Trying to decide whether to upgrade GPU. Not a heavy gamer, but interested in video editing, etc. (Prefer ~$200-400, <200W, 2 slots, <~230mm)

[PianoPlayer88Key]

Hi ...

 

 

TL;DR: Undecided on whether to upgrade GPU from 1060 3GB.  Don't play much newer games (other than considering MSFS, and having a 4K monitor, most I play would run mostly fine on an older iGPU).  BUT, interested in video editing, for example hoping for a massive speedup in transcoding (compared to my 4790K taking 4 days to transcode a 4-minute 30fps 4K video to H.265, at least realtime or faster would be nice if possible.)  Not planning to break bank, power supply / circuit breakers, or case compatibility / block motherboard ports if I do upgrade.)

 

EDIT: Added a 2-part poll.  First part is whether to get one a GPU now or later, second part, if now, is which one do you suggest.

 

I've been running a GTX 1060 3GB for a while, and trying to decide if I should upgrade now (Black Friday weekend), soon (maybe wait for the RTX 4060/4070 or RX 7600/7700/7800), or wait a while (maybe another 2 or 3 generations).

 

Hold up, before you holler and say "you should have upgraded half a decade ago!"...

 

Most of the games I play aren't all that demanding, and a lot of them could probably run "good enough" (for me at least) on older (Haswell, i7-4790K) Intel Integrated graphics, at least at 1080p.  (Here's my steam profile's games, sorted by playtime, for example, and my wishlist, sorted alphabetically, although nothing's been added in probably a couple years except MSFS which I just added.)

 

My current system is AMD (5950X), not Intel, with 128GB RAM (running at DDR4-3466 CL18 cause 3533 isn't quite stable and 3600 won't boot), an ASRock B550 Taichi, Arctic Liquid Freezer II 360, booting Windows 10 Pro from a 1TB PCIe 3.0 (carried over from a previous system that didn't support 4.0) x4 NVMe SSD (Silicon Power P34A80), several 10s of TB of HDD capacity, Fractal Define R5 case (all 8 3.5" bays used so absolute max GPU length <310mm, prefer <~230mm to not block headers, SATA ports, etc), Corsair RM850 PSU, the aforementioned 1060 3GB GPU, and a 4K 60Hz monitor (Asus VG289Q).

 

A few games I enjoyed playing back in the day when I was more into gaming included Fortress Forever (Source engine, but not nearly as demanding as TF2 or CS:GO - for example I'd get about 2x the FPS or so on Core 2 Duo era integrated graphics in FF vs TF2) Team Fortress Classic (GoldSrc / Half Life 1 engine), Total Annihilation, Descent, Castle of the Winds, Commander Keen, Captain Comic, Sopwith 2, Battlechess, Alleycat, Need For Speed (original and Hot Pursuit from the 90s or so), Test Drive 4, Whiplash (Fatal Racing in some other countries), and a bunch of others.  I sometimes wonder if there are more modern games similar to those and others, with similar gameplay, storylines, etc, and updated graphics?

 

 

 

I'm not much into the newer games, as I said.  For example, I tried a little bit of Witcher 3, GTA V and Rise of the Tomb Raider, but didn't really get too much into them.  (I wanted to do some free-map exploring and track races in GTA V, for example, but I couldn't figure out how to get to that section and avoid doing the story.)  Also I have a copy of Overwatch (1, not 2), but have never even installed it, nevermind played it.  Fortnite and a couple other games look interesting, but I don't think I'd have much time to learn to play them or get very involved.  (I think a lot of modern games are very different, in their gameplay, controls, physics, etc, than the games I got used to playing in the late 1990s to early 2000s or so.)

 

Interesting thing with GTA V... if I crank up the settings to the absolute max at 1920x1080 (including going to the advanced graphics menu and cranking up frame scaling to 2.5x, resulting in the game wanting ~9GB VRAM), my GTX 1060 3GB absolutely tanks in performance.
Normally, with standard 1080p high/ultra settings (but without cranking up frame scaling), the 1060 3GB gets about 50-60 fps, my laptop's GTX 970M 6GB gets around 30 fps, and my older Intel HD 4600 got about 3 fps or so, in the built-in benchmark, at least near the beginning when you're flying in toward the houses.
But, when cranking up everything including frame scaling, the 1060 3GB would get about 0.3 fps, the GTX 970M 6GB around 6 fps or so, and the HD 4600 about 1.8 fps.  I wonder why the integrated Intel GPU would soundly beat the 1060 in that scenario.... yes, I know 1.8 fps is not remotely playable.... although another interesting thing, at 1080p ultra on Intel iGPU in Witcher 3, running at 3 fps, the actual time of the game slowed way down, and I actually had time to react to things happening.
I haven't tried it on the 4K monitor yet though.  (All I know is it would call for a bit over 25GB VRAM with everything maxed, idk why not 36GB but I'm guessing I may have hit a texture size limit or something, idk.  Don't currently have it installed (or feel like installing) on the 5950X PC to check 1440p.)

From what I see of Cyberpunk on streams or videos, I don't think I'd get into that game at all, so I wouldn't need to worry about whether my PC could run that one.

Flight Simulator (2020) does look interesting, but idk if I'd have time to get much involved with it.  (And I'm guessing it's very different in terms of controls, gameplay, than the versions of MSFS in the late '80s or early '90s or so, which I've long since forgotten how to play and didn't get very far in anyway.)

 

 

 

So, I'm not much into the more demanding games these days, at least for now (unless something comes out that I might end up enjoying, but I'm not currently watching the rumor mill like a hawk lol)...
 

 

But....  I would be interested in doing some video editing and transcoding, especially 4K.  My current camera is a Panasonic FZ1000 which I've had since about 2015.  Someday I'd like to upgrade to something with generally better image/video quality, dynamic range, high ISO, interchangeable lenses, but I'm not planning to do that yet.  (If I had the $ and was upgrading now, the Sony A7s III or similar would be on my shortlist.)  I'd stick with just 4K for the time being, as I feel if I went to 8K in the next few years my system wouldn't really be able to handle it well at all.  (I was a bit early on adopting 4K, seeing as how my 4790K buckled when trying to work with it.  And I would consider skipping over 8K completely anyway, it wouldn't be unheard of for me to skip things like that.  My previous camera before the 4K FZ1000 maxed out at 480p, so I skipped over 720p and 1080p, not counting my cell phones.)

 

 

As for software I'd be using, I'm not totally sure, other than probably Handbrake, maybe occasionally AviDemux but I've kinda outgrown that one, Davinci Resolve (the free version) which I need to learn more when I have time, and idk what else, maybe Blender, Shotcut, or some Linux / FOSS editors, idk.  I don't plan on using anything by Adobe (like Creative Cloud), as I don't plan on buying time-based software licenses.

 

Some time ago on my 4790K setup (but without the 1060) I did a couple tests with encoding, one each with video and audio.  Both were generally at "max settings", like q=0, placebo, all keyframes, etc.
In Handbrake, transcoding a 4-minute video from the camera (4K, H.264, 100Mbps, 30fps) to 4K HEVC (H.265), in one test it took about 4 days to transcode that 4-minute video, or about 1/1440th realtime.
Using LAME to transcode some CD-quality wave files to 320kbps mp3 took about 2 minutes to transcode 2 hours, or 60X realtime.

 

It would be nice to be able to to the video encoding as fast as the 4790K was doing the audio encoding, but I have a feeling even the RTX 4090 couldn't do that, and its MSRP is like 5X my budget and TDP is like 3X my preference anyway.

 

 

I'm located in southern California, east of San Diego, about an hour and 45 minutes or so from Micro Center, and I'd of course consider buying online as well.  I strongly prefer not buying a used card though, as I would want a warranty in case something goes wrong, and also power efficiency is important to me (want to try to avoid prev-gen cards) as electricity can be upwards of ~40-65¢/kWh, possibly more since that rate was a few years ago.