I’m thinking of upgrading my GPU and possibly my hard drive. I’d like to be able to play Fallout 4 maxed out in 1080 60Hz and possibly do some fast 3D rendering and animation with Blender.
Here is my system:
Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit OS
Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-870A-UD3. Link Width & max supported: x16
CPU: AMD Phenom II X4 955 at 3.2GHz
RAM: 8GB DDR3 PC3-10700 (667MHz)
GPU AMD 6850 Code 300MHz 1GB VRAM GDDR5 at 1000MHz
HDD: 1TB Seagate WDC WD10 EALS-00Z8AO SATA
PSU: 750W
GPU-wise, I’m not sure it’d be worth it to go above 300$. I might be wrong about that though. Also, I’ve been tempted to buy a 1440p 120Hz monitor or a 21:9 1080p monitor.
For the hard drive, hybrid SSD/HDD drives seem interesting but I could easily be missing some important detail about them.
If there is some data you need, please ask for it.
Fallout 4 has yet to be released (it’s due in November) so it’s really far too early to tell. Both your CPU and GPU are well out of date, but in order of upgrade priority I would go GPU, SSD, CPU, because upgrading the CPU will require upgrading the motherboard and RAM, and the first two can be transferred to a new system.
For the GPU, the best bang for the buck is a close battle between the Nvidia Geforce GTX 970 and the AMD R9 390.
If you’re going for a 144Hz 1440p monitor then you’re going to need some serious CPU and GPU horsepower to push that framerate.
The GTX 970 does look quite nice according to the reviews and benchmarks I read. I see that it runs at rather low wattage and quite cool. Does that mean that there would be a lot of room for overclocking?
R9 390: Can it really make use of 8GB of VRAM? It seems that if any game used that much, the processors would have difficulty producing good frame rates. What do you think of the R9 290 or R9 290X with 4GB of VRAM?
I have the Sapphire R9 290X Tri-X and am very happy with it. But I got it on sale for $250ish and see it’s now $330 at NewEgg, same price as the GTX 970.
Make sit a harder choice. The Nvidia card will have lower power draw and some bells & whistles like PhysX, but the 290X has a 512bit memory bus over 256bit and didn’t have the GTX 970 memory fiasco where “4GB” really meant “3.5GB + 0.5GB”
I can’t really answer either question. I have a pair of Titan X cards driving a 4K monitor. I have seen VRAM usage in excess of 4 GB, but the TX cards have 12 GB each and have not been troubled.
Yeah, the 3.5+.5 thing is pretty bad business from Nvidia, especially the fact that they still describe it as 4GB.
The 512 vs 256 bit thing did give me pause. They seem about equal in terms of performance though, the differences mainly coming from whether a game was optimized for AMD or Nvidia: Nvidia Maxwell Power Consumption Overview
Do you have 4 or 8GB of VRAM? How much do you usually end up using and at what resolutions?
Impressive. Do you use it for CAD or media creation? VXGI would seem to be very useful to get a quick idea of how lighting will impact a scene and play around with variations before baking.
My motherboard uses PCI-E 2.0 x16 while the GTX 970 uses PCI-E 3.0. Does that mean it won’t be possible to install the GPU or that it won’t run as fast?
No, PCI-E 3.0 is backwards compatible, so your GPU will work fine on a 2.0 slot. Yes, your bandwidth will be about half that of a 3.0 port, but no, it won’t have any serious impact on performance in pretty much any game out there now or any coming soon.
This might change in the future as I believe DX12 will allow devs to stream content in from system RAM more efficiently, and more bandwidth there might improve performance, or it might not - we don’t have enough data to know one way or another yet, AFAIK.
4GB but I’ve never bothered to monitor my VRAM usage.
All things being equal, I’d probably go with the 970 just for the Nvidia effects (PhysX, Super Wolf Hair Simulator, etc) but the R9 290X was nearly $100 cheaper when I bought it so no contest or regrets there.
VRAM allocated does not equal VRAM utilized, and depending on the game engine or what the game is trying to do, filling up more RAM may be just be more advantageous or easier to work with, but in turn, doesn’t necessarily mean that there would be any performance issues with smaller buffers.
So a game can be allocating 3 gigs and only actually use 2, or it can use 4 gigs, but runs just fine with 2. Until we have new API’s which open up memory management on the GPU to developers (and to us), these numbers don’t mean much without at least a very comprehensive performance analysis to go along. It’s not util a game starts hitching (and other performance bottlenecks are ruled out) that VRAM usage can be evaluated.
Nobody’s addressed the SSD? Get an SSD! Not a hybrid, an actual SSD. Make it the primary drive for the OS. You can still use the old hard drive as a slave and store files or programs on it. SSDs have come down in price enough that the price per gigabyte is not highway robbery any longer and if you keep an eye on sales you can get a good deal on a large enough hard drive for all your daily needs.
Yeah, for 100$ less, the 290X was the obvious choice.
You bring up the clever tricks in Nvidia GPUs. Nvidia does have many features that either enable it to work smarter (MFAA, Virtual Reality, GPU Boost 2.0) or to do unique things (CUDA, PhysX, DSR, VXGI) (http://www.geforce.com/hardware/desktop-gpus/geforce-gtx-970)
Do AMD cards have features like that?
There’s free-sync but that has an equivalent in Nvidia’s adaptative V-sync and G-sync.
The R9 390 seems to have more raw power. The GTX 970 can be overclocked more easily (I don’t think I’d overclock the 390) which should make it about equal to the 390.
The 970’s 3.5GB VRAM is somewhat worrying while the 390’s 8GB VRAM seems like overkill.
I think I’ll get an Oculus rift a few months after it comes out and I’m wondering which would be better. Running 2160X1200 at 75-90fps would seem to favor the 390 but the 970 has the virtual reality feature which may improve the 970’s performance 1.3 to 2x.
The 970 has nice perks like PhysX while DX12 seems to favor the 390.
I am puzzled.
I second the SSD upthread, very noticeable if you put your OS + Steam on it. WRT which graphics card to go for, the question may already be answered for you by your computer case dimensions and power supply output. If you punch your specs into pcpartpicker you can switch the GPU to the new one you want and it’ll tell you if you have enough juice for it. Dimensions are harder, if you have a full sized ATX case either will probably fit, if its a mid-size or smaller you might have issues and you may need to look at the dimensions of each card you consider plus measure the space around your PCIe16 slot.
If size and power output will accommodate either card my purely anecdotal recommendation is to go with the gtx970. I got myself a $320 one back in March after the RAM thing and a corresponding small price decrease. Perfectly happy with it so far, haven’t had any game push it above 76°C on nvidia recommended settings including the new borderlands and wolfenstein: new blood.
I’m having difficulty telling if my power supply’s would have the connectors for a GTX 970. The PSU is a Corsair cmpsu 750tx. The 970 specs page talks about 2x 6-pins supplementary power connectors but how optional are they?
The reference 970 is 10.5 inches. My current Radeon 6850 appears to be about 8 inches. Here’s what it looks like in my case: Imgur: The magic of the Internet
Think it would fit? If you need more pictures to tell, please ask me and mention which angles would be most informative.