r9 290 to grx 980 ti or wait for pascal? asnychronous?

[Ardacer]

So right now, I've got an r9 290 card, and an 34 inch ultrawide gsync monitor (I plan to switch to green, got really fed up with red teams driver support)

 

So just as I was reading that pascal probably won't be blowing our minds and be 82095820589 times better than Maxwell, and was preparing to pull the trigger on GTX 980 ti (and plan for SLI later on)

Two things happen, a LTT video with 4way SLI showing crapload of stuttering in witcher 3, and I've read about nvidia not supporting asynchronous computing in 900 series cards.

 

I have no idea how (if) important that is.

 

What would be the wisest thing to do? Probably wait until April 5th and see what nvidia  says..

 

TL; DR

 

How important is async for gaming? Will pascal support it? Does anyone even know yet? Does the SLI really cause such problems that some games become a pain to play?

[Trav_X]

If you really want It, the 980Ti is a great card, and buying it now would be an okay idea. It's going to stay relevant for quite a while, as the 780Ti, 290x, and some other cards are still good and powerful.

 

the wiser decision would be to wait. See what technologies come with Pascal, and how they perform, and what their price is. I would say jsut wait, so that you don't regret it in a few months if Pascal does turn out to be a very good price/performance.

 

SLI is not that good. Always get the best SINGLE GPU you can get, and SLI/Crossfire it later if you NEED that EXTRA POWER!

[Ardacer]

So the best thing to do then would probably be to wait and see, and pick the new titan type card from pascal and forget the SLI, right? 980ti type cards would come some time later but I'm not gonna wait half a year to get that if a "titan class" is available some time in april / may

[Streetguru]

1 hour ago, Ardacer said:

 

What driver issues were you even having?

 

Also shoulda gone 40" 4k man

 

in any case just wait for the next gen stuff

 

I'm so sorry you wasted money on G-sync, the equivalent free-sync display was $200 less, and that could have gone towards your future GPU

 

https://pcpartpicker.com/part/acer-monitor-umcx1aa001

[Ardacer]

amd's drivers were causing my graphics card to shut itself down all the time for a year. it eventually got fixed but srsly...

 

http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/answers/id-2163760/sapphire-290x-freezing.html

 

there are a lot of similar threads, and no real solutions.. as I said it got fixed but after a year or so, so i reeaally got pissed off

 

also these 4k things are TV-s?, and the refresh rate is, iirc, limited to 60 hz over hdmi (which is what TV-s have) - implying you could drive it to 60 hz in the first place, also

 

http://www.displaywars.com/40-inch-16x9-vs-29-inch-21x9

 

man that would be gigantic.. I'd feel stupid with that in my face, honestly. also I've got a 4k samsung tv that's about a 1,80 cm in diagonal so..

[Ardacer]

22 minutes ago, Streetguru said:

I'm so sorry you wasted money on G-sync, the equivalent free-sync display was $200 less, and that could have gone towards your future GPU

 

https://pcpartpicker.com/part/acer-monitor-umcx1aa001

I've studied that, decided to go gsync cause freesync monitors implement variable refreshes in very odd ways which don't really make much sense to me (freesync in general is good, but every monitor I've seen implements it in a weird refresh rate boundry). Anyhow money is not such a great issue, I don't really buy the gear all that often so when I do, I buy what I want to buy and what makes most sense to me personally (might make no sense to someone else, or entire world, for that matter). I am open to suggestions however, and will listen to good advice, if it's acceptable to my stupid needs

 

This is what I was getting at:

 

However the story is a little bit different when your game’s FPS dips below the minimum refresh rate. Say 39 FPS while using the Acer or BenQ monitors. Once that occurs G-Sync and FreeSync deal with the situation quite differently. With FreeSync the panel would simply revert back to a fixed refresh rate that matches the lowest refresh rate that the panel is capable of. So 40Hz in the case of the Acer and BenQ monitors and 48Hz in the case of the LG monitors. At this point you will have to choose whether you want to enable V-Sync to mitigate tearing in exchange for input latency or play without V-Sync and get tearing. And because the panel is operating at its minimum refresh rate rather than its maximum, both the input latency and the tearing become more noticeable and pronounced.

G-Sync was setup in earlier G-Sync monitors to deal with the situation not very differently than FreeSync, the panel would simply stick to the maximum refresh rate resulting in an increase of input latency. However it isn’t as severe as with the FreeSync behavior, as the monitor would be fixed at the maximum rather than the minimum refresh rate. But unfortunately with G-Sync, Nvidia doesn’t give you the option of V-Sync off or on, it would always stay on so you can’t get rid of that latency in exchange for tearing. However I would still consider that fixing the monitor to the maximum refresh rate rather than the minimum to be a superior solution. Fortunately this would only require a driver update to change the current behavior of FreeSync below the minimum refresh rate, which I do hope AMD seriously considers.

Read more: http://wccftech.com/amd-freesync-nvidia-gsync-verdict/#ixzz43gCF7yex

 

Gsync-s solution actually makes more sense to me

[Streetguru]

1 hour ago, Ardacer said:

 

The range on that display is 30-75hz

http://www.tftcentral.co.uk/reviews/acer_xr341ck.htm

 

most free-sync displays will start at 30 and work to the maximum refresh rate of the display, this is usually limited by the scaler in the display, as seen with the ASUS 144hz 1440p IPS display that only goes to 90hz, while the Acer equivalent goes to the full 144hz.

Aside from that it's very rare that you're going to dip below 30hz/fps since you'd be shooting for the 75fps average of the display or higher. Which is probably why they don't bother implementing it below 30hz.

 

Also at the bottom of the article it says that AMD did just what they suggested.

[Ardacer]

Well feck. Anyway I also wanted nvidia, and also wanted at least 100 hz refresh rate, so I picked the asus beast. Waste of money but I'd probably be uneasy all the time asking myself why I didn't buy what I wanted so there's that. 5th of april can't come soon enough....