Best value NVIDIA High-End GPU

[ripventura]

Hi guys, Vitor here!

I currently own an ASUS GTX 660ti, and I'm thinking about upgrading it for something with at least 4GB RAM, so I can come back to the 60FPS heaven.

If some of you could help me with high-end options that are fine for my usage (details below) I'd appreciate it very much!

 

My specs:

i7, 8GB RAM, 1080p 60Hz BenQ monitor.

 

What I want:

Play heavy games like Assassins Creed Syndicate, Far Cry Primal, GTA V with > High graphics settings, stable at the 60FPS threshold.

 

I know I'll probably end up with at leat a GTX 970, but I really don't know if it's worth the upgrade for the ti model or even the 980.

Thanks!

[Majestic]

Best value is indeed the 970. 980 is 20-25% faster, but >20-25% more expensive.

[don_svetlio]

Go for a 980. 970 won't get you stable 60fps with maxed settings

[Majestic]

1 minute ago, don_svetlio said:

Go for a 980. 970 won't get you stable 60fps with maxed settings

for once i agree with you

 

http://pclab.pl/zdjecia/artykuly/chaostheory/2016/01/game_rtr/charts2/rtr_1920vh1.png

[Atmos]

970 is the best value, but again at the same price the 390 is better all around

980 is at a weird area. For the same price the fury is significantly faster.

980ti is the best performing.

 

 

Don't shoot yourself in the foot though by limiting yourself to half of the market, at the 970 price point the r9 390 performs better, costs the same, and has more than double the usable vram making it a far better card for the future. Not to mention that each driver update since crimson is only helping amd cards more and more. If you're not already heavily invested in the green-team's ecosystem [i.e.: you have a g-sync monitor, shield tablet, etc] then do the thing more people need to and just get the better card, instead of getting what fanboys tell you to get.

[T-Aero]

But if he gonna play at 1080p and 60 Fps isn't better a Gtx 960?

[Atmos]

Just now, T-Aero said:

But if he gonna play at 1080p and 60 Fps isn't better a Gtx 960?

A 960 can't pull 60fps 1080p at ultra/max settings today, and it certainly isn't going to get better as more and more demanding games launch.

[don_svetlio]

Just now, T-Aero said:

But if he gonna play at 1080p and 60 Fps isn't better a Gtx 960?

960 can't do high 60, it struggles to do medium 60. The R9 380 and 380X are vastly superior and what @Atmos said - a 390 beats a 970 and a Nano(same price) performs 5% better than a 980 and a 390X (100$ less) is 5% slower while a Fury (50$ more) is 15% faster.

[cortexcortex]

I would go for a R9 390. The 390 is in the price range of a 970, and it beats it.

http://pcpartpicker.com/part/xfx-video-card-r9390p8256

[ripventura]

1 minute ago, Atmos said:

970 is the best value,

980ti is the best performing.

 

 

Don't shoot yourself in the foot though by limiting yourself to half of the market, at the 970 price point the r9 390 performs better, costs the same, and has more than double the usable vram making it a far better card for the future. Not to mention that each driver update since crimson is only helping amd cards more and more. If you're not already heavily invested in the green-team's ecosystem [i.e.: you have a g-sync monitor, shield tablet, etc] then do the thing more people need to and just get the better card, instead of getting what fanboys tell you to get.

Good point. What about heat and noise? I love my ASUS because it's really silent, and AMD has been known for generating much more heat than NVIDIA...

[SteveGrabowski0]

My 970 can do GTA V at a mixture of Very High and Ultra with 2xMSAA and get an almost locked 60 fps (I have one spot it drops to 57 fps), but I'm using an E3-1231v3 for my CPU and DDR3-2400 RAM (the RAM speed matters for minimums in GTA V). I'd imagine it should get a locked 60 fps ultra in Far Cry Primal since my card can do it in Far Cry 4. And this is with a 970 that overclocks horribly, to only 1418 MHz boost after GPU Boost 2.0. AC Syndicate you probably will have to drop to high to get a smooth 60 fps. The 970 is an excellent card for 1080p 60 fps gaming. The 980 is nice but it's only 15% more powerful while costing 50% more than the 970. 

 

Still, with a 660 Ti in my system I'd just hold out for AMD Polaris and Nvidia Pascal. With the drop to 14 nm / 16 nm from 28 nm I'd imagine something a lot more powerful than the 970/390 will come out in that price bracket that Nvidia moved into the new sweet spot ~$350 price range with the 970 a year and a half ago. They made so much money and that card sold so well that they'd be crazy to not try to duplicate that runaway success with Pascal, and node shrinks have corresponded to enormous performance increases in the past. Look at GTX 680 vs GTX 580: the 28 nm 680 was the full upper midrange Kepler chip while 40 nm 580 was the balls to the wall highend Fermi chip (the equivalent of Titan for that generation), and the 680 still beat it by 40%.

[Atmos]

Just now, ripventura said:

Good point. What about heat and noise? I love my ASUS because it's really silent, and AMD has been known for generating much more heat than NVIDIA...

They do put out a bit more heat, but that's why amd cards also generally have beefy coolers.

Something like the sapphire r9 fury tri-x is damn quiet, and doesn't get much hotter than a 980 with a good aftermarket cooler. 

The sapphire 390 nitro is also darn quiet and cooler running (temps anywhere from 68-78c at load)

 

While it's true that the reference amd designs for the 390/390X run at well... 94c and sound like a blowdryer, the aftermarket coolers make the cards run a lot quieter, and brings down the gpu temps a lot. Once all is said and done the temps are not that far off from what you see on nvidia, same goes for noise too since now a lot of amd cards support 0dcb modes.

[T-Aero]

Gtx 960 ? WIth 60 Fps on medium? In what game?!

[don_svetlio]

5 minutes ago, Atmos said:

They do put out a bit more heat, but that's why amd cards also generally have beefy coolers.

Something like the sapphire r9 fury tri-x is damn quiet, and doesn't get much hotter than a 980 with a good aftermarket cooler. 

The sapphire 390 nitro is also darn quiet and cooler running (temps anywhere from 68-78c at load)

 

While it's true that the reference amd designs for the 390/390X run at well... 94c and sound like a blowdryer, the aftermarket coolers make the cards run a lot quieter, and brings down the gpu temps a lot. Once all is said and done the temps are not that far off from what you see on nvidia, same goes for noise too since now a lot of amd cards support 0dcb modes.

A Nitro 390 barely goes over 65*C - 78*C is waaay above what you can expect.

 

10 minutes ago, ripventura said:

Good point. What about heat and noise? I love my ASUS because it's really silent, and AMD has been known for generating much more heat than NVIDIA...

Not really much more. More yes. Not enough for you to notice, however, provided you get a good aftermarket cooler from Sapphire, MSI, PowerColor or XFX

[stealth80]

 

14 minutes ago, Majestic said:

Best value is indeed the 970. 980 is 20-25% faster, but >20-25% more expensive.

Where did you find this? 20 -25% ???

 

http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/graphics/2015/05/08/evga-geforce-gtx-970-ssc-acx-2-0-review/5

 

http://hexus.net/tech/reviews/graphics/81985-evga-geforce-gtx-970-super-superclocked/?page=4

 

https://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/EVGA/GTX_970_SC_ACX_Cooler/16.html

 

The most I seen was around 12% in one game, Shadow of Mordor ......

 

970 is perfect for upto 1440P and easily gains 60 FPS at 1080P ...... Too many people quoting bad facts

 

Sorry not aimed at you personally

 

People seem to think that just because newer cards came out that these cards are all of a sudden incapable of carrying out the job they were designed to do ...

 

 

I do agree though you should look at AMD for anything but the 980ti in all honesty

 

[Atmos]

3 minutes ago, don_svetlio said:

A Nitro 390 barely goes over 65*C - 78*C is waaay above what you can expect.

 

Not really much more. More yes. Not enough for you to notice, however, provided you get a good aftermarket cooler from Sapphire, MSI, PowerColor or XFX

I just pulled my temps from my cfx machine, so they're probably a lot higher than you'd normally expect. 

Literally didn't occur to me until you pointed it out that cfx temps are higher than single card temps, rofl.

[App4that]

Not this again...

 

The 390 is NOT better than a 970. They are equal. It entirely depends on the game you are playing as to which has the advantage.

 

But I have to agree if you want max settings, and a consistent 60 fps, you want at least a 980.

[MMKing]

The way i see it.

 

390 = 970.

There are very few games were the difference is more than 5%, and i generally recommend whichever is cheaper in your country. But if the price is the same, go for the 390 as it has over double the VRAM.

 

The 390x is sort of between the 390/970 and the 980 in terms of performance and price. It's not a card i usually recommend seeing as the price premium don't justify the performance gain. The 970 and the 390 is simply better value for your money.

 

The Fury is a bit better than the 980 but tend to cost 10-25USD more than the 980. For 1080p, this is as high as i recommend, especially for a 60HZ monitor.

[SteveGrabowski0]

The 390 vs 970 at 1080p is a lot more nuanced than people here would lead you to believe. The 390 is no doubt the stronger card at a hardware level. The 970 is no doubt the card with better drivers. This tug of war between raw power vs better DirectX11 implementation mean these two cards trade blows at 1080p. As a general rule it seems the 970 wins a lot when the game has high CPU overhead over many cores. AMD's DX11 drivers just seem to have more overhead than Nvidia's DX11 drivers do, and this shows itself in higher framerates for the 970 in really CPU taxing games like GTA V, Witcher 3, and Fallout 4. Conversely, in games that don't ask as much out of your CPU, the 390 is a pretty clear winner at 1080p. I'm talking games like Far Cry 4, Star Wars Battlefront, and Shadow of Mordor. The 390 is significantly better in these games. So for right now it's a wash.

 

For the future? If DX12 catches on that CPU overhead that kneecaps the 390 a bit in DX11 is probably gone, and the 390 should be a clearly better card. And if ASync compute starts really being used the 390 will completely destroy the 970. If developers stubbornly hold onto DX11 then who knows? If we get a lot of CPU heavy games like we did in 2015, the 970 might still be the one to buy. With that said, AMD definitely has the better track record with how their cards age. I would much rather have an R9 290 over a GTX 780, or an HD 7970 over a GTX 680, or an R9 280x over a GTX 770, or an R9 280 over a GTX 760.

 

If you like to mod your games a lot, the 8GB VRAM on the 390 vs the effective 3.5 GB on the 970 could prove a big difference. Overall I think the 390 might be the better card of the two on average unless you plan to play a ton of say Fallout 4 or GTA V, but that's based on a guess of where gaming goes from here into the future. But don't believe the 390 is some slam dunk over the 970 at 1080p (though it is at 1440p where the gpu's power increases in importance while the cpu's importance decreases).

[App4that]

The reason the 290 has aged better than the 780 is architecture, very bad comparison.

 

DX11 is absolutely riddled with backwards compatibility. Any feature used can also be paired with the DX11 counterpart. This translates to the card that is better in DX11 tasks being supported by DX12 games. This was done on purpose. Look at the game we have already, the benchmarks are the proof in the pudding. Same results as a DX11 title. 

[SteveGrabowski0]

27 minutes ago, App4that said:

The reason the 290 has aged better than the 780 is architecture, very bad comparison.

Yeah, Nvidia doesn't have the best track record supporting old architectures. Of course that very well could be due to AMD still selling Tahiti cards until last year and still selling Hawaii cards today.

[App4that]

1 minute ago, SteveGrabowski0 said:

Yeah, Nvidia doesn't have the best track record supporting old architectures. Of course that very well could be due to AMD still selling Tahiti cards until last year and still selling Hawaii cards today.

It's not a matter of support, but relevance. That is exactly why DX11 has backwards compatibility. Publishers know if you make sure the game runs well on older hardware, you sell more copies. And they put pressure on the developers to implement this. 

 

You'll see in 3 years

[stealth80]

All I know is Nvidia better sort this shit out in DX12, I just bought a Gsync monitor!

[MEC-777]

970 and 390 trade blows and both have their -'s and +'s. This segment offers the best 1080p price/performance. IMO.

 

Personal preference, I would go with the 390.  

[ripventura]

Thanks a lot guys... Thinking about a 390X now, but maybe I get enough money for the 980...