Outdating GPU’s

BasicallyWittless · August 9, 2022

With team Green and team Red Dunking on their old tech almost doubling performance every 2 years, is there less of a reason to upgrade? Do games really need all that horse power? And if this performance Trend continues of 15-30% performance gains each year, will newer GPU’s become dated quicker with devs pushing to use everything the new cards got?

Crunchy Dragon · August 9, 2022

It depends on the games and the resolution you're playing at.

If you want to play modern AAA titles at 1440p120, you'll be wanting the latest and greatest more often than not. If you're just casually playing games at 1080p with the very occasional AAA title, a GTX 1070 still does the job perfectly.

There isn't exactly less or more of a reason to upgrade, it's just the same as it's pretty much always been. Upgrade when you feel a need to, don't upgrade when you don't feel a need to.

tkitch · August 9, 2022

note: "Almost doubling their old tech every 2 years" is a HELL of an exagguration.

There's a 20-30% boost every 2 years or so generally. Anything significantly higher is a dramatic outlier.

jaslion · August 9, 2022

Basically the age old rule of is my card better than current gen consoles? If yes coolio itll last till the end. No? Might need an upgrade along the line.

Like a hd 7970 to this day can do 1080p 60fps low. Its really at its limits but its been over 11 years. A rx480 is over 6 years now and has no prob doing 1080p medium 60fps. So yeah no worries here for performance.

komar · August 9, 2022

This feels a bit like OP's other topic from a few days ago (Better Graphics Card needed or Devs getting lazy with optimization?) and I think he already have received a few good responses there.

Nevertheless, the most straightforward answer to "is there a reason to upgrade?" is that when your machine cant do what you want, you spend more money to make it better/get a new one.

37 minutes ago, BasicallyWittless said:

And if this performance Trend continues of 15-30% performance gains each year, will newer GPU’s become dated quicker with devs pushing to use everything the new cards got?

Is it only the devs or are the user too tho?

A game can run on very different hardware only by desired resolution/fps output criteria. Going from 1080p to a 4k alone is 4 times more pixels to be generated. 30 vs 300HZ monitor (fps required) is also big leap in the "horsepower" needed to accomplish.

I'm still quite comfortable using my GTX 960 2 gb version even tho I just bought 2 165HZ 1080p displays but I dont play any AAA games. My hardware meets my demands so I dont feel the need to upgrade it even tho its getting "dated".