Looking for a good graphics card to last me a few years.

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Andrew Stinnette

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Jul 7, 2013
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10,520
I previously bought a radeon 7750 (The best card without an external power supply) For a pre-assembled POS dell. Approx a year later I bought a computer custom built, and didn't have money for a GPU at the time. So, here I am with everything pretty decent, except the GPU.

Computer specs

Corsair 600t Case
AMD FX-8350
16GB Ram Jigsaw
MSI Mobo 970A-g46
GX bronze 650Watt Coolermaster

I will be playing games like BF4 diablo 3 whenever new patch gets here GW2 stuff like that. Looking for completely maxed out. I Don't really have a budget although it'd be nice to keep it around 400 dollars or less, or else I'll hear it from the wife about how I could have bought her something.

Thank you for your time in advance!
 
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J_E_D_70
GTX 770 is king at that price unless you plan to buy the games that come free with the radeon 7970, then it becomes a better value.
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DirkXXVI

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Jun 27, 2013
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+2.

I was recently looking at those two when trying to decide what GPU to get and the games would have been a little bit more of a factor if I didn't already own Farcry 3 and Sleeping Dogs, which I think is the current Never Settle bundle. Also own Bioshock Infinite so thats not much of a factor either in case they were offering that as well.

Personally what convinced me to go with Nvidia was the lower power consumption, great memory bandwidth, as well as the recent reviews declaring it the better $400 card. Also tried convincing myself that I would get Physx on max settings (got boring after 2 minutes on Borderlands 2 lol). Though it doesn't seem to be a huge difference in performance between the two. I likely would have been just as happy with the 7970.
 
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DirkXXVI

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Jun 27, 2013
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I was looking into that when I was trying to decide between the 7970 and 770 as well. It's possible that it will be. However you could also look at it as by the time companies start regularly going over the 2GB mark it'll be time to upgrade your GPU.

When looking at it the most frequent examples of games going over 2GB I saw were Crysis 3 at 1440p for a small amount of time and ultra high res texture mods in Crysis 1 and Skyrim. I think Max Payne might have a few instances were it very quickly shoots to over 2GB at very high resolutions. Metro might have a couple of seconds here and there where it quickly shoots to over 2GB. However the point is these instances in games without texture packs are so rare you likely won't notice them.

The GTX 770's advantage is that it has a very good memory bandwidth. Heres a good description of memory bandwidth I found on the Steam forum when I was researching cards:
You have 1GB of VRAM so you can store a decent amount of data on the card but the bandwidth affects how quickly and *smoothly* that data can be utilized.

For example - SKYRIM with the High Definition Texture DLC will use all that VRAM but the bandwidth (and number of texture units) on your card means you'd never be able to run the game smoothly or at a decent framerate.

So in a nutshell - you're stuck with running games at Medium settings and you'll never utilize all that VRAM - but memory is cheap and it looks good on the cards specifications/helps to sell cards so manufacturers always stick 1GB on their cards nowadays.
Click to expand...

Here's another more recent description
Besides cranking up the AA, many titles run fine under 1.5GB. Most GPUs run out of processing power before you can max out the AA.
You card may use up to 3GB maxing out AA and textures., but your FPS is below 60fps on a single card. I'll go for a more powerful GPU before more VRAM.

I rather have a powerful GPU with 2GB that can run 2xMSAA @ 60fps, over a slower card that has 3GB running 8xMSAA @ 35fps.
Also look at the mem bus. A 192 bus with 3GB is a waste. But a 384 bus with 3GB is perfect. Doubling VRAM without a larger bus to match will not do anything for performance.
Click to expand...

If the 2GB has you worried then you can get the 4GB version for $50 more on Newegg. However everything I've seen says that over 2GB is only useful when gaming at ultra high resolutions and using multi monitors. If you're gaming at 1080p you will likely never exceed 2GB.
 
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