With MSAA off on current games yeah, but even GTA V has me at 3 GB VRAM w/o MSAA.. I can imagine at 4K
3GB on a 680? No way man, you'd be a stuttering mother er there. Maybe it's caching textures from areas you aren't in, but if it really needed 3GB no way the game would be playable on a 2GB card with ultra textures and mostly high settings like you said you're running and other benchmarks have put the 680/770. It would be like Shadow of Mordor that tanks on a 960 with high textures.
Or do you have a 4GB 680?
do u even pay attention to the minor details at high resolutions?
too busy gaming away anyway to notice it
Nah, it's a 2GB..GTA V estimates your VRAM usage in the settings like Max Payne 3 did.. my settings has me at 2700 MB roughly, but the performance is good. I can't get Precision X to work in DX11 games, so I don't know exactly how much is being used at different times in game
I do.. I spend so ing long admiring a games details and the enviroment, that I get enjoyment from getting stupid high and just exploring . , I haven't even beat Skyrim yet cause of that ..
And 4K is so ing clear, it can't go unnoticed. You'll notice when you have to go back to 1080p for whatever reason.
Damn this is a great time to buy a GTX 970 with this bundle:
Not so much a 980 though with the 980 Ti dropping next month probably.
no point buyin a high end card, when ur still using a TN 1080 panel...
That's console peasant talk. Enjoy your 30 FPS son.
, wrong ing thread
What about a 144hz 1080p TN panel? That many frames is hard to push..
No hacks for the PS4 or XBO, I gotta start looking into putting together a PC, might as well replace both the 360 and the MacMini I have...
Unlike a console, I need to future proof the PC at least a bit, I've been thinking i5 + GTX 970, but we're talking 600+ with mobo and RAM...
Any suggestions?
I suggest waiting a month to see what AMD launches and whether Nvidia puts out anything good between the GTX 960 and GTX 970 to counter if you need to save a few bucks. There is such a gulf in performance between the GTX 960 and GTX 970 and it blows me away there is nothing in between. Hate to sound like an Nvidia fanboy because I think they're a ing shady company, but I don't think I'd touch an AMD card right now. Nvidia is getting their GameWorks crap into every good new release now and even behemoths like the R9 290 are getting stuck with ty GTX 960 level performance in new games. Dying Light was an example where the GTX 960 and R9 290x were neck and neck. Witcher 3 is supposed to be like this too. AMD hasn't lined up any Gaming Evolved les for 2015 while Nvidia Gameworks has Dying Light, GTA V, Witcher 3, Batman Arkham Asylum, not sure what else. AMD's R9 300 series being announced in a couple of weeks at Computex better ing be amazing or their GPU division is going to be in as much trouble as their CPU division is.
Yeah, I kinda gave AMD cards a thought for about 20 secs, then basically realized that 960 has the same performance for about the same price and uses about 1/3 the power. And yet, the 970 just blows the 960 out of the water, so right now I think it's 970 or bust for video. The 970 isn't priced badly, it's just that it's 300 right there off the bat.
I also thought about cutting corners with an H97 mobo and a i3 CPU, but two core, no turbo boost... it's just ridiculous that a i5 or i7 sandy bridge still costs as much as a Haswell.
With the console, you know you buy it and devs will code to maximize those specs until basically that console gen is dead, but with the PC, if you cheap out too much, in a year or two you gotta fork off more money, and I really don't wanna do that.
The "computer" part I'm gonna use is booting into OSX for Web browsing and some XCode, or Windows for Visual Studio... nothing major.
I have a 26" 1920x1200 monitor, a spare SSD and a MicroATX case, so it's really cpu, video, mobo, ram and a PSU... the last three can be had for ~$150...
For power supplies check out XFX. They're rebranded Seasonic units and sell for great prices. DDR3 RAM is getting dirt cheap again with Skylake and its DDR3L/DDR4 standard coming; it's easy to find 8GB DDR3 1600 for $50 now. If I wasn't using an H81 board with only two DIMMS I'd buy another 8GB now. But right now 8GB is way more than enough for gaming and I don't do anything that needs much RAM other than the occasional video encode here and there. No surprise that Sandy and Ivy are hard to find now new, Intel just takes off the market and never drops prices much.
It's funny AMD releasing Mantle seems to have benefited Nvidia most, since it forced them to get their together on their DirectX 11 driver. Now their DX11 driver is so good most games run as well on i3s as they do i5/i7 with Nvidia cards, while AMD cards tank with anything less than an i5 due to DirectX 11 overhead. This blew me away the first time I saw this video:
Just a horrible year all around for AMD.
If you're looking at a GTX 970, it's the Gigabyte G1 Gaming and then everything else. Those are cherry picked to often run at 1500+ MHz, giving them better than stock GTX 980 performance most of the time, though the 970's memory subsystem is very much inferior to the 980's. They're huge though, something like 12 inches. I wouldn't touch the ITX 970s, as I have heard they're really loud.
Overall though I have to say I'm pretty happy with my 970. GTA V, Dragon Age Inquisition, Dying Light all look and run incredible on it. Not bad to get better than GTX 780 level performance for $300-$350.
I'm a fan of Corsair 80+ for PSU, tbh... plus with these CPUs/vid cards/SSDs being finally power efficient, you can get away with a 450W-500W PSU easily, and Corsair has some modular ones for as cheap as $50, including 3 year warranty.
I was thinking 8GB too, even considered just 4GB, but again, don't wanna cheap out too much. You don't want to spend $300 on a video cards then be swapping out. However, I would rather buy a 32GB capable mobo. H81 are the cheapest, but they have 2 cons, IMO: only 2 USB3 ports and 16GB max... B85 or H97 are probably the way to go, I don't really care for overclocking, so a Z97 or a K proc doesn't make sense for me. Which is good, I can cut some corners there.
I'm putting together a backup box monday with a Haswell i3. I'll play with it a bit and see how it performs. I already have a couple i5s at the office and they're such kickass processors. Super silent and power efficient at idle, and the 4 cores really give you a bang for the buck when you gotta crunch numbers. Ideally, I would love to get an i7, but they all start at $300, sandy, ivy, haswell... just more than I'm willing to spend right now.
Thanks for the heads up about the upcoming cards. Had no idea. I'll probably wait a couple more months.
I don't like Corsair PSUs at all, except for the really high budget ones. Lots of them are made by companies like CWT. Here is a much better modular PSU for $66
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16817151093
If you want an i7 to use with a discrete GPU without paying i7 prices you can get a Xeon E3-1231v3. It's a Haswell Refresh i7 without the integrated graphics for $250.
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00KB4A2XA/?tag=pcpapi-20
Here is what Tom's Hardware has to say about the 1231v3
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/...ck,3106-4.html
Ever since Sandy Bridge, Xeon E3 CPUs have just been better binned consumer i7s. The highest binned Xeon E3s are more expensive than the best consumer i7s (e.g., not counting the enthusiast X79, X99 i7s), but the lower binned ones like the 1231v3 still run cooler and at lower voltages than i7s, at the cost of integrated graphics. Actually, I take that back: the E3 1220v3 doesn't have hyperthreading, so it's more like an i5 with 2MB extra cache, but everything 1230v3 and above does have HT.
Never would have guessed Xeon E3 would be so affordable. It's the best binned E3 and then the entire E5 and E7 series where the Xeon prices start getting ridiculous.
Last edited by baseline bum; 05-16-2015 at 09:27 PM.
Looks nice. Like the 5 year warranty. PSUs just go with time. We had to replace 3 on servers recently. I think the 80+ stuff is great, saves power and grind. But I still will take some warranty.
Good looking on this, thanks. I didn't even know Intel made Haswell without GPUs. It's more than an i5, but it might be worth it. OSX uses multi-cores like a champ, and I think DX12 is going to have a lot of improvement on that. For an extra $50, this is the kind of future-proofing I like.
oops, read your post wrong El
My 760 still holding its own two years later
Yeah, the GTX 760 is awesome, especially for a 60 series release, since it's a barely cut down GTX 670. Whereas this year's GTX 960 is a gimped from the beginning GM 206 chip.My 760 still holding its own two years later
I considered upgrading to the 970 when it came out, but it's not really worth it seeing as I can still run most games on high (only game I've struggled with being crysis 3) with good fps. I read that you said Nvidia is probably going to just release remastered 970s and 980s next year, disappointing if true.
Why? That's what they did with the 670 and 680, rebranding them as the 760 and 770 with slight changes. I'd be shocked if next year's 70 series model isn't a rebranded 980 for about $400. I figure Nvidia will release a 960 Ti sometime this summer that will be a farther cut down GM 204 from chips that failed to make the cut for GTX 970s. It's not a bad time to buy a 970 right now for $300 with Witcher 3 and Arkham Knight thrown in for free. Well, unless you think AMD is going to hit it out of the park with their R9 380/380x cards. But I bet those will just be rebranded R9 290/290x just like the R9 280x was a rebranded HD 7970GHz, the R9 280 was a rebranded HD 7950, the R9 270 a rebranded HD 7870, and so on. I'm betting AMD's only interesting cards are going to be R9 390/390x.
Last edited by baseline bum; 05-17-2015 at 09:27 PM.
so what do you clowns do with ur old gear?
hand them over
You want my old Athlon 64x2?
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