Current Sweet Spot GPU

The Game Room
1

Happy holidays, everyone!

I got a new game for Christmas – High on Life. It’s a ton of fun, but its biggest drawback is that it’s making it clear that it’s time for me to get a new video card.

I currently have a GTX-970, so I’m probably due for an upgrade. I bought it in the era of 1920x1080 monitors, and now both of my monitors are 4k.

I’m not a huge gamer (as you can tell from my video card…), but I have this one and another couple of games that I want to get into, at higher resolutions than I can right now.

Is there a current sweet spot that will get me 4k gaming for a few hundred dollars?

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Not new. You’d probably be looking for an RX 6800 or better from AMD ($600+) or an RTX 3070Ti or better from Nvidia ($700) for reasonable 4k performance. “Reasonable” being around 60fps and taking advantage of things like DLSS or FSR, no ray-tracing and not cranking everything to super-duper ultra settings.

If you’re cool with 1440p (2k) then I’d go with an RX 6600XT ($300+) or 3060Ti ($400+) as a minimum.

Prices taken from a casual Newegg search.

3

I’ve seen the RX 6750 XT down at 400 CAD, so that’d be a fairly good value if you’re patient.

4K@60 isn’t in the cards for anything cheaper than US$999 though. If your 4K screens are a smaller size, such as 27 inches, you’ll probably prefer playing at 1440p. Always turn down some quality settings though.

4

Wow! I really had no idea. I’m happy to play at 1440p – my screen 27 inches! Good guess.

This game has mostly been OK at medium settings at 1080p, but there are times that the frame rate is noticeably slower.

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I would have recommended a 3070, but prices seem to have gone crazy. A few weeks ago someone else was looking at 3070s and they were all around $530 but we found one on sale for $450.

Right now they’re all over $700, except one off-brand (Peladn?) on Newegg for $480. I don’t know what’s going on. 30 series being phased out, maybe?

With prices like that you might consider AMD instead.

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My concern about AMD is that they use (or used to use?) so much more power. Not that my power supply can’t handle it, but heat might become an issue.

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The 3000 Nvidia series uses at least, if not more, power tier-for-tier as the AMD cards.

At my local Micro Center, a 3070 will cost you $550-$600 while you can get a largely equivalent RX 6700xt for $400.

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This is supposed to be, “You can always turn down…”

Should’ve gone to bed earlier.

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I still can’t believe 3070s are back up to $700. It looks like you can get a 6700 XT for $400-ish. I see two listed at $370 on PCpartpicker, one MSI the other ASRock. You may not love those models (I have no idea about them) but you could get a nice one for $450, probably.

The 6700 XT looks better than the 3070 for 1440p gaming. In fairness, these comparisons don’t let the 3070 use DLSS, and that’s where Nvidia shines, but still, it looks like AMD wins in terms of raw power.

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Looks like 3060s and 3050s are in the 200-300 range. Don’t waste my time? Here’s an open box 3060 with 12 GB:

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Those are more for 1080p gaming. 3060 ti is essentially the intro card for 1440p, but ideally you’d want 3070 or better.

Then again, those prices are very good. Check out videos on YouTube and see how they fare in 1440p before making up your mind. I remember reviewers being down on the 3060 when it came out in terms of being far behind the 3060 TI, but if it’s enough for you then hell yeah. By the same token, for me gaming in 1080p with a 3050 is enough, and my review of the 3050 in that context is a hell yeah.

Note: that says open box. See if you can find an open box 3070 for $450 or less before committing. Open box essentially means used. (Someone opened the box.)

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A 3050 over a 970 will give you about a 1.5-2.0x boost in FPS (assuming no CPU bottlenecking) at 1080p. I wouldn’t use one for 1440p or higher, though. It’s definitely a better card but maybe not one you’ll be happy with if you’re trying to hit 1440/4k performance.

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My CPU is a 9700, so it should be good. I’m really surprised things haven’t gotten much, much better since I got the 970 back in the stone age.

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It’s because it’s dropping down two tiers, from the 70 series to the 50 series. The 3070 would be the natural upgrade for the 970, and is noticeably better than the 3050.

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Just my $0.02 but I think 4k gaming is waaay overrated.

1440p is a great sweet spot. You can max graphic settings and still get great performance with a quality you would be hard pressed to distinguish from 4k.

In general, higher refresh rate is better than higher pixel count. But you need a graphics card that can manage it.

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Just to close this out, my brother’s cousin (my half cousin?) has a 3080 that he’s going to sell to me for $400. He won some NVidia thing and got a 4090.

So, the 3080 should be plenty for my needs, I imagine.

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Yeah, you’ll be fine. With DLSS, you can even play the most demanding game out there right now: Portal RTX–which was specifically created to show off the 4000 series and is deliberately underoptimized.

And for anyone else, I’d say that you should really consider DLSS when going for 4k, as that’s where it works the best.

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Awesome! I own Portal, and would love an excuse to play through it again.

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I’ve seen videos of Portal with ray tracing on and it looks pretty amazing. Makes a noticeable difference.