Moving from Radeon to GeForce Again

Getting a better monitor seemed like a great idea at the time, but performance issues in games became noticeable on my aging system once 1920 x 1080 became the default resolution. The Gigabyte Radeon 7750OC is a great budget videocard that handled 1680 x 1050 well ever since my Palit Radeon 4850 died. It was the only card at that time which would fit in my case while having any kind of decent gaming performance.

A visit to Newegg.com to check out the newly released AMD Radeon 7790 based cards produced a possible replacement from Gigabyte again for $150.00. For some reason, I decided to see if any Nvidia based cards had come out in smaller size. Somehow I’d missed the introduction of the Nvidia 650 TI family of GPUs last fall.

Being one to save $20 I ended up ordering Gigabyte’s GeForce 650 TI in the 1 GB factory overclocked edition. The videocard is very small with amazing performance for its size. Luckily for me I got a good one straight out of the box.

Some initial observations follow since I won’t actually benchmark the performance.

First off, the 650 TI is a lot faster then the 7750 at everything. In game video quality is superior except for antialiasing. There the AMD chip was superior in smoothing out the jagged outlines of objects. What surprised me was the Nvidia chip handling textures so much better. I hadn’t realized how much shimmering was present with the Radeon. At 1920 x 1080 I’ll take the better textures over the antialiasing.

One area that has been a downgrade is in video playback. For HD content I see no difference, which is great. But for DVD scaling and playback, the 7750 once tweaked was capable of producing amazing results especially with animated content. The vector adaptive deinterlacing and mosquito noise reduction on current AMD cards can’t be beaten.

I’m still tweaking things with the Nvidia control panel and have edge sharpening where I want it at 20%. Anything more starts adding too many artifacts. FYI, I’m using The Secret World of Arrietty DVD to test this. Noise reduction may require more tweeking and is currently set at 70%.

Oh and a big surprise is that VLC works properly with the 650 TI when it apparently wasn’t with the 7750. Hardware deinterlacing works and works better as far as getting rid of “combing” in DVD video.

I’ll wait a day or so before putting the 7750 into the media center in the living room. For quite awhile I’ve wanted to do that to improve the quality of streaming video and will eventually put a current DVD drive in it for DVD playback. The Samsung Blu-ray player I have does a good job, but it nowhere near the quality achieved scaling up DVDs with a modern videocard.

So far I am pleased with the Gigabyte 750 TI. It looks like I’m CPU bound again, but not by much. The PC is now upgraded to its final form and any additional upgrades will be component replacement when they go bad. Extending the life of the old Gateway DX4710 that I got in 2008 so that it can soldier on for more years has been quite a journey.