Help buying a new videocard.

[K3NERT]

Hey folks,

 

I need help deciding if I should buy a videocard now or wait until 8xx lineup of Nvidia videocards.

I'm quite a bit of a graphics enthusiast and very very sensible when it comes to framerate. I simply can not handle having lower than 60 framerate continously. My current GPU is not strong enough to run Skyrim on Ultra Settings 60FPS@1200p with heavy ENB i.e. Phinix Natural and texture mods i.e. Skyrim HD.

I currently have my mind on two picks: GTX 780 DCUII or R9 290 DCUII. I picked the 290 since it's almost a 100 euro cheaper than the 290X and when both of them are overclocked, has almost 1:1 performance to the 290X. Keep in mind, the end goal of the purchase is to have a videocard that's capable of running Skyrim 1200p@60FPS@Ultra Settings with heavy ENB, large texture mods and increased viewing distances (not uGrids!).

 

Current Specs:
i7-3770k @ Stock
Gigabyte GTX 670 2GB OC Edition

 

Here's something I quickly made to have a short insight on how the cards generally perform:

 

Left - R9 290, Right - 780

Average 1080p FPS in Games:

75.7 vs 79.5 -5%

34 vs 37.5 -10%

43.3 vs 43.3 0%

58.1 vs 63.4 -9%

R9 290 DCUII is averagely 6% slower than a 780 DCUII

Price: 398,30 vs 444,96

R9 290 DCUII is roughly 10% cheaper than a GTX 780 DCUII

VRAM: 4GB vs 3GB

R9 290 DCUII has 1GB more VRAM than a GTX 780 DCUII

OC:

32 vs 32

42.6 vs 45.6

When both cards are overclocked, the R9 290 is still roughly 6% slower

than a GTX 780 DCUII

At 2560x1440 resolution the R9 290 was up to 10% faster than the GTX 780.

Edited March 6, 2014 by K3NERT

[Deleted5993995User]

Better things will always come. Its just a matter of when you want them. If the new series of cards isn't that far away then you might as well just wait since you want the best and desire a constant good fps.. but if you think you can get all you want out of these cards then go for it.

 

They probably will do the job for 60 FPS with ultra settings and a high-perf ENB. Add in 4k textures to every single thing in Skyrim, static mesh improvements, lighting changes, all kinds of view distance mods like high quality lods and increasing your draw distance, parallex, mods that add loads of new things to the game like floral and trees and town changes, a grass mod set to be ultra dense.. then you're probably not gonna' be staying at 60.

But I could be wrong as I haven't used any of these cards and have no idea what they're capable of :)

But should I be right, then it depends on just how far you want to go with visuals.

 

You could always get two ;)

[K3NERT]

Better things will always come. Its just a matter of when you want them. If the new series of cards isn't that far away then you might as well just wait since you want the best and desire a constant good fps.. but if you think you can get all you want out of these cards then go for it.

 

They probably will do the job for 60 FPS with ultra settings and a high-perf ENB. Add in 4k textures to every single thing in Skyrim, static mesh improvements, lighting changes, all kinds of view distance mods like high quality lods and increasing your draw distance, parallex, mods that add loads of new things to the game like floral and trees and town changes, a grass mod set to be ultra dense.. then you're probably not gonna' be staying at 60.

But I could be wrong as I haven't used any of these cards and have no idea what they're capable of :smile:

But should I be right, then it depends on just how far you want to go with visuals.

 

You could always get two :wink:

I don't really care about grass that much, I care about visuals that I mostly can actually notice the difference of whilst playing. Gopher has a bunch of those mods, he's running a 780 and a heavy ENB. He does manage to keep his FPS around 60 solid, mostly. Although I'm not really sure what kind of settings he has.

[Deleted5993995User]

according to his video descriptions he uses like 5 mods that aren't very taxing. and that won't hit fps near as much as like 50 that include a lot of demanding mods :blush:

 

I'm sure if you loaded your game up a ton, you'd drop frames. so it depends on how far you want to go.

if you're an absolute perfectionist that wants the best video game graphics possible aaaand a stable 60 fps, then you're probably going to need a super high end setup. if you just want real nice visuals with good performance then the cards you're interested in should do the job quite well.

 

also, grass is so awesome.

if you change your mind on it, I highly recommend Grass on Steroids. Not only does it look great, but it runs leagues better than any other grass mod I've tried and makes it possible to actually play with dense grass.

Edited March 6, 2014 by Guest

[Rennn]

Skyrim will probably never stay at 60 fps all the time with a ton of graphics mods. The engine just starts to break eventually and dumps performance down to a fraction of what you would expect. Skyrim doesn't scale as well with stronger hardware as other relatively modern games (granted, it's 3 years old but it was even unusually low-performing when it released). With a heavy ENB on Skyrim, you can expect it to still look worse than Crysis 3 and run at a much lower framerate.

 

As for which card to choose, the 290x should offer better performance in Skyrim, but ENB's support for AMD cards has been lackluster at times. You might get shafted if a new version releases... Also, the 780 will still beat the r290 in games with heavy PhysX or Tesselation such as Metro: LL and most of the best looking next-gen games.

[Thor.]

One video card i recommend, the gtx 780 ti gigabyte windforce edition, it solves your fps problems, if you stay in the lines of the vram limits, just like any video card. I get around 120fps out doors, 260fps in doors with mods and enb. The trick is to limit the texture use, or the fps will tank.

Edited March 7, 2014 by Thor.

[Rennn]

One video card i recommend, the gtx 780 ti gigabyte windforce edition, it solves your fps problems, if you stay in the lines of the vram limits, just like any video card. I get around 120fps out doors, 260fps in doors with mods and enb. The trick is to limit the texture use, or the fps will tank.

 

A 780 Ti will barely get 120 fps average and drops to 90-100 fps in stressful areas on vanilla ultra, let alone with ENB and other graphics mods. Your stats aren't accurate.

Edited March 7, 2014 by Rennn

[Thor.]

My stats are accurate, my system is probably the best optimized, i wish i could send some screens over. Sense enb doesn't like overlay to well it'll just crash to desktop.

 

The highest i ever reached was around 150fps optimized, i have some proof of that with raptr overlay. Note that's not geforce experience optimization or raptr optimization.

 

The lowest it'll dip will be around 90fps depending where you are with enb enabled. Anywhere outdoors its so variable that the fps will scatter from 150 fps to 90fps in a matter of second. The game engine is by far the worst i have come across when it comes to drops in frames, it'll dip 80fps in a blink of an high if your not careful. I was talking the average peak out doors, indoors its another story, 260fps stable.

 

Its like running a poorly optimized benchmark lol.

 

Not to mention i have csaa and supersampling maxed out around 32x and then some.

Edited March 7, 2014 by Thor.

[K3NERT]

A decent GTX 780 Ti costs around €650 in Estonia. And in comparison to the 780, it only gives an average 20% increase and costs about 200€ more. I don't think that it's worth it, I'd rather spend the 200 on very good Arctic Accelero cooling or get a new keyboard.
I appreciate the help, the main problem is deciding whether if I should buy one of those two videocards now or wait until the 8xx lineup.

[Thor.]

i would wait until the 800 series, maxwell is now released on laptops so i would estimated a 50% increase in performance, might even topple mantle and the radeon cards. They consider it a big threat.

 

http://www.extremetech.com/gaming/177974-nvidias-mobile-maxwell-gpu-is-a-monster-beating-all-current-amd-and-nv-graphics-cards-by-a-huge-margin

Nvidia is pushing sheer power.

Smiles, it didn't beat my system yet, i score a 5330 on 3dmark. That's impressive considering that's a laptop gpu, see what i mean when it could very well be a threat to mantle and the Radeon cards.

Edited March 7, 2014 by Thor.