Replacing my GTX480

[ClockworkBlack]

Thanks for the info Clockwork.

 

Awesome news, unfortunately I won't be getting one of those for a long time if ever but it will be nice to see prices on 900s drop. How much of a difference does 4gb to 6gb make since I've heard that 2gb on 4gb on the same card isn't that significant?

 

Unfortunately there are a lot of complaints over support for the 700 series drivers and this will only make things worse for them. I wonder if we will start hearing the same complaints for the 900 series after these 1000s drop.

 

It really depends on what game you play. 2 to 4 gb of vram can make a huge difference or not at all. So can 4 to 6. More VRAM doesn't really give you more performance out of your GPU overall. VRAM is very similar to regular ram. If all the applications on your computer require 2gb of RAM whether you have 4 gb or 64gb it makes no difference in performance. The only time you notice a difference is when you see a performance drop because you don't have enough. Well its exactly the same for VRAM. All of the games textures (and some other things) get loaded into the VRAM. So if you play a game with poor texture compression or really high quality textures you need more VRAM. But if you have enough VRAM it won't make your game faster to just have more. Vram is the thing you want to have enough of but having more won't make things any better.

 

That's why 4k requires so much VRAM. Because when you switch your resolution to 4k all those textures render in 4k which is a lot larger than 1080p.

 

The 700 series are kind of a special case scenario. Until recently I had 2 EVGA 770's in SLI (the 2gb version). I've only ever had problems with them after I jumped over to windows 10. I was on windows 7 before and I didn't have a single issue. After windows 10 I had constant driver crashes, BSOD's caused by DirectX, slow downs, etc. And all of that is because the Nvidia drivers. Now this is just me. I know other people have problems with them in general. But EVGA made better 770s than most other manufacturers (even though they kinda dropped the ball on the 900 series) so I suspect that's why I had less issues than my friend who has an MSI. However the 600 series (and even 500 and 400) don't have as many issues. That's why there's no reason to believe that 900 will have anymore issues than it has now. I think you'll be fine if you can get a good 900 series card.

 

But of course if you buy it used you have to take a risk that it has some issue. it doesn't have to be the card being DOA. It could've been overheated, could've had water on it from a water cooling loop, or just improper installation/uninstall without taking the anti-static precautions. All of that can cause all sorts of issues from artifacts in games (Textures going crazy, effects like dust and smoke showing up only when your camera is in a certain position, etc) to random GPU freezes crashing your whole system. But of course that's a worse case scenario. I bought my second 770 from Ebay used and it worked fine. Just make sure that the page from where you buy has a "ebay money back guarantee" and that you contact the seller on ebay and get him to tell you that it has absolutely no issues and that he uses an anti static bag/foam to ship to you. That way if the card has issues you can always return it and have a case to get your money back. Its not a 100% guarantee, but its better than nothing.

[obobski]

Agree with everything Clockwork said (not sure I could've said it better myself!), just some bits and bobs to add:

 

- AMD is also coming out with new cards as part of the "Arctic Islands" series, which are next-gen GCN using the same stacked memory (HBM) that Pascal gets (random factoid: HBM was first introduced with the Radeon Fury, but in that implementation is limited to 4GB; "HBM2" for Pascal and Arctic Islands will eliminate that cap).

 

- Memory usage will vary not only between different games/applications, but from card to card too, as different architectures and drivers handle their resources differently (this includes how resources are reported too).* The whole reasoning of "more is better when its needed" is 100% true, but what exactly constitutes "needed" is somewhat variable from game/driver/card to game/driver/card. Not all 4K gaming will require even 4GB of memory - it really depends on the application (e.g. requirements for Oblivion at 4K are going to be different than Skyrim at 4K). Here's a TweakTown review that gets into it a bit more:

http://www.tweaktown.com/tweakipedia/89/much-vram-need-1080p-1440p-4k/index.html

And a HardOCP article comparing different cards' memory usage in the same applications:

http://www.hardocp.com/article/2016/04/17/hitman_2016_performance_video_card_review/9

 

Easiest advice here is just to get whatever is the best GPU you can afford, and if it includes more VRAM than others that's great too. Don't shy away from extra capacity *unless* it comes at the cost of bandwidth (this is an old trick that some OEMs still pull on folks, where they'll double or quadruple capacity but you get slower RAM out of the deal, which will hurt performance across the board), but certainly don't overspend just to have tons of surplus memory you'll never use.

 

- Running a game at 4K (or any other resolution) doesn't (by itself) force a specific texture resolution, at least this is not true for all games (but it would make a lot of sense to see developers start pushing higher resolution textures when running at higher render resolutions).

 

 

 

* If you want to read a lot more on DirectX and VRAM you can go bounce around on MSDN:

https://code.msdn.microsoft.com/windowsdesktop/DirectX-Video-Memory-ee7d8319

https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/hardware/ff569456%28v=vs.85%29.aspx

https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/hardware/ff538322%28v=vs.85%29.aspx

https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/hardware/ff565494%28v=vs.85%29.aspx

https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/hardware/ff569500%28v=vs.85%29.aspx

https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/hardware/ff570508%28v=vs.85%29.aspx

 

I know there's another MSDN page where they specifically outline the relationship between VRAM and system memory, and suggest a minimum ratio of 2:1, as DirectX requires VRAM resources to be backed by system memory, so for example with a 1GB videocard, at least 2GB of system memory is suggested. If I could find that page to link I would include it (if I stumble across it later, and remember, I will edit this post). Where things get a bit interesting is if we're talking about Titan X (with 12GB of VRAM), or something even more ridiculous like FirePro W9100 (with 32GB of VRAM) - do you really need 24 or 64GB of memory at base? Windows will certainly boot with VRAM:system memory at 1:1 (or even "backwards" e.g. a 256MB card in a system with 128MB of memory) but I'm guessing if you actually had a game that could use 32GB of VRAM, and the machine only had 8GB of system memory, you may run into trouble with the W9100. That's largely theoretical though, since no game is using resources like that, and the "big memory" cards of today likely couldn't keep up with such a game when it comes into existence.

[FMod]

I currently have a GTX480 1536mb GDDR5. Yes, I know it's very old but it has been a pretty good card for years in my EVGA ftw3 x58 mobo

It's struggling badly though and I need an upgrade. Unfortunately I don't have much money so I'm trying to figure something out for under $150

 

Your 480 is a pretty decent card. As your own chart shows, the potential gains from an affordable or less than high-end card (seeing how you're considering a 770) are in the range of percentages, not times improvement.

 

Is it struggling somewhere specific, and have you tried to optimize the visual settings (and I mean optimize - turn out the stuff that doesn't produce a visible difference - not gut them out) in that game?

 

Games are designed to run on a wide variety of hardware; yours is still well in the upper half and should be able to do 60 fps almost everywhere in 1080p, at reasonably high settings. There's a lot of performance left on the table if you don't play with the settings - it's usually just 1 or 2 switches somewhere that cause a card like that to struggle, and only if set to their highest. Shadows can grab a ton of power for almost nothing; SSAO at "high" can halve the framerate over "low"; on the other hand, textures can usually be safely maxed out even on low-end cards.

 

I'm not trying to discourage you, but buying a $150 card right now or soon will be a bad decision in the long run, considering that you don't seem to upgrade frequently. With custom settings, you should still be able to run almost all games at 60 fps looking very close to the best they can, and a new $150 card won't make them look twice better or even 10% better.

 

For what your buying habits seem to be, I suggest to shy away from everything on the market right now, unless you're buying it used and getting a good deal. And even then, more and better cards things will flood the second-hand market after the next generation drops. Don't worry too much about driver support, you're not running SLI. For your presumably 1920x1080 display, VRAM shouldn't be the bottleneck on any card.

 

Nvidia's new 1070/1080 or whatever won't be in your budget.

AMD's new cards, coming out sometime later, very well might be, they've promised to target the mainstream.

 

Still, even the new AMD cards might be out of your budget. You might need to wait till early 2017, post-Xmas-shopping-season, to get a good new card in your price range. Work on your settings now, save up a bit to get to $200+, and the more substantial upgrade will be worth the wait (you'll still barely notice it visually, but at least it will do better in the future).

[obobski]

Something else I've thought of, given the budget range - can your system support SLI? If so, another GTX 480 would easily fit in your budget (I've seen them used around $100).

[Fatalmasterpiece]

 

Is it struggling somewhere specific, and have you tried to optimize the visual settings (and I mean optimize - turn out the stuff that doesn't produce a visible difference - not gut them out) in that game?

 

The 480 actually runs FO4 alright. Set to high settings it gets anywhere from 50-70 fps in most locations. In downtown Boston it really starts to struggle though, dropping to 20-30 fps. Interiors it can run full ENB and Reshade beautifully at 70 fps.

 

The real problem is that every 30 seconds or so the game stutters down to <1 fps for about 5 seconds and grows exponentially worse closer to downtown. This stutter is less noticeable with lower settings and more pronounced with higher settings, but never completely goes away, even with ENB disabled. Furthermore there seems to be lots of issues with textures loading.

 

My rig has an i7 950 @ 3.07GHz and 12gb DDR3 ram. I've set up shadowboost with my ENB. Unfortunately I am running the game off an HDD sata 6.

 

The weak link seems to be the 480, possibly due to it's older drive support and the 480 is known to overheat. I should also invest in a SSD to run games from though I never had a problem until now.

[FMod]

The symptoms are fairly clear then.

 

Drops to "slideshow" framerate (1 fps) that fix themselves are virtually never GPU related - GPU problems don't fix themselves, you'd see that 1 fps persist till you leave the area.

Such temporary drops are usually related to engine/scripting bugs and occasionally to system RAM deficiency or mismanagement, causing data to be loaded from the HDD.

 

Sub-30 fps drops in Bethesda games are usually single-threaded CPU bottlenecks, but also sometimes GPU load mismanagement. Your CPU is old. It's still viable, but it has about 60% the single-threaded performance of current CPU, which would be enough for these drops.

 

Neither CPU nor GPU replacement can fix your 1 fps problem. Only game content changes can do that. Basically, enabling performance mods, disabling problem mods. "Texture loading problems" also sounds like a software issue - GPU forced to use system RAM slow down to 10-30 fps (and don't snap out of it, only regain a bit of speed), not to a slideshow.

 

If the problem is hard drive related, a SSD install for both the OS and the game might alleviate the problem considerably, but not fully fix it.

 

Even if the 1 fps problem is a bottleneck on the GPU (it almost certainly isn't), upgrading to a 2x more powerful GPU will only mean 2 fps instead of 1 fps. I doubt you'll find 2 fps a sufficient improvement. The weak link is Fallout 4, that's where things need to be fixed.

Edited May 2, 2016 by FMod

[obobski]

+1 to FMod, again, based on the description of the problem. A hard-drive upgrade will not improve frame-rates or similar, because it will not have any influence on computational performance. What it will do is improve disk-related tasks, so for example level/cell loads will be faster, but it won't make the GTX 480 (or the i7, or whatever) work any faster than they presently do, if that makes sense.

 

I can tell you on Xbox One the game does not have random/consistent 1 fps dropouts that I've noticed, so I'd look at the modlist for potential culprits.

[Fatalmasterpiece]

That makes sense except it happens even with the vanilla, unmodded game. The only difference is that the drops become exponentially worse as more strain is put onto the system. So near Swan's Pond in vanilla there might be slideshow framerates for 2 seconds every minute. With more mods it becomes 10 seconds every 30 seconds etc. I should add that it's only in that area, even with shadow distance set at medium.

 

The texture loading issue is a common one I've read about many people having. For others the fix was the ENBoost patch with ForceVideoMemorySize. Then there is increasing the iTextureUpgradeDistance1 value in Fallout4.ini. The later does help but doesn't completely solve the issue. For some reason low res mipmaps more often seem to load.

[Fatalmasterpiece]

So I ended up waiting and just purchased and installed a EVGA GTX 1060 SC 6gb for $250. Huge improvement in FPS for a small investment and is dx12 ready if I ever feel the need to switch to Win10. From what I hear these cards are on par with the GTX 980 and cost much less.

[FMod]

Yeah, I think you did as well as you possibly could given your circumstances. The 1060/6 is IMHO the overall best card of this generation - its 6 GB VRAM is just right (the 1080 will grow obsolete before it needs over 6 GB), and its power draw is small enough not to overload its VRM or common PSU. And of course the price is right.