Gaming in 4K - Upgrade or Buy New?

[Emily Young]

Thanks to NVIDIA for sponsoring this video!

So many options exist for 4K these days that it's tough to decide - And with 4K displays getting cheaper all the time, which should YOU choose?

 

 

Buy a GTX 1080 Ti:
On Amazon: http://geni.us/y7i59q
On Newegg: http://geni.us/0Dstl
Or directly from NVIDIA: http://geni.us/R0qv

[vanished]

NVIDIA SHILLS!!!!

 

/s lol someone had to

[Emily Young]

Just now, Ryan_Vickers said:

NVIDIA SHILLS!!!!

 

/s lol someone had to

And many more will.  

[Crunchy Dragon]

I'm gonna be here this time next year with a GTX 780 while literally everyone else is using 4K....

[AshleyAshes]

Can't deny that my old R9 390X is roughly equal to an Xbox One X and it offers pretty good 60hz 'Normal' settings 4K gameplay in most games. (Or a HECK of a lot better in older games)

[BlueChinchillaEatingDorito]

I'd like to see you try to make my system 4K ready.

[Cyracus]

Wait, I thought Jay was the only Nvidia shill I had to be skeptical of.... guess I was wrong 

[mikat]

3 minutes ago, BlueChinchillaEatingDorito said:

I'd like to see you try to make my system 4K ready.

yeahhhhhh

[samcool55]

Actually, what's the better option?

Keep your old platform and whack an insane gpu in it or upgrade both the platform and the gpu for a more balanced system?

 

[Luscious]

I am assuming this was meant for the budget gamer with only a single GPU in their system. 4K for poor people YAY

 

Back in the day when X99/5960X was king I ponied up the cash and went the 4-way SLI route. Laugh all you want but I am so glad that I did.

 

Many of us just skim over benchmark numbers. But there is a surprise here if you look closely. Crank up on max 4K detail and it's almost linear the performance increase from a single 980Ti to four cards. And at that 4-way configuration it ran every game tested at 4K on max settings like a champ.

 

Yeah, these are two year old cards, and yeah, when you don't game you can mine/fold impressively with them, and yeah, having four cards in your rig still gives you bragging rights

 

Clearly in my case I have no need to upgrade my system for quite a while. But the take away here I think is that if you can grab a 4-way SLI mobo and have the right SLI bridge, putting four 980Ti's together WITH THE RIGHT DRIVER will enable you to rock a 4K display as good as any Pascal setup today. Don't fall for the marketing hype - SLI has plenty of muscle left in it if you know how to flex it

[Emily Young]

@Luscious - The article is from 2015, and unfortunately, both driver and developer support for SLI has been getting worse and worse since then. In fact, it's basically the reason why Linus lost Scrapyard Wars 6... It's something that's honestly probably worth revisiting in a future video.

 

Still gives you bragging rights, though  

[King_of_Oz]

#rx480FTW.

[vanished]

2 hours ago, samcool55 said:

Actually, what's the better option?

Keep your old platform and whack an insane gpu in it or upgrade both the platform and the gpu for a more balanced system?

 

Well if you're gonna play at 4K it looks like the former works just fine.  What "balanced" is changes on the intended workload and context.

[samcool55]

5 minutes ago, Ryan_Vickers said:

Well if you're gonna play at 4K it looks like the former works just fine.  What "balanced" is changes on the intended workload and context.

That's the point i'm trying to make, it "looks like" just throwing in a 1080ti is the better option for 4K, but is it?

And to measure it, same settings and maybe more games, 4 is imo not enough.

 

It would be nice to see if there's some truth to this or older cpu's really need to be upgraded because they bottleneck just too hard.

[DoctorWho1975]

3 hours ago, Cyracus said:

Wait, I thought Jay was the only Nvidia shill I had to be skeptical of.... guess I was wrong 

 

You just need to be skeptical of Jay in general.

[Cyracus]

Just now, DoctorWho1975 said:

You just need to be skeptical of Jay in general.

Well, to his credit he does follow up content when things appear wonky, like with the 8700k review, multicore enhancement stuff, I know Linus made mention of it at some point, but Jay did a full breakdown of it, so he's pretty good in my books

[vanished]

17 minutes ago, samcool55 said:

That's the point i'm trying to make, it "looks like" just throwing in a 1080ti is the better option for 4K, but is it?

And to measure it, same settings and maybe more games, 4 is imo not enough.

 

It would be nice to see if there's some truth to this or older cpu's really need to be upgraded because they bottleneck just too hard.

I recall them doing some comparisons at least... here we go:

 

 

So it looks like the 2500k is taking a hit in almost all titles, but only on Low settings, and even then it's not much considering the 4790k has higher clock speeds, 3 years of architectural improvements and HT behind it - Forza being the only exception in both cases.  Furthermore almost all the games still scored 60 or more at high settings (and the one that didn't wasn't helped by the i7 anyway), so it seems reasonable to me that someone might grab this card now, and then upgrade their platform later if it really is an issue, meanwhile still enjoying a very good experience.

[DoctorWho1975]

Meh, I have a hard time trusting who is moronic enough to embed in brakes on the street and has stock factory seat belts while tracking a car like a 370.

[Luscious]

18 minutes ago, GabenJr said:

@Luscious - The article is from 2015, and unfortunately, both driver and developer support for SLI has been getting worse and worse since then. In fact, it's basically the reason why Linus lost Scrapyard Wars 6... It's something that's honestly probably worth revisiting in a future video.

 

Still gives you bragging rights, though  

Good points, and that's exactly why I am still on 361.43 - runs every game I have, scales almost perfectly and doesn't affect folding performance like later nVidia drivers did. It's one of those few rare circumstances where a previous-era card works best with the previous-era driver.

 

Linus lost SW6 because Linus doesn't have any muscles to flex A Xeon is the STUPIDEST chip to pair with SLI!!! But SW is also the last way you would go to build a system - garbage parts haphazardly cobbled together running on less-than-optimal drivers/settings.

[Princess Luna]

yeah... the 1080 Ti is decent enough.

[AshleyAshes]

2 hours ago, Ryan_Vickers said:

So it looks like the 2500k is taking a hit in almost all titles, but only on Low settings, and even then it's not much considering the 4790k has higher clock speeds, 3 years of architectural improvements and HT behind it - Forza being the only exception in both cases.  Furthermore almost all the games still scored 60 or more at high settings (and the one that didn't wasn't helped by the i7 anyway), so it seems reasonable to me that someone might grab this card now, and then upgrade their platform later if it really is an issue, meanwhile still enjoying a very good experience.

Honestly, I've seen this problematic tone a lot on this forum and elsewhere speaking about 'System Balance' and often people being told to buy weaker GPUs.  Benchmark over benchmark shows that you still see GREAT performance on older or even current-but-less-than-top-tier with a new GPU tossed in.  I'm not going to dispute that you will see MORE frames with a brand new top of the line CPU but when you weight the difference in performance against the cost of a new motherboard, CPU, and RAM, you are not really getting a good value with a whole platform upgrade.  It makes a LOT more sense to put more money into the GPU.

 

I have an i7 4930K, that's Sandy Bridge-E, all I did was pop a GTX 1080 in there and that four year old CPU still hits gets great performance.  The real kicker was when I tried the GTX 1080 in my i7 2630QM system.  That is a Sandy Bridge Mobile, 2.0ghz, 2.9ghz turbo, with PCI-E 2.0 lanes. and the GTX 1080 was still running GTA5 at 4K 60hz at normal/some high settings.

 

Unless someone has something PAINFULLY out of date, the smart money is just to upgrade your GPU.  But far too many nerds on this forum and other places are obsessed with 'balance' and 'bottlenecking' that they basically tell other users to set money on fire on a full platform update.

[vanished]

24 minutes ago, AshleyAshes said:

[...] The real kicker was when I tried the GTX 1080 in my i7 2630QM system.  [...]

I also have a laptop with that CPU... how exactly did you manage this?

[AshleyAshes]

Just now, Ryan_Vickers said:

I also have a laptop with that CPU... how exactly did you manage this?

 

 

[dizmo]

4 hours ago, Luscious said:

-snip-Clearly in my case I have no need to upgrade my system for quite a while. But the take away here I think is that if you can grab a 4-way SLI mobo and have the right SLI bridge, putting four 980Ti's together WITH THE RIGHT DRIVER will enable you to rock a 4K display as good as any Pascal setup today. Don't fall for the marketing hype - SLI has plenty of muscle left in it if you know how to flex it

Except you're looking at a much, much higher system cost when you're going that route. Even buying the cards used, it doesn't make sense once you also factor in finding the right motherboard, a high wattage PSU, etc. To what. Get comparable results with a single much easier to run card? Hell even 2 1080Ti's wouldn't be much more than the cost of 4 GTX 980Ti.

[Shreyas1]

Wait but if they acquired you then why did they sponsor you?