TIme for a GPU (970/980/other?)

[inkyserifs]

3 minutes ago, Citadelen said:

Which programs do you use?

Basically everything Adobe like Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere, After Effects,  Lightworks, 3DMAX, Autodesk, Maya, Zbrush, Cinema 3d.... and a few others I can't think of off the top of my head, for school alone.

 

My MAIN tools are  Photoshop, Illustrator, After effects and Zbrush, but the others definitely come into play.

[Citadelen]

4 minutes ago, inkyserifs said:

Basically everything Adobe like Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere, After Effects,  Lightworks, 3DMAX, Autodesk, Maya, Zbrush, Cinema 3d.... and a few others I can't think of off the top of my head, for school alone.

 

My MAIN tools are  Photoshop, Illustrator, After effects and Zbrush, but the others definitely come into play.

All of them have some sort of OpenCL acceleration I think, though I'm not too sure about ZBrush.

[inkyserifs]

11 minutes ago, Citadelen said:

All of them have some sort of OpenCL acceleration I think, though I'm not too sure about ZBrush.

Yeah, most do, but for professional's it's recommended (putting it gently, lol) to take advantage of CUDA and other Nvidia exclusives when available.

 

Overall I prefer AMD GPUS so it honestly bugs me, but I think Nvidia is just the wiser option for work and study. Also I don't know if it's smart to invest the larger sum so close to the release of pascal eh. Decisions.

[ripper101]

3 hours ago, rhyseyness said:

Personally, I'd get a 970 or wait for Pascal.

Imo the extra money for the 980 isn't worth it.

You should be able to max everything at 1080p with a 970

Hope this helps

I think the extra money would be worth it because the 970 can't max a lot of games at 1080p

[inkyserifs]

1 minute ago, ripper101 said:

I think the extra money would be worth it because the 970 can't max a lot of games at 1080p

Do you think the performance jump is large enough to justify the price leap, especially this close to pascal? Genuine question. The way I see it it could go two ways -- it's a better investment and lasts me longer than the 970 would, thus justifying the price. OR it is *still* outclassed by pascal in a few months and I will have tossed that money into the void where perhaps I should have saved for a pascal upgrade.

 

lol I feel like I'm digging my grave here.

[Citadelen]

38 minutes ago, inkyserifs said:

Do you think the performance jump is large enough to justify the price leap, especially this close to pascal? Genuine question. The way I see it it could go two ways -- it's a better investment and lasts me longer than the 970 would, thus justifying the price. OR it is *still* outclassed by pascal in a few months and I will have tossed that money into the void where perhaps I should have saved for a pascal upgrade.

 

lol I feel like I'm digging my grave here.

Pascal is still quite far away, Polaris is defiantly closer.

[inkyserifs]

2 minutes ago, Citadelen said:

Pascal is still quite far away, Polaris is defiantly closer.

Yes, Polaris also sounds very promising. To be honest my decision would be much easier if I knew the retail prices in my country X'D If Polaris/Pascal launches at prices that are about on par with current GPUs of a similar caliber I'd be willing to wait a short period of time.

 

Although to be fair, even if Polaris launches early, people will still advise me to wait until Pascal so that the two cards can be compared against each other. It just never ends.

 

It's the 'wait for 6 months for something that MIGHT be in your budget' bit that gets me. Even if it's leaps and bounds ahead, it's still a flipping long time X"D

[SteveGrabowski0]

2 hours ago, Majestic said:

lol wat, no it isn't. It has 23% more CUDA cores and has 256bit memory instead of 224bit. It's generally about ~20% faster, sometimes more.

 

OP also has a 4460, i'd opt for the 970 or 980.

I was going by average framerate at 1080p in the techpowerup test suite of games.

 

[SteveGrabowski0]

51 minutes ago, inkyserifs said:

Yes, Polaris also sounds very promising. To be honest my decision would be much easier if I knew the retail prices in my country X'D If Polaris/Pascal launches at prices that are about on par with current GPUs of a similar caliber I'd be willing to wait a short period of time.

 

Although to be fair, even if Polaris launches early, people will still advise me to wait until Pascal so that the two cards can be compared against each other. It just never ends.

 

It's the 'wait for 6 months for something that MIGHT be in your budget' bit that gets me. Even if it's leaps and bounds ahead, it's still a flipping long time X"D

I think the 970 should still age pretty decently considering we won't see a new Playstation or XBox for a few years and since most of the games that push PCs the most are AAA console ports designed to run on crappy Jaguar processors with HD 7850 level graphics. You're not going to be maxing games like you would with a Pascal 70 or 80 series, but it's still a very strong GPU. I think one big thing that makes the 500 series seem so ancient is the 600 series came out right before a new console generation. So I don't think a 970 will age anywhere near as badly as the 570 did, for example.

[SteveGrabowski0]

I just wish the freaking thing would go down in price. At launch it was an incredible deal for $330 since it gave almost 780 Ti level performance for a lot less, and only the 780 Ti and 980 were better (not counting Titans, who buys those?). Now it's still $330 US and trails behind the 780 Ti, 390x, Nano, Fury, 980, Fury X, and 980 Ti.

[inkyserifs]

2 minutes ago, SteveGrabowski0 said:

Just now, SteveGrabowski0 said:

I just wish the freaking thing would go down in price. At launch it was an incredible deal for $330 since it gave almost 780 Ti level performance for a lot less, and only the 780 Ti and 980 were better (not counting Titans, who buys those?). Now it's still $330 US and trails behind the 780 Ti, 390x, Nano, Fury, 980, Fury X, and 980 Ti.

I think the 970 should still age pretty decently considering we won't see a new Playstation or XBox for a few years and since most of the games that push PCs the most are AAA console ports designed to run on crappy Jaguar processors with HD 7850 level graphics. You're not going to be maxing games like you would with a Pascal 70 or 80 series, but it's still a very strong GPU. I think one big thing that makes the 500 series seem so ancient is the 600 series came out right before a new console generation. So I don't think a 970 will age anywhere near as badly as the 570 did, for example.

That's pretty encouraging to hear. I think I will go for the 970 in the next few days, as it has the best price/performance ratio + features for my current needs. It is a tad expensive, but much cheaper than buying a top tier card and realizing I want to upgrade it very soon. And it should last me hopefully a few years, maybe not with everything maxed, but with decent fps until it's time for me to get whatever pascal happens to be around at the time. I don't think I can wait for months to get a working GPU in my system. It feels kinda annoying to be buying a GPU so close to the end of its generation, but given the time frames of the new ones coming out, and all the maybes associated with it, I think I'd rather have something for work and gaming now, and start squirreling money away for a pascal down the road.

 

Thank you for all the brilliant advice by the way, to all the people commenting. It's really educational

[KazuMae]

IMO just wait for pascal. It should be out by the end of the year(they said they are going to announce it in the mid late year but to get it on the shelf wait till the end or early next year) or get 2 GTX970 SLI(if you really need it)

[SteveGrabowski0]

13 minutes ago, inkyserifs said:

That's pretty encouraging to hear. I think I will go for the 970 in the next few days, as it has the best price/performance ratio + features for my current needs. It is a tad expensive, but much cheaper than buying a top tier card and realizing I want to upgrade it very soon. And it should last me hopefully a few years, maybe not with everything maxed, but with decent fps until it's time for me to get whatever pascal happens to be around at the time. I don't think I can wait for months to get a working GPU in my system. It feels kinda annoying to be buying a GPU so close to the end of its generation, but given the time frames of the new ones coming out, and all the maybes associated with it, I think I'd rather have something for work and gaming now, and start squirreling money away for a pascal down the road.

 

Thank you for all the brilliant advice by the way, to all the people commenting. It's really educational

A good bellweather for the next couple of years might be Witcher 3, as that is an extremely demanding game that will probably stay so for a couple of years at least (like Crysis 3). With a vram overclock of +300 MHz and a core at 1418 MHz after GPU Boost 2.0 (my 970 is a terrible overclocker, your's will probably be better) I play with shadow quality, terrain quality, and foliage distance at high, hairworks off, everything else maxed (HBAO+ is a must in this game, the lighting is incredible with it) and it runs mostly 60 fps, with occasional dips into the 50s. I also turn off depth of field and motion blur not because of performance (it doesn't matter at all for that), but because I hate the way they look. It's a must buy with a 970 unless you just hate action RPGs. The lighting just looks so good in it in motion. Don't judge it by the screenshots, in action it's really something. And if you can take your card to 1500 MHz you should get significantly better performance even.

[SteveGrabowski0]

I wouldn't sweat the 3.5 GB, especially at 1080p, as that's still a lot of vram. Witcher 3 and Crysis 3 are the two hardest games I have to run and neither ever hits even 2GB usage.

[inkyserifs]

Just now, SteveGrabowski0 said:

A good bellweather might be Witcher 3, as that is an extremely demanding game. With a memory overclock of +300 MHz and a core at 1418 MHz after GPU Boost 2.0 (my 970 is a terrible overclocker, your's will probably be better) I play with shadow quality, terrain quality, and foliage distance at high, hairworks off, everything else maxed (HBAO+ is a must in this game, the lighting is incredible with it) and it runs mostly 60 fps, with occasional dips into the 50s. I also turn off depth of field and motion blur not because of performance, but because I hate the way they look. It's a must buy with a 970 unless you just hate action RPGs. The lighting just looks so good in it in motion. Don't judge it by the screenshots, in action it's really something. And if you can take your card to 1500 MHz you should get significantly better performance even.

Loool the Witcher 3 is going to be like 95% of my gaming life I grew up on the books and I've been obsessed with trying to play through the games since they released, except my laptop wouldn't give me more than 20 FPS on low settings on witcher 1 before it died, so I never got to play X) I feel like if the 970 can handle Witcher 3 reasonably well, I'll be happy for a goooood long chunk of time.

[Coaxialgamer]

I would say r9 nano or wait ( and watercool the nano )

[inkyserifs]

Just now, Coaxialgamer said:

I would say r9 nano or wait ( and watercool the nano )

O_o the nano is cheaper than the 980. What the hell? How? I mean, not by much but... this was not true the last time I checked my go-to supplier...? or maybe I'm just delusional/misremembering....

Couldn't afford it with watercooling though. But dang it sure is a nice card.

[inkyserifs]

15 minutes ago, KazuMae said:

IMO just wait for pascal. It should be out by the end of the year(they said they are going to announce it in the mid late year but to get it on the shelf wait till the end or early next year) or get 2 GTX970 SLI(if you really need it)

I'm still debating waiting for it, but there's no way I can afford a 970 SLI right now. X'D I also don't think my case could handle it and I'd need a few extra upgrades to make sure that can run.

 

 

[Coaxialgamer]

3 minutes ago, inkyserifs said:

O_o the nano is cheaper than the 980. What the hell? How? I mean, not by much but... this was not true the last time I checked my go-to supplier...? or maybe I'm just delusional/misremembering....

Couldn't afford it with watercooling though. But dang it sure is a nice card.

well , you could buy it stock , and later on down the road watercool it with something like a kraken g10  and get get it to actually reach 1ghz , then overclock , to make it faster than the fury X

 

Edit: at stock r9 nano = 980

watercooled = fury X

[inkyserifs]

Just now, Coaxialgamer said:

well , you could buy it stock , and later on down the road watercool it with something like a kraken g10  and get get it to actually reach 1ghz , then overclock , to make it faster than the fury X

Huuuuh. Interesting. A new possibility presents itself...... Thank you for bringing this to my attention.

[Coaxialgamer]

Just now, inkyserifs said:

Huuuuh. Interesting. A new possibility presents itself...... Thank you for bringing this to my attention.

no problem . Don't forget pascal/polaris are around the corner though

[KazuMae]

1 minute ago, inkyserifs said:

I'm still debating waiting for it, but there's no way I can afford a 970 SLI right now. X'D I also don't think my case could handle it and I'd need a few extra upgrades to make sure that can run.

 

 

well let me make it like this. Right now GTX 970 is a good card. but during this time of the year, people are considering to move to pascal. Why not stay where you are right now, save some more, and maybe when pascal is ready on the shelf you will be one of the first person posting in fb/insta or where ever  "LOOK AT ME NEW SHINY PASCAL!!!" or something like that

[PlayStation 2]

See that GPU guide in my signature?

It's helpful.

 

Personally, just get a 970 or a 390.

[inkyserifs]

4 minutes ago, Coaxialgamer said:

no problem . Don't forget pascal/polaris are around the corner though

Yes, I am keeping it in mind and therefore fidgeting greatly over my choices.

[inkyserifs]

3 minutes ago, KazuMae said:

well let me make it like this. Right now GTX 970 is a good card. but during this time of the year, people are considering to move to pascal. Why not stay where you are right now, save some more, and maybe when pascal is ready on the shelf you will be one of the first person posting in fb/insta or where ever  "LOOK AT ME NEW SHINY PASCAL!!!" or something like that

Lol well it is tempting to get the shiny new thing the moment it releases, but I don't know how long I can handle running software and games on Intel HD integrated graphics. Probably wiser to wait, but I'll probably go insane somewhere along the way.