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PC graphics card recommendations 2016?

category: general [glöplog]
What's the cheapest reliable desktop PC graphics card that can handle Blitzgewitter? MicroATX, PCIe 2.0 x16, 480W supply. I'm doing some demo development but will probably never reach the calcatraz level. :)

Not resurrecting this ;) . Provided for historical comparison.
added on the 2016-11-11 04:24:20 by cxw cxw
Should have mentioned - supporting HDMI or DVI-D, not exclusively DP. Thanks!
added on the 2016-11-11 05:37:34 by cxw cxw
i'm on nvidia gtx 970 right now, no complaints on it. it's not the best in quality but was the best in the price/quality ratio and still seems to hold up nicely.

would probably go for GTX 980 Ti or GTX 1070 nowdays

http://videocardbenchmark.net/high_end_gpus.html

curious to hear more opinions though.
added on the 2016-11-11 07:10:33 by psenough psenough
Blitzgewitter runs super smooth on my Radeon R7 260X + Celeron G1820, so I guess any 150$ card will do.
I'd say that AMD is a better designed hardware but worse drivers, and NVIDIA is a better designed drivers and worse hardware.
added on the 2016-11-11 09:17:23 by rutra80 rutra80
Nabbed a 1070 a couple weeks back, it's absolutely brilliant. :)
added on the 2016-11-11 10:10:28 by ferris ferris
yeah the new nvidia pascal cards are really fast and very energy efficient (aka: good hardware!).
the 1070 is a dream but pretty expensive and probably overpowered for your needs.
Blitzgewitter runs mighty fine on my gtx 1060, but of course it always depends on the resolution you are aiming at.
if you want to go even cheaper think about a 1050 (ti) or radeon rx 460, although I fear you soon will get trouble with less than 4gb of VRAM if you also want to play games on it.
added on the 2016-11-11 13:49:45 by wysiwtf wysiwtf
and yes, id always prefer a little more low-end card of the newest gen to a more high-end one of the last gens as they are constantly improving their feature level and energy efficiency.
added on the 2016-11-11 13:51:39 by wysiwtf wysiwtf
1070 if you have the money for a nice card that'll be worth it for the next ~3 years, 1060 if you dont.
added on the 2016-11-11 14:01:16 by maali maali
seconding 1060/1070. though we need more AMD coders to fight the monoculture ;)
added on the 2016-11-11 14:17:12 by cupe cupe
Thanks for the tips! The last serious gaming I did was on a PS2, so I'm not worried about that. :) The RX 460 looks decent. Any experience with 1050 vs. 1050 Ti? Looks like the extra RAM in the ti is the biggest difference, yes? (Looking at linky and other one)
added on the 2016-11-11 19:38:04 by cxw cxw
I will be giving myself a gtx 1070 next month, to replace my (now really old) gtx 460. My desktop is i7 already, so no cpu upgrading for now.

As a side note I would like to find a new notebook as well, but I still like this lg i7 with stereo full hd screen. It is getting a bit old now, but the screen is still amazing imho, I really like it. Want to find a newer i7 but with stereo screen as well.
added on the 2016-11-11 21:15:34 by imerso imerso
1050 = 640 shader processors + 40 texture mapping units
1050 Ti = 768 + 48 respectively
added on the 2016-11-11 22:51:11 by rutra80 rutra80
Christmas came along, and other people's presents took priority to my own :) . I'm getting back to shopping - any updates or other thoughts?
added on the 2017-03-24 15:59:09 by cxw cxw
no change on the nvidia front but a slight pricedrop since the release of the 1080 Ti...
AMD on the other hand is said to be releasing an updated rx 4xx series (rx 5xx most probably) with slightly improved efficiency and production costs so the segment around the current 460-480 models might change a bit then.
AMDs new high end card (vega) will be launched later this year as well, but nothing much is revealed about that one yet (although it would make sense to put the high end card next to or slightly above the 1080 ti performance if AMD really tries to get some market share back)...
added on the 2017-03-24 16:17:04 by wysiwtf wysiwtf
Usually getting the top card of 6-9 months ago is considerably cheaper, more than fast enough and as a bonus you're less likely to miss obvious performance bottlenecks.

That is, if what you'll be doing is making demos and/or gaming on a non-ridiculous resolution/screen setup.
added on the 2017-03-24 17:05:00 by superplek superplek
The long-awaited conclusion... <drumroll>
I went with an EVGA 1050 Ti. Initial indications are promising! I can finally run my own prods full-screen at 60fps :D . Thanks again to all for the responses and info!
added on the 2017-06-04 05:52:34 by cxw cxw
"I've got two words to say to you Kimmy..."
"EN" "Vidya"!
go with AMD. I have a full AMD setup at home and I am more than happy with it (I own a Radeon R9 295X2 [yes, I had 1500 eur to spare at one point]). 4K pretty damn high settings 60ish FPS gameplay, demos run like a butter on it, except when some do not know how to code in a vendor agnostic way. To say a comparison: I have an 8 core AMD FX8350 CPU and at work I have i7-6950X with a 1080 Ti GPU, in both computers 16GB ram. On my home computer our demo engine runs ~2% faster usually. Of course it is just a hairsplitting difference, but all it takes is to use Direct3D instead of OpenGL, and repeat after me (Mercury, you should too, some demos I can watch way after the release, so I stopped watching the exe, just from youtube, if I am wrong, please ignore this last statement): write shaders properly [mercury part off], don't overuse tesselation (AMDs are bad on tesselation, but on the flipside the bandwidth is much better than on nVidias, which means better texturing caps) and for the love of god, don't ever, EVER use that god damn gameworks. It is a cancer...seriously...If you adhere to this, AMD is a very good, if not better, because bigger bang for the bux you spend on the card. And GCN is a cool architecture, besides other uses, it is AMD all over the place, given Xbone/PS4/Mac uses AMD cards at the moment. Also my GPU is not that hot, which means that the AMD is a heater is just a damn myth. On the flipside, my card eats up more watts, but hey, that card is getting 3-4 year old, but still kicking and more than alive.

TL;DR: If I were you, I would wait for Vega GPUs and see how they perform. The new Radeon ProDuo with 32gb vram is a serious competitor to the Titan XP.
added on the 2017-06-05 12:31:43 by citrus citrus
I feel like AMD GPUs are shader beefy cards (vs Nvidia). Is it true ?
added on the 2017-06-05 13:30:19 by Tigrou Tigrou
http://www.videocardbenchmark.net/high_end_gpus.html oh yes, AMD makes excellent cards.. *cough* first high-end AMD card is like..14th in the list, that'll teach nVidia! :P
added on the 2017-06-05 14:25:50 by maali maali
Maali, I've often heard that videocardbenchmark is unreliable but better than gpuboss.

http://gpu.userbenchmark.com/ and https://www.futuremark.com/hardware/gpu seem to be more trusted and comprehensive for comparisons.
added on the 2017-06-05 15:59:19 by MuffinHop MuffinHop
citrus, all our shaders compile with the khronos reference compiler with no warnings. That's not sufficient to get them running, but enough to shift the blame a bit ;) In my impression, Nvidia glsl driver bugs are more or less on par with AMD driver bugs these days: AMD has become a lot better and Nvidia has become worse, on average. Can't really say anything about performance.
added on the 2017-06-05 16:37:50 by cupe cupe
There are lots of Nvidia only demos. If you want to run those, stay clear of AMD.
added on the 2017-06-05 18:57:25 by yzi yzi
This is so last year. ;b
added on the 2017-06-05 20:03:48 by Hoild Hoild

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