new graphics card

[Tedx5]

im looking at a new graphics card and from what i can tell theas are you best options.  Radeon HD7950 (no 2 way sli), gtx 690, gtx 780 lightning, gtx 780ti i don't under stand why the gtx 780 lightning and gtx 780ti would be any different. i think i'm going to go with a gtx 780 of some variety, and i don't really like the  Radeon HD 7950 because it doesn't have 2 way sli. i thought i would ask you people how are much better at computer things  

[Frosty]

Are you buying used? All of those cards are discontinued. Also, you can crossfire a 7950, not SLI.

[Tedx5]

yes i know but thanks for looking out for me. ye ye right dint think of that 

 

[Gonio]

Would go with the 780 Ti, but really depends on dosh required. If price to high (for any of those second hand cards) I would rather go with a new gen card.

[Tedx5]

i would go with a gtx 1060 1070 but my mb doesn't support them

[Gonio]

Wut, you have PCIe gen 1 orso?

 

If you can run a 780 you can run a newer one aswell.

[sazrocks]

2 hours ago, Tedx5 said:

i would go with a gtx 1060 1070 but my mb doesn't support them

What do you mean by that?

[Tedx5]

4 minutes ago, sazrocks said:

What do you mean by that?

 

24 minutes ago, Gonio said:

Wut, you have PCIe gen 1 orso?

 

If you can run a 780 you can run a newer one aswell.

no i was just confused about the compatibility chart for my motherboard 

[smokefest]

As long as you have PCIE you can.

But there are difference in PCIE...

Gen 1, 2 and 3.

Both gens can run @ 1x 2x 4x 8x 16x

That said, the first gen VS the third gen has about 20% difference in performance...

That said, if you buy newer GPU in a Gen 1.0 pcie slot, you will have 20% less performance right away but it will work

[sazrocks]

3 hours ago, smokefest said:

As long as you have PCIE you can.

But there are difference in PCIE...

Gen 1, 2 and 3.

Both gens can run @ 1x 2x 4x 8x 16x

That said, the first gen VS the third gen has about 20% difference in performance...

That said, if you buy newer GPU in a Gen 1.0 pcie slot, you will have 20% less performance right away but it will work

Way more than 20%; each gen is twice as fast as the previous version. Linus has a video on it here (skip to 1:26 for the generations):

 

[WEEEEEE]

2 hours ago, sazrocks said:

Way more than 20%; each gen is twice as fast as the previous version. Linus has a video on it here (skip to 1:26 for the generations):

 

The GPU does not utilize 100% of the PCIe bandwidth. Not even close.

A gen1 PCIe slot will be able to handle any modern gpu just fine. The real limitation will be the platform, since any mobo with a gen 1 slot is really old.

[sazrocks]

1 hour ago, WEEEEEE said:

The GPU does not utilize 100% of the PCIe bandwidth. Not even close.

A gen1 PCIe slot will be able to handle any modern gpu just fine. The real limitation will be the platform, since any mobo with a gen 1 slot is really old.

While I do agree that modern gpus don't need gen3 x16, remember that a gen 1 x16 slot is equivalent to a 4x gen 3 slot. And in this video: 

,there is noticeable performance drop when using x8 gen3 on a GTX 980, a card which is more or less equivalent to a 1060. Imagine what a 4x slot would do to a 1060, let alone a 1070, and you get a (near) exact picture of what using a 1060 or 1070 on a gen 1 pcie x16 slot would be like.

[smokefest]

9 hours ago, sazrocks said:

While I do agree that modern gpus don't need gen3 x16, remember that a gen 1 x16 slot is equivalent to a 4x gen 3 slot. And in this video: 

,there is noticeable performance drop when using x8 gen3 on a GTX 980, a card which is more or less equivalent to a 1060. Imagine what a 4x slot would do to a 1060, let alone a 1070, and you get a (near) exact picture of what using a 1060 or 1070 on a gen 1 pcie x16 slot would be like.

This is in SLI and the drop is barely noticeable..

In 1 card config, 8X gen 3 deliver 99.99% of the performance... not a big deal

[sazrocks]

1 hour ago, smokefest said:

This is in SLI and the drop is barely noticeable..

In 1 card config, 8X gen 3 deliver 99.99% of the performance... not a big deal

Yes, but that is 8x, and we are talking about 4x. In the video there is a noticeable performance drop at 8x. This indicates that a GTX 980 (again, which is equivelant to a 1060) uses at least 100% of an 8x slot. Therefore if we were to halve the bandwidth and stick the 980 (1060) in a 4x slot, we would get roughly half the performance as if we had it sitting in a proper 16x slot. And since a 4x gen 3 slot is equivelant to a 16x gen 1 slot, using a 1060 on a 16x gen 1 slot would halve its performance.

[System Error Message]

11 minutes ago, sazrocks said:

Yes, but that is 8x, and we are talking about 4x. In the video there is a noticeable performance drop at 8x. This indicates that a GTX 980 (again, which is equivelant to a 1060) uses at least 100% of an 8x slot. Therefore if we were to halve the bandwidth and stick the 980 (1060) in a 4x slot, we would get roughly half the performance as if we had it sitting in a proper 16x slot. And since a 4x gen 3 slot is equivelant to a 16x gen 1 slot, using a 1060 on a 16x gen 1 slot would halve its performance.

Quite untrue. Its to do with bandwidth, as long as theres enough bandwidth data can be sent fast enough. The more frames you render the more bandwidth you need but also scales with resolution used too. So you could do a 4 way SLI with x1 only and it will work fine if it was enough bandwidth for all the data. More bandwidth is better if more communication is needed but it doesnt mean you cant do things with less lanes. You should see what bitcoin miners, folding rigs and other compute applications use, they work without issue on x1 slot. In gaming however the graphical data (the frame with pixels) is synced between cards and the CPU just sends 3D data to all cards.

[sazrocks]

6 minutes ago, System Error Message said:

Quite untrue. Its to do with bandwidth, as long as theres enough bandwidth data can be sent fast enough. The more frames you render the more bandwidth you need but also scales with resolution used too. So you could do a 4 way SLI with x1 only and it will work fine if it was enough bandwidth for all the data. More bandwidth is better if more communication is needed but it doesnt mean you cant do things with less lanes. You should see what bitcoin miners, folding rigs and other compute applications use, they work without issue on x1 slot. In gaming however the graphical data (the frame with pixels) is synced between cards and the CPU just sends 3D data to all cards.

Since everything I've said is theoretical, I'm just going to take my 1060, and put it in a 16x gen1 slot and see what the difference is. It will be a while though since I don't have access to my computer right now.

[smokefest]

Go check youtues, theres lot of video..

Even a 1080 dosnt use all of the gen 3.0 8x bandwith

So a 8x gen 3.0 is still enuff, under that, theres a little bottleneck at 4X
 

 

[Qwerty2323]

How much cash you have and what is your current pc? Running new pc with no gpu might end up as better option than getting new gpu that wont be able to do a sht with all bottle necks.

So might aswell consider new motherboard and cpu and probably new psu is needed.

[ybriK]

Don't even worry about PCIe for GPUs, only for storage.

 

https://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/AMD/R9_Fury_X_PCI-Express_Scaling/18.html

 

" there is no significant performance difference between x16 3.0 and x8 3.0 (and x16 2.0, which offers the same bandwidth). The average difference is only 1%, which you'd never notice. Even a bandwidth-restricted scenario, such as x16 1.1 or x8 2.0 offered by seriously old motherboards, only saw a small difference of around 4% "

[ybriK]

13 hours ago, sazrocks said:

While I do agree that modern gpus don't need gen3 x16, remember that a gen 1 x16 slot is equivalent to a 4x gen 3 slot. And in this video: 

,there is noticeable performance drop when using x8 gen3 on a GTX 980

No. Unless it's SLI as the video has shown.

 

https://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/NVIDIA/GTX_980_PCI-Express_Scaling/21.html

[System Error Message]

You can game on a single GPU via a PCIe 2.0 x1 link (2.0 bit is important for full duplex). I used to do this with batman arkham asylum, i gamed on a GTX 580 attached to laptop via expresscard with monitor attached to GPU, i could play with high settings at 1080p around 50 fps. Some games however do poorly with less bandwidth, its more to do with the game engine, how much data needs to be transferred at a time. For multiple cards they require bandwidth to sync.

[WEEEEEE]

8 hours ago, sazrocks said:

Yes, but that is 8x, and we are talking about 4x. In the video there is a noticeable performance drop at 8x. This indicates that a GTX 980 (again, which is equivelant to a 1060) uses at least 100% of an 8x slot. Therefore if we were to halve the bandwidth and stick the 980 (1060) in a 4x slot, we would get roughly half the performance as if we had it sitting in a proper 16x slot. And since a 4x gen 3 slot is equivelant to a 16x gen 1 slot, using a 1060 on a 16x gen 1 slot would halve its performance.

That's an oversimplification, since it assumes that the GPU is maxing out the slot bandwidth all of the time.

The charts that Linus showed were averages. So if there was a scene where the GPU(s) needed a whole lot bandwidth between to the CPU for whatever reason, the FPS there would have dipped, causing the average to be lowered by a small amount. Most of the time the GPU's would have been fine.

As far as the equivalences go, you are forgetting that these GPU's were in sli, so while 1x980=1x1060, 2x980=1x1080, and it took 3 to cause the FPS to dip. Then of course there is the fact that these GPU's were in SLI, meaning that this doesn't really work as a good test. The performance dip was at most 6%. You can get more FPS by applying a minor OC in afterburner.