In news:alt.comp.periphs.videocards.nvidia, Paul
posted on Tue, 01 Jan 2013 15:08:48 -0500 the following:

As for mid-range video cards, I always feel regrets later, when
I look at the my bone-yard of slow and lonely video cards. For example,
I have a bushel of FX5200s, and no more driver support :-)

The main benefit you're likely to get from the new video card,
is "buzz word compliance". Any new tech that games might use,
your new card will have it. Whereas the 7950 will likely run all
your old DirectX 9 games, you can look forward to running demos
for the newer stuff, to see what all the excitement is about.
And if some program needs GPGPU acceleration, you'll have a
chance of trying that out as well.

Oh god. Well, I've tested the GeForce GTX 650 on a couple of browser
games to compare it to the 7950 GT. This GTX 650 thing is HORRIBLE! I
was able to use the 7950 GT for a little bit on CoasterVille before my PC
rebooted itself and the animations were so smooth and I was so delighted.
This 650 makes the game play more like my roommate's dual-core 2 GHz
processor, though it's not quite that bad, and I have a six-core 3.5 GHz
processor. Mine looks like about 25 frames per second. His looks more
like 10 frames per second, at best. My 7950 GT looked like 60 frames per
second. I'm so disappointed. At this point, the only thing that makes
THIS card better than my old one is the fact that my PC hasn't rebooted
with it in there. ::: ( I added this parenthetical to a saved draft I
was composing earlier: ... My PC rebooted itself again after behaving for
about 3.5 hours. The rest of this was written yesterday afternoon as the
above portion was.)

I'm just utterly disgusted. I thought I was looking at the most important
comparisons when checking the GPU Review website, not that it mattered. I
only had so much money to spend and I couldn't afford a higher-priced
card. But remember, studies say having more money won't make you any
happier. Yeah, right!

I hope you have fixed-width:

7950 GT GTX 650
..===============================================| ====================.
| GPU: | G71 | GK107 |
| Release Date: | 2006-09-06 | 2012-09-13 |
| Interface: | PCI-E x16 | PCI-E 3.0 x16 |
| Core Clock: | 550 MHz | 1058 MHz |
| Shader Clock: | --- | 1058 MHz |
| Memory Clock: | 700 MHz (1400 DDR) | 2500 MHz (5000 DDR)|
| RAMDACs (MHz) | 400 | |
| CUDA Cores | | 384 |
| Memory Bandwidth: | 44.8 GB/sec | 80 GB/sec |
| Standard Memory | 512 MB DDR3 | 1024 MB GDDR5 |
| Shader Operations: | 13200 MOperations/sec | --- |
| Pixel Fill Rate: | 8800 MPixels/sec | 16928 MPixels/sec |
| Texture Fill Rate: | 13200 MTexels/sec | 33856 MTexels/sec |
| Vertex Operations: | 1100 MVertices/sec | --- |
| FLOPS | --- | 812.544 GFLOPS |
| Px. per clock (peak) | 24 | |
| Memory Bus | 256-bit | 128-bit |
|--------------------------------------------------------------------|
| Passmark G3D Mark | 287 | 1822 |
'================================================= ===================`


It LOOKS like the GTX 650 is better if the texture fill rate, pixel fill
rate memory bandwidth and all that jazz is supposed to be important. I
don't see why the GTX 650 can have higher specifications in those areas,
and yet perform at such a dramatically inferior level. I had more
comparisons in the chart, but since I already know I don't want to keep
this GTX 650, I didn't bother adding more.

In actual use, it most definitely is NOT better than the 7950 GT, at least
in the few games I was trying out as a test. Granted, they aren't
full-fledged stand-alone games. The two I tested as best I could were
CoasterVille and FarmVille 2, which might be "meh" games to serious
gamers, but since I don't have any rockin' heavy games to play right now,
I get my entertainment with games I can play for free. With the GTX 650,
animations in CoasterVille were choppy, almost as bad as my friend's PC,
which has an Intel dual-core 2.21 GHz processor and an Intel G33/G31
Express integrated graphics chip. That's pretty embarrasing for the GTX
650, but I never tested it on a real game. I took it out of my system
because the 7950 GT plays the game with far more fluidity. Farmville 2
was even on the verge of being unplayable. It certainly wasn't enjoyable.
I'm hoping I can get a refund on it, or even a store credit at Newegg.com
so I can put that credit toward a better video card in the
future...preferably an Nvidia card that supports DirectX 11.1 so I can get
the full benefit of it in Windows 8.

One thing that does have me baffled, though, is why Farmville 2 isn't
showing up with all the "pretties" it had in my old Fatal1ty setup. All
my hardware (except the hard drive and case) are newer and better than my
old stuff, and I'm using the same video card. Yet I can't zoom out as far
in FarmVille 2, the full-screen button is gone, plus there are several
animations missing, as well as game elements like the tall, animated grass
in areas I haven't expanded my farm to yet. I'm using the same driver I
was using before, too; I've got the latest version of the Flash player;
and I've disabled Pepperflash in Chrome, which is the browser I was using
before. I don't have all the Windows updates yet, but I don't think I had
these updates before, either, because I had them disabled for so long. I
later downloaded them all when I started having problems on the Fatal1ty.
Can you think of anything I might be missing that would make Farmville
look like a game designed on the cheap?

Anyway, I've changed my setup again. I put the 7950 GT back in, and I'm
not powering the PC using my battery backup anymore. It's actually a
couple of years beyond its three years of service, but it was behaving and
it still gave me 20-25 minutes of uptime during power outages. But
someone suggested it might be going bad and he suggested trying it plugged
into the wall instead. I just stuck it in a surge protector. So far,
I've had no issues...but then I said that before about the GTX 650 until I
had another reboot. Yet before, with the 7950 GT and automatic
configuration of memory speed, timing, etc..., this thing would not even
last for 10-15 seconds past exiting the BIOS before it was rebooting. It
did better if I raised the memory speed to 2133 MHz, and changed the
timing and voltage to match, but I still eventually had a reboot.

While I hate running without a battery since I feel vulnerable to spikes
and outages (I feel like a UPS is more protective than a regular old surge
protector), at least I might be able to stay up and running until I can
get a new UPS.

Damaeus