If this was me I'd get a GTX 285. That being sad the HD5870 would blend far better in a XP Core2 Duo system out of the two cards you have. The 650ti seems a little steep for a Core2 Duo system and ma lead to slight bottle necking.

A GT640 or GT740 would probably be better for a system like that. The Core2Duo is going to be a bottleneck for anything faster. I wouldn't even consider that CPU for triple screen gaming. I have an old Dell XPS around here somewhere that came with a Core2Duo E6600 and HD5850 originally and that was painfully slow in 1080p on a single screen. I upgraded it to a Core2Extreme QX6800 and that picked it up a lot, but the video card was still a slug. I'd worry about upgrading that CPU first before the video card.

Nvidia has better drivers in general (especially OpenGL) and less noisy texture filtering.

5870 however has officially supported rotated-grid supersampling support. Only for Direct3D however.

sliderider wrote:

... painfully slow in 1080p on a single screen...

That's interesting. I've been expecting better. Simply based on general reading here, and how those games perform on my AGP systems. I suspect adventure ahead.

The only thing like a heads-up I've managed to find for either card is red_avatar's general observation on DX10 kit - "you're forced to use later drivers (2008+) but compatibility is pretty high as long as you don't go 2011-2012." That suggests a 2012 card could be cornered, but I haven't found tales of woe, and several have mentioned using such cards.

So that's great then. I'll spare my PSU and forge ahead with the much cooler Nvidia. The ATI will be kept handy as backup, and for later exploration of how it's different.

I'd also go for the 650Ti. It's less noizy, consumes less power and might me better in openGL than the 5870. I have one (but with a 750 bios) in a C2Q system using Win7/WinXP as a backup gaming/LAN Party PC. You can always upgrade your cpu, if you wish. Modded Xeons like the E5450 would be a nice upgrade.

I'd say go nvidia, SGSSAA can be forced with nvidia inspector (even if somewhat fiddly in some cases), and generally when it comes to AA, I've found that AMD's drivers circa 2011-13 (and arguably later) do a very poor job at forcing SSAA and transparency AA modes (checked on a 4850 with a Catalyst 13.9 and likewise RX570 struggles with modern drivers in older games). Nvidia's CSAA + Transparency SSAA do a very good job at combating jaggies at moderate performance impact.

tanasen wrote:

I'd also go for the 650Ti. It's less noizy, consumes less power

That is a good point to make. The 5870 is a power hungry card compared to the 650ti

an81 wrote:

...and generally when it comes to AA, I've found that AMD's drivers circa 2011-13 (and arguably later) do a very poor job at forcing SSAA and transparency AA modes (checked on a 4850 with a Catalyst 13.9 and likewise RX570 struggles with modern drivers in older games). Nvidia's CSAA + Transparency SSAA do a very good job at combating jaggies at moderate performance impact.

Okay, that'll be interesting to look into. Thanks. When you say "older games", roughly starting when? Or a title or two remembered as challenged.

It happens with Crysis. Company of Heroes too.

Forcing MSAA/SSAA is mostly for old games. Even DirectX 9 games can be troublesome. It became quite complex to force MSAA/SSAA on games once they started to use deferred lighting/shading (began around 2007). MSAA/SSAA started to be phased out in favor of post-processed AA like FXAA/MLAA that are very simple to apply. Unfortunately post processed AA has sucked until recently (with the arrival of temporal processing).

Recent NV and AMD cards also have a form of resolution supersampling. They call it Dynamic Super Resolution or Virtual Super Resolution. This is the only sure fire way to force a type of SSAA on relatively modern games. Some modern games actually directly support SSAA though.

swaaye wrote:

MSAA/SSAA started to be phased out in favor of post-processed AA like FXAA/MLAA that are very simple to apply. Unfortunately post processed AA has sucked until recently.

Just curious -- does anti-aliasing have a Golden Reference? Some singular web-page or thread, or video?. The sort that would grace Nerdly Pleasures.

Not that I'm not enjoying picking things up in these pleasant foragings on Vogons. I'm just thinking AA probably has that page somewhere, and I ought to have read it by now.