GPU help please

[Bowza]

I have a 970 4gb card from Zotec, I run MSI aftrburner to boost the clocks by 5% so its a rather nice card.


drives a 24" benq screen at 1080p at ultra settings so well pleased with it, As I hope you will be with yours.

[Avago-Earo]

Do you want to go with VR?

If you want to play at 1080p on High/Ultra settings then the 970 should be just fine. I'm playing on a 970 (Asus Strix) with an i5 4460 and am mostly buttery all the way. I did my first home build PC and when I upgraded to a 970 it flew. Saying that, I'm speaking from a novice's point of view. I've read that the 970 is pretty much minimum when it comes to VR and playing Elite D.

[TorTorden]

The 970 is not minimum for the rift. It's the minimum RECOMMENDED and that makes for a small but big differentiation.
Earlier great woes will soon go out the window since before now there has only been a development kit and they have largely been used with games that doesn't really support of was designed for VR at all, that meant throwing a lot of hardware at the problem.

With the right tweaks and maturation VR as it comes this year will probably eventually not tax a computer much more than running a trippel screen setup or less, except for one caveat and that is VR wants a 75fps to be truly imersive.

I still think VR is a couple of years off from fully complete and available to anyone.

[de Carabas]

Closing the loop here:

I got the 4GB EVGA GTX970 and fitted it (while my wife wasn't looking). All went very smoothly. Frame rates are limited by my monitor which will only do 1080p and 60Hz but it's running that on Ultra without dropping below the 59-60Hz so far, even when canyon flying.
The EVGA software (Precision X) is great and gives some good onscreen feedback about temperatures etc which I'll keep an eye on for a while to see the behavior in Haz Res sites etc. So far the fan has not really had to do a lot

Interestingly Frameshift transitions feel faster which I thought was limited by network not graphics but from the onscreen display for Precision X I can see a power usage spike for the GPU at that point (as it has to hurry up and render what's at the drop point?).

[Jeffers2112]

I was in a similar position but I didn't fancy forking out for a 900 series card.
I got another GTX660 fairly cheaply so I now run a pair of them in SLI mode.
I've a 2560x1440 monitor and the setup is giving me good performance with Horizons 64 bit.
The only strange thing I noticed is that this really confuses the NVidia Gforce experience software, which claims that my system doesn't meet the minimum spec to run Elite. I've just ignored that......

[TorTorden]

I pretty much ignore the geforce experience all together
Congrats on the card, should do you nicely for quite awhile

[Black Rose]

I have the GTX 970 at 4 gb of ddr5 memeory. It was at 189.00 upgrade to the base card which was a 660 on my new build.

I am running 16gb of 2466 mhz memory and the CPU is an i7 Devil's Canyon at 4.0 ghz, not over clocking.

I am also running at 1920 X 1080 at max settings. Some games I run at 2560 X 1440

All in all the GTX 970 is all I need for now and it was considerably less costly than a 980.

[Digga]

Something for people interested in GPU cards.

According to this NVidia Gameworks - Game Over for You video, buying NVidia cards means some of your money is going towards the obsolescence of the card.

https://youtu.be/O7fA_JC_R5s

I have heard about this before, like NVidia deliberately reducing the performance of older generation cards, the video helps to make some sense of that.

Before anyone calls me an AMD fanboy, I have owned NVidia cards since the 6800 and currently run 2x670 in SLI.
I am waiting for the Polaris vs Pascal fight before making any decisions.

[Roger Wilco Jr]

Funny thing, I've always considered the history of PCs to be the history of obsolescence and upgrading. Whether it's cpus, busses, storage, or graphics, there is always something faster, bigger, and cheaper. Up until my last computer, I've always been pretty cheap, buying middle of the road components, but I'd still upgrade about every 5 years or so on average. And I was still too cheap to buy a 980 last time. Meanwhile, I'd always be reading about people who are constantly upgrading, maybe even more than once a year. So it just seems a little unrealistic for someone to think 3-4 year old previous generation graphics cards to still be viable verses the latest tech. But maybe things have changed vs. previous generation upgrades, and maybe I'll feel a little different if the performance of my 970 goes in the crapper in a year or two. But then I'd be just about a year away from upgrading again anyway.

Regardless, my next upgrade will be driven by the requirements of second generation VR (read that as affordable). I'd always bought ATI/AMD cards in the past, and I'll happily go back to them, but if Nvidia is the best option, that's what I'll do.

[TorTorden]

Funny thing, I've always considered the history of PCs to be the history of obsolescence and upgrading. Whether it's cpus, busses, storage, or graphics, there is always something faster, bigger, and cheaper. Up until my last computer, I've always been pretty cheap, buying middle of the road components, but I'd still upgrade about every 5 years or so on average. And I was still too cheap to buy a 980 last time. Meanwhile, I'd always be reading about people who are constantly upgrading, maybe even more than once a year. So it just seems a little unrealistic for someone to think 3-4 year old previous generation graphics cards to still be viable verses the latest tech. But maybe things have changed vs. previous generation upgrades, and maybe I'll feel a little different if the performance of my 970 goes in the crapper in a year or two. But then I'd be just about a year away from upgrading again anyway.

Regardless, my next upgrade will be driven by the requirements of second generation VR (read that as affordable). I'd always bought ATI/AMD cards in the past, and I'll happily go back to them, but if Nvidia is the best option, that's what I'll do.

As for crazy ass upgrade cycles, there are actually quite a few hobbies that can be way worse.
I am suffering personally for one such addicition, mainly becoming an audio\video nutter with focus on home cinema, with setups where even my mid range projector (that is old by most people standards at about 3 years now) costs 3-4k$ and fairly "decent" blueray\universal disc player cost more than my 980TI...

Another, that I don't suffer myself would be mountain biking, hugely expensive 10k$ or so bikes that basically gets destroyd with just light use for a few months and then you pretty much might as well bin them. (ok I might be exaggerating a bit)

But basically there many many things far more expensive and less useful than owning a great gaming computer