Video card upgrade suggestions

supitza · Oct 18, 2016

Bigcracker said:
One catch. Looking to spend as cheap as possible( Student loans and bills are bitches), So if I can savage the Mobo and cpu that be nice. I been looking at the 1060 and 1070's just dont know to much about them. If you can suggest other upgrades that would be helpful.

The CPU and MoBo seem fine to me, I think the bottleneck is your GPU, and you can't go wrong with the 1060/1070.
The new Pascal architecture has a market spread similar to the old series, the GTX 960/970/980, as in 1060 is the budget one, the 1070 is the most common, the middle-of-the-road option for enthusiasts and the 1080 is for the most demanding of gamers (and the smallest market share percentage).
If the single purpose of your upgrade is running Star Citizen, I'd suggest you wait. There's a chance new tech will be available until SC finally goes live.
TL;DR: CPU and MoBo are fine, get a 1070 (or a 1060, if you can't afford the 1070). If you don't want performance for anything else than SC, I'd rather wait it out.

Murderer · Oct 18, 2016

I can't honestly admit I would recommend any card at the moment for Star Citizen alone. There is yet alot of optimization that must be done before I would say you have a similar experience as another using the same card. What I can say is, if you are looking to go cheap, the holiday sale season is about a month away; and I would almost bet you will find a better deal then. Test marketplace forum also has cards pop up every few weeks if you don't mind second hand until you can catch up on some of those loans :-/

Texelis · Oct 18, 2016

If $$ is a factor, then just wait. Like Murderer said, full optimization is far far away. I would see how your card does when 3.0 drops with the netcode update, then go from there. Purchase a new card on launch year. That's my plan anyway.

Grimbli · Oct 18, 2016

Concur with others. Waiting is best option. Most ships don't even have second pass graphics yet, so you're not missing much on pretties.

Current 10xx Pascal is great, but I doubt SC is out before Nvidia's Volta drops (the 11xx series). Pascal is supposed to be geared for VR, but honestly modern VR is still in its infancy. I'm hoping Volta will perfect the VR experience (along with next gen VR hardware?). I'm not up to date on all the rumors about them.

Even if VR isn't your thing, Volta will have beastly hardware. GDDR6 memory. I'm not informed enough to comment on the specs, but they're amazing from my limited point of view.

Personally I'll wait for the 1180ti SLI if I can hold off. But that's really the point of the message. Hold off if you can. There's always better coming out. And if you can't afford the better stuff then current hardware will drop in price.

einbruch · Oct 18, 2016

@Grimbli by time this game goes live we will definitely see the Ti versions of these cards and Radeon will have released their X versions at a minimum. the series codename Volta at this point from "rumors" will have an identical leap in performance from the maxwell 980 to pascal 1080, about 40% IIRC. which will be insane especially the upgrade to memory capacity and speeds to a doubling of active Cuda cores. at this point most hardware companies are already leaning towards 5K TV's/Monitors, its insane.

TL;DR: wait.

Speedkills · Oct 18, 2016

I recently picked up an MSI GeForce GTX 1060 6gb, and I saw a significant improvement in my graphic quality and frame rate in Star Citizen and other games like Overwatch. If you have the money to spend on an upgrade, but don't want to go off the deep end, the recommendation others gave on the 1060 is a good one. It will definitely hold you over until release.

Grimbli · Oct 18, 2016

einbruch said:
@Grimbli by time this game goes live we will definitely see the Ti versions of these cards and Radeon will have released their X versions at a minimum. the series codename Volta at this point from "rumors" will have an identical leap in performance from the maxwell 980 to pascal 1080, about 40% IIRC. which will be insane especially the upgrade to memory capacity and speeds to a doubling of active Cuda cores. at this point most hardware companies are already leaning towards 5K TV's/Monitors, its insane.

TL;DR: wait.

Thanks, I figured it'd be a comparable boost, I just don't understand the specifics. I'm excited for 1180s as I already have an MSI 980ti and don't feel a 1080 would provide much increase.

Would you recommend a 1080 or a second 980ti? I'm noticing drop-off in frames of newer games where before I could max easily.

supitza · Oct 18, 2016

Grimbli said:
Would you recommend a 1080 or a second 980ti? I'm noticing drop-off in frames of newer games where before I could max easily.

A single, powerful GPU will (almost) always be better than two lesser cards (for the same budget, of course). Also, I've heard Star Citizen either performs really badly on SLI/Crossfire cards, or just uses one of the linked cards. So, again, if Star Citizen is your main focus, go for one good GPU instead of two cheaper cards.

Grimbli · Oct 18, 2016

supitza said:
A single, powerful GPU will (almost) always be better than two lesser cards (for the same budget, of course). Also, I've heard Star Citizen either performs really badly on SLI/Crossfire cards, or just uses one of the linked cards. So, again, if Star Citizen is your main focus, go for one good GPU instead of two cheaper cards.

I know most modern cards go for power efficiency, but does the 1080 take more power than the 980ti? I could probably sell my old 780ti and my 980ti and buy a 1080. But a PSU on top would be a bit much.

supitza · Oct 18, 2016

One of the key features of the new Pascal cards is the low power consumption.

EDIT: Here you go!

einbruch · Oct 18, 2016

Grimbli said:
I know most modern cards go for power efficiency, but does the 1080 take more power than the 980ti? I could probably sell my old 780ti and my 980ti and buy a 1080. But a PSU on top would be a bit much.

most current gen AAA title games are not optimized for SLI/Crossfire and most titles have stated they won't support it either in the future. if i where you i would wait until after the new year when Nvidia drops the 1080Ti, or just hop on Newegg in a few weeks for the massive sales for the holiday season to start. like @supitza said above the current gen 1080 is going to outperform the 980Ti in most areas. to answer your question about the total power draw see above he beat me to it lol.

BUTUZ · Oct 18, 2016

Don't worry about power efficiency - the 1070 saves you 2 watts at idle over the 970 - that's gonna save you approximately bugger all maybe a few cents a week in electricity. Not even worth thinking about.

I would say go for the 1060 or the 1070. I've got a few AMD cards here as I am an AMD man - the different gen cards do make a difference even now and even in the PU, my Radeon 290 is noticeably slower than my RX480, and my R9 Nano is noticeably faster than both.

If you had a stronger card, then waiting may be a good option, but you don't the 760 is a budget card, and is several generations old. Even a 1060 will absoloutly spank it, you can put all the games you currently play to ultra and enjoy.

Why wait to enjoy star citizen more? If you have the money now, spend it. The performance and image quality we get will only get better as SC matures and gets optimised, so it's a win win. Youb get better now, and you'll get even better better, Soon(tm).

einbruch · Oct 19, 2016

Bigcracker said:
Thanks for the help guys! I might take a look at see how low the cards get for right now and if they dont go low enough I will just wait. But also any idea about this?
http://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2016/10/18/13316750/nvidia-geforce-gtx-1050-ti-price-release-date-amd

IDK if I'd buy that. performance is very important and the 1050 cards are not going to be very spectacular out of the box, i honestly think the 780ti will blow it out of the water during full testing. Nvidia is trying to undercut the budget GPU industry where AMD has ruled since around 2008ish. if you want instant gratification buy a 1060 6gb card now they are honestly perfect for 1080p gaming, but if you plan to move to 1440p or 4k (60hz) in the near future (read next two years) go with the 1070 for 1440p or save for the 1080 for 4k. honestly, at this point in time you should worry about future proofing to an extent because we don't know when SC will be finished.

Annitias · Oct 19, 2016

I approve of what has been said so far. Well done mates.

If you are on a budget, the 1060 is a viable option. Price will drop closer to the holidays. Let's be honest, if 2.6 drops by then, your want to upgrade. Low FPS playing a shooter is the worst thing ever.

Ignore power efficiency for the most part, unless you are planing an ITX build or multiple GPU setups now, it's pretty irrelevant.

Always go single GPU when you can.

Volta will be nice, but Vega will also be an option. A 1060 is not too expensive where you won't be able to upgrade later however.

I_MIKE_I · Oct 19, 2016

Well... my PC is creeping at the very floor of settings possible, so take what I say with a grain of salt.

I'd honestly suggest waiting at least for the end of next year when SC will (very optimistic here) has 4.0, since SC doesn't really have enough stuff to do atm.

What I know so far however, is that AMD Cards (the new ones, at least) benefit more from Dx12 than Nvidea Cards, which can be a rather crucial point once the CPU becomes the Bottleneck.

einbruch · Oct 19, 2016

I_MIKE_I said:
Well... my PC is creeping at the very floor of settings possible, so take what I say with a grain of salt.

I'd honestly suggest waiting at least for the end of next year when SC will (very optimistic here) has 4.0, since SC doesn't really have enough stuff to do atm.

What I know so far however, is that AMD Cards (the new ones, at least) benefit more from Dx12 than Nvidea Cards, which can be a rather crucial point once the CPU becomes the Bottleneck.

this is correct, but only for the time being. AMD did a better job prior to releasing the RX series cards optimizing their settings for the very few titles available that support DX12 (ashes of the singularity comes to mind). Nvidia has started to release driver packages already for pascal based cards and this should even out (or move in Nvidia's favor due to having much deeper pockets and more employees) I'm not an AMD or Nvidia fan boy i just go with what will perform the best for my needs. as a matter of fact the computer i use for work has an R7 260X ghost edition lol, it sucks. it works for what i need it for and runs games i like to play although it gets stupid loud under load.

look up linus tech tips on youtube, they've done several videos pitting the two GPU makers against each other this year and have come up with loads of great data. just make sure everything else in your system can operate at the same level or better so as not to cause a bottle neck.

Thalstan · Oct 19, 2016

What other games are you playing? As said here, don't get a new rig for SC as it will be at least a year, probably two for Squad 42 and you will probably see at least one more generation of video cards come out by then. Then another year for SC (although I think alpha will be done by end of 2018/mid 2019 and it will move to beta phase for a Christmas 2019 release) That said, if your other games are having issues or SC is having problems running at all right now, it might be best to look for a minimal upgrade.

I am probably going to be forced to upgrade this year, even though I don't want to. I have 2x 690s and while they are very nice for playing things like Civ V, (will know more about VI in a few days), WoW, EQII, ToR, etc, it has a problem with the high poly counts of SC and since it does not support SLI it's really bad (but could be worse). It's a memory/performance issue. My current comp is getting older and at some point, I will need to redo my system and turn my current system into a media box

Now, if you are looking to do 4k gaming or VR, you will definitely need to move up the ladder. I am happy with current HD tech and my current monitor, but my wife loves her 4k.

TL;DR - Check your other games performance and see how they are doing. If money is as tight as you say, it will be 4 years or so between cards, so hold off as long as you can in order to maximize your entertainment funds.

Printimus · Oct 19, 2016

1080 JUST DO IT

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