GPU help please

[thebs]

I'm currently running with a GTX660 GPU and with Horizons it starting to struggle a bit. It's coupled with an i5-3330 CPU and 12GB of RAM.
I'm contemplating swapping out the GTX660 for a GTX970 because I don't need cutting edge performance and I think I can get away with it (without my wife noticing). I'm wondering if I should hold off a bit as I've heard of new nVidia cards coming that might mean people start selling 970's to upgrade but I can't find anything on timing.

I finally upgraded from a GTX 660 Ti 2GiB to a GTX 970 4GiB on Black Friday 2014, and didn't regret it.

I only wished Gigabyte's 6.7" long ITX version would have been out at the time. That card can fit in a very, very small and true cube indeed! Yes, I'm an ITX wennie.

I've thought about upgrading the CPU as well (assuming I can find an old i7 that will fit) but I'm assuming the more urgent need is the GPU.

The Intel LGA-1155 (2xxx/3xxx CPU, 6x/7x MCH, SandyBridge / IvyBridge) and LGA-1150 (4xxx/5xxx CPU, 8x/9x MCH, Haswell / Broadwell, although the latter isn't found in performance desktop), are all fairly and equally capable. They are all 8GiB 1R UDIMM DDR3 platforms (16GiB 1R UDIMM capable with Haswell/Broadwell, but no fab ever made the DRAM ICs required in DDR3), similar I/O and interconnect capabilities and features.

The biggest issue was Intel crippling the lower end B and H series products in the 60-90 series that are now more "standard" in the LGA-1151 (6xxx/7xxx CPU, 1xx/???, SkyLake / Kaby Lake).

LGA-1151 adds DDR4 with 16GiB 1R UDIMMs (DDR3 support requires wasteful glue, so no one is doing it outside of servers), and Intel finally got full NVMe boot going in 64-bit Native uEFI Storage Services now that Microsoft finally does it right in NT 10.

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Don't get me started on that latter rant. NVMe is the bomb for PCIe-based NAND read queuing. Let's just say if it wasn't for Samsung, Intel and Microsoft would probably still have issues, because they rely so much on OEMs to provide drivers. I honestly don't blame manufacturers for just waiting to release specs, work with the Linux community develop the drivers, and be done with it instead of that whole support non-sense where Intel and Microsoft don't lift much.

I've personally just stuck with my i5-2500K (Sandy) from late 2010 and got a killer i7-4790K (Ivy) deal in late 2014, and they are just fine for gaming. I actually have more memory in my notebook (32GiB) which is a i7-2860qm (Sandy), as it has four (4) SO-DIMMs while my ITX cubes only have two (2).

If I was assembling new today, I'd get a SkyLake. But there is no need to upgrade from SandyBridge or later, until you really need something it offers.

I'm personally not in a notebook until I see a commodity, 1TB NVMe M.2 NAND device in regular circulation. I've been using 1TB mSATA NAND since 2014 in my notebook, and a 1TB 2.5" NAND in my desktop.

So, any ideas on when the new cards will hit or any other thoughts on the direction to go?

So, I asked myself this very same question, especially since I already have a GTX 970 4GiB.

According to everything I read, the Titan will appear in just a couple of months. It will be expensive, of course. The high-end consumer products won't follow until November, and that means they won't be in good supply until amost 2017, let alone the mid-tier is likely not community until spring of 2017. So ...

I just bought a GTX 980 Ti 6GiB today. In fact, I'm looking to sell my not-so-reference GTX 970 4GiB. I almost want to keep it, and then sell my GTX 660 Ti 2GiB, but I know my 970 is 2x a 660, while the 660 Ti is only 33% faster than a 660.

[de Carabas]

I get the impression that you know what you are talking about thebs. Just as well really, 'cause you lost me with most of that post

For now I'm a happy camper with the second GTX970 that I tried. My machine just wasn't happy with the EVGA one, I replaced it with an MSI and it's been rock-solid. For now I'll not worry about my processor (i5-3330).

[TorTorden]

As long as this is taking I'm less worried I jumped the gun getting my 980ti last December along with my 3440x1440 screen.

It depends how things go with vr maybe I'll build a new i7 rig in 2018 but only if I then consider my current i5 based pc as less viable.
Only time I feel my CPU is bottlenecking is if I live stream or try recording gameplay at the formentioned resolution.
If I drop down to 1080p for capturing it's plenty still. and I don't really care that much about recording or livestreaming anyways.

[thebs]

I get the impression that you know what you are talking about thebs. Just as well really, 'cause you lost me with most of that post

Oh, I don't know about that. I mean, an accountant can ramble off on the tax code ... and he can still be wrong.

For now I'm a happy camper with the second GTX970 that I tried. My machine just wasn't happy with the EVGA one, I replaced it with an MSI and it's been rock-solid. For now I'll not worry about my processor (i5-3330).

Glad you've got a working GTX 970 now. It's definitely the best bang-for-the-buck card right now in the 3 Teraflop+ (Single Precision) category.

I now have the following, three (3) GTX 900 series cards in my wife and my systems, from newest to oldest ...

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MSI GeForce GTX 980 Ti GAMING 6G LE in my CoolerMaster Elite 120
Case 16"/400mm long, cards allowed over 12"/300mm long


MSI GIGABYTE GeForce GTX 970 4GB Mini-ITX OC Edition (GV-N970IXOC-4GD) in my CoolerMaster Elite 110
Case only 11"/280cm long, card limited to 8"/200mm


EVGA GeForce GTX 970 FTW Gaming ACX 2.0 (04G-P4-2978-KR) in my SilverStone SG05BB
Case only 11"/280cm long, card limited to just over 10"/250mm


For more on the cases, see the Spoiler in this hardware post.
I really love the Gigabyte GTX 970 Mini-ITX Edition, which is only 6.7" (170mm) long, and fits in anything, while still being fully featured and i've had 0 issues with heat.

[thebs]

As long as this is taking I'm less worried I jumped the gun getting my 980ti last December along with my 3440x1440 screen.

I probably did "jump the gun" by going GTX 980 Ti just this past month, so close to the new, 1000 series launch.

But nVidia has traditionally made prices proportionate to performance, so I don't expect to get GTX 980 Ti performance for the $500 I paid for mine. I figure just the GTX 1080 will be $699 to start, and hard to find for anything less, maybe $20 off promotions.

Now it is good they are now on TSMC's (?) new 16nm feature size, which will bring power requirements down. Indeed, it looks to be the new GTX 1080 will deliver better peformance than (although still within 20-33%? -- more 6-8 Teraflop v. 5.6 Teraflop?) the GTX 980 Ti, but at only 170-180W TDP, instead of the 250W TDP required for the latter. The limited benchmarks out there seem to be mobile editions, and it's not the 3x "benchmark" over the prior mobile (more like 50%), although desktop may vary (I don't expect more than double).

I wouldn't be surprised if the 8-10 Teraflop GTX 1080 Titan (or whatever they call it) is around full grand, with double the memory, and then a 1080 Ti later on for less, possibly pushing the GTX 1080 down.

It depends how things go with vr maybe I'll build a new i7 rig in 2018 but only if I then consider my current i5 based pc as less viable.

True quad-core i5 is virtually as good as the i7. With the i7, in the desktop, all you're usually getting is usually a little more clock, a little more L3 cache and (rather useless for gaming, sometimes worse) HyperThreading.

Only time I feel my CPU is bottlenecking is if I live stream or try recording gameplay at the formentioned resolution.
If I drop down to 1080p for capturing it's plenty still. and I don't really care that much about recording or livestreaming anyways.

Are you writing to a SSD? Not doing so killed my performance, and I had lots of dropped frames. Now I only get 3-5s of visual reduction, then it pics up again.

[JustSomeGuy]

I'm still using GTX 660 non-ti, and been wanting a new one for a while, but I'll keep waiting for couple of more months. I want to see what the 'next gen' has to offer, and at the very least the new ones usually push the price of the old ones down a bit so one way or another I'm sure I'll get that 660 replaced. RTG:s Polaris 10 is the one I'm most interested in at the moment, at least until there is more detailed information available.

[thebs]

I'm still using GTX 660 non-ti, and been wanting a new one for a while, but I'll keep waiting for couple of more months. I want to see what the 'next gen' has to offer, and at the very least the new ones usually push the price of the old ones down a bit so one way or another

But that didn't happen with the 900 series to the 700 in the desktop. I know, because I had a 660 Ti until late 2014. Even with Black Friday specials on boards, CPUs, etc... there were no GPU sales, other than $20 off here, maybe $30 off in one case I saw.

And the only thing I ever saw in 2015 was the 770 dropping $100 and being offered for not much less than the 970. The 970 was slightly more powerful with far, far less power consumption, making it a non-sale for me. The 760 Ti and 780 didn't see much drop at all, and eventually became difficult to find as a result of vendors dropping stock, while the 750/750 Ti stuck around until the 950 was released.

Only with the 900m mobile series did we finally see some vendors drop notebook prices with the 800m still inside. Although those vendors that could upgrade the 900m mobile module then rebranded a new variant. That won't happen with the 1000m from what I understand, it'll be a design change, but don't quote me.

I'm sure I'll get that 660 replaced. RTG:s Polaris 10 is the one I'm most interested in at the moment, at least until there is more detailed information available.

^ This is more likely to cause price drops, especially in the lower-end mobile market where AMD still has a good amount of OEM penetration. Because Intel loves to cripple the low-end products, AMD does well with OEMs on the value segment, which means they'll get related, OEM penetration on the higher-end GPU end too .. undermining nVidia for discrete GPUs.

So I think it'll definitely make the 1000m more price competitive.

The question is when and how much penetration will AMD get on the desktop. If they are able to challenge nVidia's performance, that will definitely start to impact prices by fall and we could see some great Black Friday deals. But if not, as well as until then, nVidia is going to milk the price of the GTX 1000 series on the desktop. It'll take AMD hitting them hard to push prices down.

That said ...

I could be wrong. E.g., if nVidia is getting better yields on the new TSMC 16nm process for the 1000 than the 900 products using the old 28nm, you can be sure they're going to flip that switch for full economies-of-scale, trying to push as many as they can. That's about the only scenario where I could see nVidia dropping prices without market pressure from AMD.

It's one of those things I'd love to be able to tap my colleagues on the shoulder and ask about, where they are with tape-out and their resulting yields (one is an AMD product manager). Both AMD and nVidia are using the TSMC 16nm process, and I know they had failures with early yields (one of the reasons I was wondering if nVidia is still going with TSMC -- apparently they still are). We'll know more when the products hit.

We should see some similarities from the 40nm switch in the 500 series to the 28nm process for the 600 series, but 600 products were costly when they first came out ... even having a "markup" in several cases beyond MSRP in some cases. E.g., a few months after the 600 series came out, the GTX 660 Ti hit and was often priced $30-50 over nVidia MSRP, because it performed close to a GTX 670 that cost $100 more.

[JustSomeGuy]

I think AMD uses 14nm with those new ones. Anyway, we can mostly speculate at this point. I hope AMD does well, a bit of competition is good for us end users. And I have a feeling that even if the price of the current generation goes down a bit, I will still go for the new ones.

One plan I had was to get a new card anyway even if they were not the top of the line, for example if the Polaris 10 is similar to say R9 390x performance wise, and the price is right, I'll buy it. When the heavy hitters arrive later, and if I end up wanting one of those, I can then move that Pol-10 to my living room pc.

One thing I noticed with my very old living room pc was that AMD OSS drivers seem to work better with KDE plasma 5 than nVidia's closed driver on this old pc (I have 2 desktops, old pc and very old pc ). Have not tried nVidia's open one with plasma, but I've heard the nouveau is not the best option at least for games. Most visible difference was that with AMD there was absolutely no screen tearing in desktop use, when moving windows, playing video etc. This is one reason why I have that "Polaris 10 plan" in my head, as that living room pc runs Linux most of the time. If I end up getting a faster card later, then I can move that Pol-10 to the living room pc, and enjoy video free of tearing.

But it's all just current plan, could change a lot when things change around the whole thing, performance, other cababilities, price, drivers...

[TorTorden]

Only time I feel my CPU is bottlenecking is if I live stream or try recording gameplay at the formentioned resolution.
If I drop down to 1080p for capturing it's plenty still. and I don't really care that much about recording or livestreaming anyways.

Are you writing to a SSD? Not doing so killed my performance, and I had lots of dropped frames. Now I only get 3-5s of visual reduction, then it pics up again.

That's a very good point, been so far storing to one of my possibly ancient harddrives so they are quite possibly not up to the task, at least not after I went from 2 million pixels (1080p) to practically 5 million (3440x1440).
That's another thing I might look into, getting a couple of new SSD's and a few new harddrives, would like more SSD's for os and high capacity stuff, and I need more storage anyways.

But I honestly should just build a NAS for that.

Looks like I built my current rig in 2014 apart from the GPU, 16GB ram, and the i5 4670k.
I normally aim to get maybe, two to three years out of a build but if I dont have to I dont have to

Anyhoo, I don't really care all that much about capturing my gaming, I guess I'm just too old.
I remember a time when nerds would practically hide their games like porn, now it's bragged about

[thebs]

That's a very good point, been so far storing to one of my possibly ancient harddrives so they are quite possibly not up to the task, at least not after I went from 2 million pixels (1080p) to practically 5 million (3440x1440).

If you have 24-32GiB RAM (possibly even just 16GiB) you might even be better off creating a 8GiB (4GiB) ramdisk. That should hold enough for 20 (10) minutes of 3.5K@60Hz. There are various Windows software drivers out there for that.

Otherwise, just use a folder on a NAND SSD drive. It doesn't have to be an existing drive. $40 will get you a 120GB and $60 a 240GB these days. Just format it and either assign it a new drive letter, or mount it in some directory on the C: drive (yes, you can do this too in Windows 7+).

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I'm double f'd because my D: drive is a 4x4TB RAID-5 array (12TB effective), so the inefficient XOR operations (for the PC bus) keep me from getting more than maybe 50MiBps linear throughput at best, sub-10MiBps when writes are contested with other reads or operations. Reads are blazing fast, because 4x4TB RAID-5 is effectively like having a 3-drive RAID-0, but writes are slower.

The second I moved to my 1TB NAND SSD, I went from lots of lost frames forever to just 3-5 seconds of lost frames. And that was just for 2K@60Hz (1080p)! Since they are largely linear writes, it's close to a 1:1 commit, so I won't wear out my SSD too fast. I also only have a 383GiB C: drive, so I have lots of under-commit.

That's another thing I might look into, getting a coup, e of new SSD's and a few new harddrives, would like more SSD's for os and high capacity stuff, and I need more storage anyways.

Other than this "high-end" system (1TB NAND SSD, 4x4TB RAID-5) ...

I just use a $60, 240GB NAND device for my 127GiB C: drive, where Windows is located, everything else goes over on a D: drive, which is usually (2) 1TB (+8MB NAND) Hybrid SSHD drives in RAID-1. Steam is installed on D:, but I also setup C:\SteamSSD for any games that are I/O heavy (e.g., Fallout 4), in addition to the output for nVidia ShadowPlay.

But I honestly should just build a NAS for that.,

I have two (2) NAS devices.

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One is my high-end Linux server with boatloads of memory and six (6) hard drives, but I don't boot it except for archiving or various build work I do on the weekends or evenings. I also only have it connected to the segmented, "secure" LAN, but that's me and my anal security nature (5 zones at home).

The other is a nice, ultra low power Synology DS414slim (DS416slim is the latest), with 4 x 2TB 2.5" (yes, 2.5") drives that consumes less than 30W (including hard drives). That one stays on 24x7 and does anything and everything file and media, connected to the "default wireless" that all consoles, phones, tablets and Windows systems are connected to.

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It's still Linux underneath, so I can hack it, but the DiskStation Manager (DSM) means you don't need to know jack about Linux. It has an advanced Java GUI console, various Apple/Android/etc... media compatible services, and uses all sorts of protocols that "just works" with everything. It's much better than most SOHO NAS software out there, sustained much better, I've had an unit fail and moved drives to a new unit and it "restored" all the settings automagically (as long of the same, major Synology product series).

Synology has other products too (nearly all have 3.5" bays), although I find the J-series is just fine unless I'm transcoding a lot of video (but that's what a PC is for).

Looks like I built my current rig in 2014 apart from the GPU, 16GB ram, and the i5 4670k.
I normally aim to get maybe, two to three years out of a build but if I dont have to I dont have to

I'm still running 35W TDP AMD Opteron 4000 series units for OpenStack. They do the job, and are low power so I'm running a full datacenter (7 servers) for under 400W.

Anyhoo, I don't really care all that much about capturing my gaming, I guess I'm just too old.
I remember a time when nerds would practically hide their games like porn, now it's bragged about

I was one of those computer nerds in the '80s, and didn't hide it, but ...

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... also a 3-sport athlete. My teammates would constantly tell me not to talk about tech at parties, but I couldn't resist. I figured they only kept me around because I didn't drink. 365 days/year automatic designated driver.

There was always a joke among them that my girlfriends were hot at the start of the year, then total nerds by the end. I.e., at the start of the year, new girls didn't know how much of a computer nerd I was, and just saw the [American] football jersey. Eventually, it all came out. I literally never had a girlfriend more than 5-6 weeks in my life (sans 1, other than my wife).

But I was always myself and didn't care what people thought, or let them dictate my friends, back in the '80s. I also loved Slavic women, which was taboo in the Cold War US of the '80s. Now that I'm a fat UNIX geek, married to a Hungarian-Italian (US-born, not a mail-order bride), people look at me and go, "figures."