of the test.







the 3300 took about 5 minutes to load before it started, i nearly gave up. but on it plodded eager to make up for its witcher 2 failings.
the 4870 was a bit jittery especially when the fire kicked in or animals where running about.
7770, fire, glorious fire, see how it carresses its surroundings, see how it burns. yes its very nice looking, you'll just have to play it yourself to see the beautiful mayhem. or just watch the video below.

[stevie lee]

MAX! continued...

Witcher 2

Set it to Ultra Spec, leave UberSampling on just because its the MAX! Section. Cry quietly in the corner.







I re-ran it with ubersampling off on the 7770 because, everyone who is sane will turn it off, on this card at least. And it scored pretty identical to the High settings, I’m thinking this is down to the increased texture memory size option, maybe there’s more memory available for all the shiny goodness and therefore it speeds up.

<see video at the end of this post, theres a limit to the number of videos per post which i didnt know about, so I've had to combine them into one>

there is some major streaking going on with the textures in the background, especially if you spin round too fast. but as this card is considered low/mid range and this game is designed to run on sli/crossfire rigs with much faster CPU, SSDs and faster memory then it is forgiveable. just turn the settigs down to high, you do lose detail, but as the game looks so good on any settngs, you'll be happy with what works.


LOTRO

Set everything to Ultra high, change texture cache size to 0, so graphics card uses all its available memory (or so i’ve read)



Then I re-ran the test but with DX11 turned on just to see whether the new shiny shiny features slow it down.



Well, DX11 takes of 5FPS but it is more shadowy looking.


heres the combined video of the witcher 2 tests and LOTRO test routes, both run on MAX settins on the 7770

[stevie lee]

Analysing the Shiny Whizzy Bits/Overview

I'll just be rambling on with thoughts and musings in this section so bear with me, it may get long, or i may just cut it short because i really want to get back to playing games again. benchmarking is all well and good, maybe run one or two tests when you first setup your computer, just so you know its been setup correcctly. then you should forget about all that and then just play games, because thats what these graphics cards are for, playing games.

if you are in a similair situation to what i was a week ago. having a 3 year old computer that you are thinking is running a bit slow and you are thinking of a complete overhaul and get a brand new computer. but you dont have that much money (if any). so if you do upgrade you'll have to get more budget components. Then these tests i've done, go to show that you dont need to upgrade very much to get a very massive and noticeable improvement in things.

most if not all the tests show an improvement of half to double the FPS output by buying what is considered a low-mid-range graphics card. so that can easily last another 3 years before you start to notice sowdown again.

DX11 and the tessellation feature are worth upgrading your graphics for if you are still on a DX10 card, but thats only if you have or plan to get any games that support that.

and you dont need to worry about backwards compatibility or Power requirements. I'm only using a 425W PSU and you only have to look at the introduction section, to see the amount of thins i've got plugged into it. just make sure its a decent named brand (havea look at other threads on HEXUS to find some examples). my PCI-E is only version 2, this card is a version 3, it still works. i've no idea whether its being bottlenecked atall in my computer, youll just have to look at the other reviews around these parts too see whether they get higher or lower results.

so if you do havea 3-4 year old computer, instead of spending £300 - £400 that you can just about afford, to get a compromise of a computer with what will probably be ths card anyway. then why not spend around £100 and buy this card, enjoy a doubling of FPS, then in 3 years get an even better computer when you've saved up some more money. That will be an even more noticeable jump in performance and you'll be grinning even more.

one thing i should mention and one thing you do need to check though, is the position of your sata ports. i'm only using 4 devices and have no plans on getting any more, so it doesnt matter to me that much. but heres what it looks like after its installed



not much clearance there is there?

but other than that, i cant fault the card as a very nice upgrade.


the reason i tested it against the onboard graphics, was in an attempt to show that if you are on a laptop, or a media PC with either its own onboard or low end graphics, then you can play games on it after all. all the other reviews just laugh at the prospect, but i'm of the opinion that, why not give it a go anyway?

so in summary:

yes it does work on old computers,
yes it is worth the ~£95 price tag,
yes you did just read all this review, so why are you still reading it and not playing games? go on, shoo, away with you now.

[stevie lee]

Outtakes, Bloopers and Destruction

heres the first outtake. from the scrapped crysis section. (and theres a limit of 1 video per post, so i've had to bung it down here)

Here’s a FRAPS video for MAX! Settings on the 3300 onboard graphics. well just because why not?



Well there you go, crysis does run on onboard, so whats the point in buying a separate graphics card when onboard graphics will suffice? I fully accept responsibility for single handedly killing off the GPU market overnight.

But i don’t think you’ll be happy at 1.87 FPS, so you could try turning the settings down a bit, but where’s the fun in that?

______

reviewing stuffs hard, leave it to the profesionals, like for instance the staff at HEXUS, they get the job done in a more sensible fashion

[stevie lee]

review is finished btw,
Just bumping it back to the top of 'new posts' partly to alert you to this fact, but mostly to annoy you with it continually being bumped back to the top of 'new posts' in the hope that someone will read it and add comments below this post.

go on, i won't mind.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Great review!!

[Zak33]

My word

My absolute word

That Is one of the maddest , craziest and yet most definitive reviews I've ever ever read

What you've done there, my fine fellow, is to tear up the benchmark rule book and yet rewrite the rules ..... And make it all make sense

May I Assume that the card is making you a happy bunny?

It's fantastic to see what a "mid range " card can do, using less electricity than a 3 year old model

You've done us all proud bud

Very very well done

[stevie lee]

<snip>
May I Assume that the card is making you a happy bunny?
<snip>

happy bunny? naah...

happy panda? yesssss...

this is almost like what i feel like, i just have less girls to play with

[bigsnow]

good material

[bigsnow]

The vedeos are great

[losertheone]

Great review

10/10 would read again

[stevie lee]

^ thanks. its not finished yet though

still need to do the 'destruction testing' for the boxes.
need to figure out (make up a reason that souds plausible) why they changed from foam to cardboard for packaging.

may also do 'does updating drivers increase your FPS?'
and then at the next LAN i need to go round and shove it in peoples faces, do a montage video of me getting them annoyed and being beaten up,

its just stalled a bit because i broke my sisters tripod and she wont let me borrow the camera anymore. she'll come round eventually though

[geb]

my word wot a fantastic indepth review of the Sapphire Vapor-x 7770 graphics card, you certainly put this bad boy through its paces,,,this is first class work Stevie excellent video etc, should be working for Hexus my boy,,,and still more to come i hear. cant wait for the rest of the review,,watch this space as they say

geb

[Zak33]

Right.. I've read this review.... 5 times I think.

It is, in my opinion , one of the worlds greatest masterpieces. It's a classic. Comedy, quality, good graphs.. and a final conclusion that, frankly, the world of normal people wanted to know the truth on: ie does £100 on graphics on an older PC, make value sense.

It does...

Stevie for PM tbh