GPU: Upgrade this year or wait?

[Sirrrus]

Hello,

I received excellent advice on my current build a while back and I thought I'd check back for more advice.

CPU: i7-4930k
Mobo: Asus Rampage IV Extreme Black Edition
PSU: Seasonic 1250XM
Cooling: Corsair Hydro Series H100i
RAM: G.SKILL Ripjaws Z Series 16GB (4 x 4GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 2133
GPU: 2x SLI EVGA GTX 780 Classified
Hard Drive: 1TB Samsung 850 Evo
Case: CoolerMaster HAF 932 Advanced

I'm trying to decide if I should upgrade the GPU. The 980Ti is about to come out and then you have the high end Titans. I'm into seriously delicious graphics when gaming. I want to be lost in and feel like everything is real. I'm looking forward to Assassin's Creed in the fall, Batman: Arkham Knight in June, possibly Dishonored 2 and/or Elder Scrolls 6/Fallout 4 depending on what Bethesda comes up with. Ever since I built this rig, I've always felt it was "good" but not "great". Still had stuttering and hiccups with graphics with some demanding games. I want to be able to crank the settings up as high as possible.

One more minor note. I play on a 50" plasma TV. I love the size, helps me get lost in the RPG's. But I wouldn't be opposed to getting a new high end monitor if it would dramatically improve visual performance. I avoided it because I'm pretty sure this model GPU doesn't interact with the G-sync monitors.

Thank you so much in advance! Any and all advice is helpful!

[Korth]

I assume your 50" TV has at least 1080 HD resolution, perhaps even 4K?

Your x8/x8 GPU SLI setup is excellent, and a great balance of price-vs-performance-vs-overkill. Although a pair of GTX780 cards is indeed overkill for playing mid-weight 3D games at 1920x1080, a single GTX780 could probably sustain 60fps running WoW with all the eye-candy turned on at that resolution.

The 780 (and 780Ti and TITAN) cards were epic in their time and they're still mighty beasts. The new TitanX card is an epic beast (lookit that phat 12GB of GDDR5!), but it's no true Titan. The 980Ti is also impressive, exactly the incremental upgrade on the 980 that people expected. Both of these cards will command the top of the price tier until NVidia releases their new product line (circa Q2/2016, people say), but NVidia will likely keep trickling out other cards to "fill out" intermediate rungs on the pricing ladder. AMD is (or will soon be) offering some new "ultra-enthusiast" toys with phenomenal specs as well. Expect GPU card prices from both manufacturers to basically sit where they are (and maybe inflate a little, as supplies are brought down a bit) until their new rollouts push existing cards down the price hierarchy and force a little more competition. Remaining stocks of "obsolete" GPUs (GTX 660Ti, HD79xx, etc) are sometimes found at awesome liquidation prices these days, definitely worth scoring if your budget is tight and/or extreme performance from a couple years ago is adequate for your needs.

NV Partners (including Asus) probably have more detailed access to NVidia's product schedules (after all, they will already be bidding for GPUs in volume so they can start in-house binning processes and, ultimately, offer a whole range of factory-overclocked card models). But they're probably locked down with heavy NDA shackles, NVidia has legally (and economically) sanctioned violators who've leaked before.

The GTX780 chip supports G-Sync. NVidia built it into the GPU design (or at least they built it into NV Partner licensing, lol), it's not an optional add-on, and it would be kinda stupid for any manufacturer to sacrifice such a major selling point in return for pennies anyhow. Monitors which support G-Sync carry a hefty price premium, partly imposed by the NVidia license.

I personally think the best bang for the buck, these days, would be 4GB GTX670/680 and 3GB R9-280/280X cards at the low end and 4GB GTX980 or R9-290X cards at the high end. Yes there are cheaper cards, and yes there are better cards, but these models offer (I think) the best overall compromise for most gamers and most gamers' budgets.

[kkn]

your monitor/tv dont support more then 60HZ max even if it is "listed more".
read on the specs of it, under pc , it says after connecting pc tru hdmi its 60HZ.
so if you want to take advantage of graphics i would go for a high HZ pc monitor before tv TBH ( i play on tv too so i know ).

[Sirrrus]

Ok, so go for a nice monitor? How well could my current setup handle 4K?

Also, is there some bottleneck that's causing the small hangups/stuttering/lagging I occasionally get? I feel like I should be cruising through all these games and I'm not quite convinced that it's the TV causing this issue... =(

[kkn]

4K? forget it.
1440P? yes you can.
4K i would recommend 980TI or titan X.
but then again as of now the monitors are 60HZ ( 4K monitors )

[Nate152]

Hello Sirrus

If money isn't an issue you could upgrade to three 980ti's and a 32" 4k monitor and game with the highest settings except with AA maxed out of course.

A 4k monitor will give you 4 times the picture quality compared to gaming at 1080p.

This will cost around 3,000.00 for three 980ti's and a 4k monitor but it will be as good as you can get at the moment. The 980ti is almost on par with the gtx titan x. G-sync isn't a necessity if you can keep pegged at 60FPS with v-sync.

If you're gaming at 1080p with two 780's in sli I don't see how you would be getting stutters and hiccups unless you're using 8x AA or more.

[Sirrrus]

I don't understand it either, but Assassin's Creed: Unity, Crysis 3, Dragon Age: Inquisition, Alien: Isolation all have moments where it slows down. Perhaps it's not tweaked quite right? Or perhaps it's warmer than it should be? Does my issue sound primarily hardware related?

[Nate152]

it could be how you have the 3d settings in the NVidia control panel as well as the game settings. If you have antialiasing cranked up try lowering it to x2.

Also try enbling v-sync.

[Sirrrus]

I have deliberately not installed the Nvidia 3D settings because I don't use the 3D...kinda hurts my eyes. Changing AA seems to have no effect. V-sync enabled for all games. 😞

[Nate152]

I don't use 3d either, these settings are in the NVidia control panel under manage 3d settings.


Ambient occlusion - OFF (for now)
Anisotropic filtering - Application controlled
Antialiasing FXAA - Off
Antialiasing - Gamma correcection - ON
Antialiasiing - Mode - Application controlled
Antialiasing setting - Application controlled
Antialiasing -Transparency - OFF
CUDA - GPU's - ALL
DSR Factors - OFF
DSR Smoothness - OFF
maximum pre rendered frames - 2
Mulit display/mixed-GPU acceleration - Single display performance mode
Power management mode - Prefer maximum performance
Shader cache - ON
Texture filtering - Anisotropic sample option - OFF
Texture filtering Negative LOD bias - ALLOW
Texture filtering - quality - High Quality
Texture filtering - Trilinear optimization - ON
triple buffering - OFF
Vertical sync - Application controlled
Virtual reality pre rendered frames - 1
SLI rendering mode - NVidia recommended

Turn v-sync on in the game settings.

At 1080p you should be able to do x2 - x4 antialiasing no problem with sli 780 classifieds.

Give this a try and see if things are any better for you.