PC Tech Would it make sense for me to upgrade just my GPU or would it be bottlenecked by the rest of my system?

[Jason]

I haven' t really kept up to date on hardware since I bought my 970 a few years ago so I have no real sense of whether I could upgrade my graphics card without upgrading everything else...and I'm in no rush to buy a new TV or monitor but I know I'd have to upgrade my 970 if I went past 1080p/1200p.

 

[Mr.Vic20]

Your CPU is more than good enough to hang in there with an upgrade to a 1080ti or a high end AMD card. You will possible lose a few frames (1-4 range maybe) a second, but it won't be a night and day situation versus a much newer processor. 

 

Edit: going up in resolution only makes the situation better as the processor load actually falls off at higher resolutions as the work shifts more to the GPU. 

[stepee]

17 minutes ago, Mr.Vic20 said:

Your CPU is more than good enough to hang in there with an upgrade to a 1080ti or a high end AMD card. You will possible lose a few frames (1-4 range maybe) a second, but it won't be a night and day situation versus a much newer processor. 

 

Edit: going up in resoutlion only makes the situation better as the processor load actually falls off at higher resolutions as the work shifts more to the GPU. 

 

[Jason]

5 hours ago, Mr.Vic20 said:

Your CPU is more than good enough to hang in there with an upgrade to a 1080ti or a high end AMD card. You will possible lose a few frames (1-4 range maybe) a second, but it won't be a night and day situation versus a much newer processor. 

 

Edit: going up in resoutlion only makes the situation better as the processor load actually falls off at higher resolutions as the work shifts more to the GPU. 

 

I guess the question then becomes whether something like a 1070 or 1070 Ti is a waste of time coming from a 970, and how much VRAM I should be looking for.

[Mr.Vic20]

9 hours ago, Jason said:

 

I guess the question then becomes whether something like a 1070 or 1070 Ti is a waste of time coming from a 970, and how much VRAM I should be looking for.

8Gb of VRAM is the still the sweet spot, so you're likely good there with any card above a 1070. I would recommend that if you are willing to pay up to 600 for a new GPU, then you should consider the 2070. I say this because as more developers adopt DLSS support, the better this card will get. As is, its slightly faster than a 1080 and is within 50.00 of the same price. If that is more than you are ready to spend then yeah, I would go with the 1070ti and save the extra 100-150 bucks. Have you looked at AMD cards as well? They tend to do pretty well in the sub 500.00 segment of the market. 

[AbsolutSurgen]

1440p seems to be the sweet spot right now in terms of resolution/frame rate.  A cheap GTX-1070 card (~$360) would be a worthy upgrade, giving you pretty good framerates on most games.

 

Once DLSS becomes a thing, a RTX-2070 might make sense.

 

I'm personally holding out for the next gen of Graphic cards (RTX-2180), hoping that by that time there will be a critical mass of software that supports Ray Tracing/DLSS, or, conversely we can confirm they aren't being adopted and the RT cores are a waste of money.

[Pikachu]

Got a similar question. I have an i5 3570k and 16 GB 1333mhz RAM. I was wondering if upgrading to an AMD 590 would be a good move without too much bottleneck? And would it be a meaningful upgrade from an 8GB 480?

[Jason]

8 hours ago, Mr.Vic20 said:

8Gb of VRAM is the still the sweet spot, so you're likely good there with any card above a 1070. I would recommend that if you are willing to pay up to 600 for a new GPU, then you should consider the 2070. I say this because as more developers adopt DLSS support, the better this card will get. As is, its slightly faster than a 1080 and is within 50.00 of the same price. If that is more than you are ready to spend then yeah, I would go with the 1070ti and save the extra 100-150 bucks. Have you looked at AMD cards as well? They tend to do pretty well in the sub 500.00 segment of the market. 

 

I honestly haven't looked at much of anything yet since I wasn't sure if it made sense for me to upgrade in my situation. This all started as an idle thought about how I never finished Witcher 3, and how if I'm gonna go back and play through it again that I might as well do it with something better than my 970.

[Mr.Vic20]

47 minutes ago, Jason said:

 

I honestly haven't looked at much of anything yet since I wasn't sure if it made sense for me to upgrade in my situation. This all started as an idle thought about how I never finished Witcher 3, and how if I'm gonna go back and play through it again that I might as well do it with something better than my 970.

Fair enough! I hope we've at least given you some options to think about. 

[emalider]

On 11/19/2018 at 4:30 AM, Mr.Vic20 said:

8Gb of VRAM is the still the sweet spot, so you're likely good there with any card above a 1070. I would recommend that if you are willing to pay up to 600 for a new GPU, then you should consider the 2070. I say this because as more developers adopt DLSS support, the better this card will get. As is, its slightly faster than a 1080 and is within 50.00 of the same price. If that is more than you are ready to spend then yeah, I would go with the 1070ti and save the extra 100-150 bucks. Have you looked at AMD cards as well? They tend to do pretty well in the sub 500.00 segment of the market. 

 

This 2070 includes BF5 and is a pretty good deal: https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1437852-REG/evga_08g_p4_2172_kr_geforce_rtx_2070_xc.html.

[Mr.Vic20]

20 minutes ago, emalider said:

 

This 2070 includes BF5 and is a pretty good deal: https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1437852-REG/evga_08g_p4_2172_kr_geforce_rtx_2070_xc.html.

Nice deal! 

[Keyser_Soze]

I think all the Nvidia cards include BF5 now. I got a copy with my 2080.

 

[cusideabelincoln]

On 11/19/2018 at 9:01 AM, Pikachu said:

Got a similar question. I have an i5 3570k and 16 GB 1333mhz RAM. I was wondering if upgrading to an AMD 590 would be a good move without too much bottleneck? And would it be a meaningful upgrade from an 8GB 480?

 

A 590 is not a worthwhile upgrade from a 480 even under ideal conditions.  They are the same chip and architecture; the 590 can just hit higher clock speeds and thus squeak out more performance. You'll want to be looking at minimum a Vega 56 or GTX 1070-level of performance to get a worthwhile bump.

 

Your i5 will start to hold you back though.  Consider picking up an i7 3770k and you could probably get better performance (more consistenty, fewer stutters, better framepacing, higher minimum framerates) in quite a few games with your RX 480.

[dualhunter]

I just replaced my GTX 680 SC+ with an RTX 2070 XC. I'm still on an i5 2500k (4.5GHz) with 16GB 1866 DDR3. I haven't had much time to test it out and I haven't tested anything with a frame rate counter yet. While I  was downloading BFV I ran Cradle at 1440p max settings and it stuttered. Last night I ran the FFXV benchmark on High at 4K and my score was barely under the Geforce RTX 2070 score for 4K listed on the stats page. After updating drivers I ran it again on Custom with DLSS and got a higher score. Again, no frame rate counter but it seemed to run smoothly except for a stutter at 2 points and it recommend Standard settings rather than the High that I ran the benchmark with. Battlefield V seems fine at 1440p 144Hz though I've only tried a minute of the beginning of the single player campaign and a match of Team Deathmatch. I'm hoping to try a bigger map with a frame rate counter tonight.

[SmugPrick]

I used my 3770k up until a few weeks ago. The beauty of it was it sold on eBay for 180!