What GPU should I buy for my setup?

[App4that]

Just now, don_svetlio said:

So laptop users suddenly don't matter? Even though I am using the same GPU core as a 750 Ti? Wow, nice logic there....

It's not a laptop discussion. I went over my 4g in Fallout 4, never saw a crash or stutter. The performance impact of exceeding your VRAM capacity is like the amount used game dependent.

[CNY RMB]

9 minutes ago, App4that said:

So you have a 390 and i7, a great combination. But the OP does not. They have a i5, and older i5. Nvidia has less driver overhead and that will help them in games that are CPU intensive.

I see your point. however, I don't believe that the i5 will be that much of a bottleneck, as it fullfills more than the minimum requirements. Not quite recommended, but close.

[don_svetlio]

Just now, App4that said:

It's not a laptop discussion. I went over my 4g in Fallout 4, never saw a crash or stutter. The performance impact of exceeding your VRAM capacity is like the amount used game dependent.

And you also neglect the fact that next gen cards will have 16GB on flagships and 8GB on medium-high end. So 3.5GB will quickly be tight considering there are talks of HBM2 consoles with 16GB of total memory as well

[App4that]

2 minutes ago, CNY RMB said:

Just now, CNY RMB said:

I see your point. however, I don't believe that the i5 will be that much of a bottleneck, as it fullfills more than the minimum requirements. Not quite recommended, but close.

I appreciate your very "constructive" criticism.

I may be slightly blended by my opinion about Nvidia Gameworks. As stated above, I play at 1440p VSR.

Also, here is the review of the Sapphire R9 390 from Toms hardware. Look at the actuall game performance numbers. http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/sapphire-nitro-r9-390-8g-d5,4245.html

I know just cause 3 still suffers from slight micro stutters, however, I have noticed that at the resolution and settings I play at, the VRAM does sometimes exceed 4G.

 

Thank you for your consideration. 

I use 5 g at times playing JC3 in 1440. Games decide how much to use from the amount available and the power of the card. There's no set value. And like I said, I owned a Nitro 390 and a 4690k. I had horrible issues because of driver overhead. Going to the i7 made a huge difference with the 390.

Just now, don_svetlio said:

And you also neglect the fact that next gen cards will have 16GB on flagships and 8GB on medium-high end. So 3.5GB will quickly be tight considering there are talks of HBM2 consoles with 16GB of total memory as well

And we might get free ponies too. Back to the world of the now.

 

The 970 has no issues with it's available VRAM.

[don_svetlio]

3 minutes ago, App4that said:

I use 5 g at times playing JC3 in 1440. Games decide how much to use from the amount available and the power of the card. There's no set value. And like I said, I owned a Nitro 390 and a 4690k. I had horrible issues because of driver overhead. Going to the i7 made a huge difference with the 390.

And we might get free ponies too. Back to the world of the now.

 

The 970 has no issues with it's available VRAM.

Yes it does. There have been several people who asked what to do after being told "it's fine" and then running into issues due to a variety of reasons from the games they play, to modding, to additional screens being added

[CNY RMB]

7 minutes ago, App4that said:

I use 5 g at times playing JC3 in 1440. Games decide how much to use from the amount available and the power of the card. There's no set value. And like I said, I owned a Nitro 390 and a 4690k. I had horrible issues because of driver overhead. Going to the i7 made a huge difference with the 390.

And we might get free ponies too. Back to the world of the now.

 

The 970 has no issues with it's available VRAM.

I just checked actual VRAM usage in Assassins Creed Syndicate with Sapphire Trixx. At the settings I play at: 4172 MB. This was in game, in the Helix Glitch shoot the Plane mission (Because thats were I spawned). This is above the 4G of the 970 (Ignoring the 3.5G issue.)

[App4that]

Just now, don_svetlio said:

Yes it does. There have been several people who asked what to do after being told "it's fine" and then running into issues due to a variety of reasons from the games they play, to modding, to additional screens being added

I'd love to see it. I ran over 50 mods in Fallout 4 and just about every last one of them was texture related. I went over 4g, no performance hit though.

 

If we're going to play the "if" game, lets play. You know VRAM stacks with DX12 and that cards from separate manufacturers can work together, right? So even if they would have issues in a few years, won't matter once you add another card. The best matchup is actually the low driver overhead in combination with the compute power of AMD. Look here where the 980ti beats the Fury X, even in SLI. But the combination of a 980ti and Fury X beats everything.

 

[KemoKa]

The whole reason that we even knew that the 970 had a weird frame buffer is because someone noticed a game tanking before it hit the limit. So yes, it will become an issue pretty soon. Unless people start tightening their code, but we all know that's never a thing with modern titles.

[CNY RMB]

The 970 was a competitor for the R9 290, which it beat. But now the 390 is simply more powerful.

[App4that]

1 minute ago, CNY RMB said:

I just checked actual VRAM usage in Assassins Creed Syndicate with Sapphire Trixx. At the settings I play at: 4172 MB. This was in game, in the Helix Glitch shoot the Plane mission (Because thats were I spawned). This is above the 4G of the 970 (Ignoring the 3.5G issue.)

Please read what I'm writing, it's rude not to.

 

The amount of VRAM used in NOT SET. It is correlated to your available capacity. I would show more than you because of the more powerful card as well.

[SteveGrabowski0]

It's a tough call between the GTX 970 and R9 390 here. What @App4that brought up is absolutely true about the DX11 overhead in AMD's drivers being worse. On the other hand, the R9 390 is more powerful on a hardware level and for that reason I think it might age better. Does anyone know what holiday 2016 games are scheduled to come out on DX12? If DX12 gets big adoption this year I think it would make the R9 390 hands down the better card to get since the CPU bottleneck is supposed to be greatly reduced. If not I'd probably rather buy the 970 for the lower DX11 overhead, but I guess I'm also conditioning on the kind of games I play. CPU overhead matters a lot more in big expansive open world games with lots of AI, stuff like GTA V and Witcher 3.  For shooters you don't really have to worry too much about CPU overhead and you're going to be better off with the more powerful AMD card.

[SteveGrabowski0]

Either way we're only talking a few fps each way, either card is going to be an enormous upgrade over your 7790. And you should buy a new PSU either way.

[CNY RMB]

3 minutes ago, App4that said:

Please read what I'm writing, it's rude not to.

 

The amount of VRAM used in NOT SET. It is correlated to your available capacity. I would show more than you because of the more powerful card as well.

I did read this, but am still going to state, that it cannot hurt to have more, faster VRAM and I just need to mention that the game will not allow you to set your settings as high if you don't have enough VRAM, In this case, the game (in the settings) still showed slightly below 4G, so it would have run and accepted it. However, if it were above 4G it would most likely have thrown an error. The game simply prevents you from setting settings that exceed your VRAM capabilities.

[App4that]

Just now, CNY RMB said:

I did read this, but am still going to state, that it cannot hurt to have more, faster VRAM and I just need to mention that the game will not allow you to set your settings as high if you don't have enough VRAM, In this case, the game (in the settings) still showed slightly below 4G, so it would have run and accepted it. However, if it were above 4G it would most likely have thrown an error. The game simply prevents you from setting settings that exceed your VRAM capabilities.

Very few game require more than 4g for setting, and that effects the Fury's including the X as well. It's not a well received setting.

 

More VRAM is not a bad thing, but in this case the lower performance of the CPU must take priority as it is the weak link.

[CNY RMB]

1 minute ago, App4that said:

Very few game require more than 4g for setting, and that effects the Fury's including the X as well. It's not a well received setting.

 

More VRAM is not a bad thing, but in this case the lower performance of the CPU must take priority as it is the weak link.

I see this slightly differently, as I personally believe that it in terms of future proofness and also general performance in games with lower cpu overhead, which are also very popular, think  Battlefield, etc. the 390 is simply the better choice. Also, for any sort of 3D productivity the 390 is a absolute beast, e.g. 3D rendering, game development, etc. where raw power and more vram are a advantage. It also has to be mentioned that the 390 is the slightly cheaper card.

[KemoKa]

Just now, CNY RMB said:

I see this slightly differently, as I personally believe that it in terms of future proofness and also general performance in games with lower cpu overhead, which are also very popular, think  Battlefield, etc. the 390 is simply the better choice. Also, for any sort of 3D productivity the 390 is a absolute beast, e.g. 3D rendering, game development, etc. where raw power and more vram are a advantage. It also has to be mentioned that the 390 is the slightly cheaper card.

uh-oh.

[CNY RMB]

Just now, KemoKa said:

uh-oh.

What?

[KemoKa]

Just now, CNY RMB said:

What?

You'll see... perhaps.

 

You're not wrong, I'm just sayin'...

[App4that]

Just now, CNY RMB said:

I see this slightly differently, as I personally believe that it in terms of future proofness and also general performance in games with lower cpu overhead, which are also very popular, think  Battlefield, etc. the 390 is simply the better choice. Also, for any sort of 3D productivity the 390 is a absolute beast, e.g. 3D rendering, game development, etc. where raw power and more vram are a advantage. It also has to be mentioned that the 390 is the slightly cheaper card.

Both cards are under the gun when it comes to "future proofing", and my student loan argues with your rendering opinion

 

If the 390 is cheaper by over 10 bucks, then yeah, that's the one to get.

[CNY RMB]

1 minute ago, App4that said:

Both cards are under the gun when it comes to "future proofing", and my student loan argues with your rendering opinion

 

If the 390 is cheaper by over 10 bucks, then yeah, that's the one to get.

Well, thanks for this surprisingly reasonable debate. I hope the OP can make the right decision for him and is happy with his purchase. I think we have probably discussed basically all the ups and downs of the cards and can agree that they both are great cards. 

[don_svetlio]

4 minutes ago, App4that said:

Both cards are under the gun when it comes to "future proofing", and my student loan argues with your rendering opinion

 

If the 390 is cheaper by over 10 bucks, then yeah, that's the one to get.

A person with a student loan shouldn't be buying 980 Tis..... but anyway. Over the past 5-6 generations of GPUs AMD's cards have aged better. At this point it's 99% certain that a 390 will outlast a 970. Back in the day a 770 was neck and neck with a 280X but concurrently a 280X is 10-15% faster.

[KemoKa]

Just now, CNY RMB said:

Well, thanks for this surprisingly reasonable debate. I hope the OP can make the right decision for him and is happy with his purchase. I think we have probably discussed basically all the ups and downs of the cards and can agree that they both are great cards. 

ikr, I was pleasantly surprised, I thought this was going to turn into a flame war. Again. Again. AGAIN.

[App4that]

Just now, CNY RMB said:

Well, thanks for this surprisingly reasonable debate. I hope the OP can make the right decision for him and is happy with his purchase. I think we have probably discussed basically all the ups and downs of the cards and can agree that they both are great cards. 

Yep, totally agree. filed you in the good list