Fps/cpu questions regarding game performance

When it comes to nvidia, it's not always how new the card is. They typically release a high performance card, then a newer budget revision of an older card. For instance they had the gtx 760 and 770 already. For awhile they've had the gtx 970 and 980. They went and released the gtx 750ti and even though it's newer, it's a lower/mid grade card. Then they released the 980ti and one of the newest releases has been the gtx 960. The 970 and 980 are 'older' and have been out longer, but then they went and released a newer mid grade card. The first number usually denotes the generation (5xx then 7xx, 9xx) and the others usually refer to the series. x50, x60, x70, x80. The higher the number the more performance. It's possible to have an older gtx 780 (prior to the 980) that's stronger than a newer gtx 960. The 960 is newer architecture but lower series number.

In a lot of bench's, a newer card one series back is usually equal or slightly faster. Ie, gtx 770/960 or 780/970. It does get a bit complicated since newer architectures can provide benefits like newer supported directx versions and possibly more vram than previous cards. Even though a card like the 680 sounds 'old' it was a premium card back when it was new at a selling price of around $500. It's comparable in performance to the newer amd r9 280 but they have different capabilities. The r9 280 supports the newer dx 11.2 and opengl 4.3 where the gtx 680 had dx 11 and opengl 4.2 which makes sense since they were 18-24mo apart in release dates.

It may be a bit of a crude generalization, but the 50/60 series (560, 760 etc) are more the lower mid range cards, the 70's (770, 970) are mid/upper range cards and the 80's (680, 780, 980) are upper end cards. Best bet is to look at benchmarks prior to buying any card you're considering. See how well it scales with increased resolution. If you typically game at 1080p, look at some 1200 or 1440p bench's for the same card and how it compares to others. Does it scale well and hold up or fall flat on its face? Sort of a rough estimation of how it may perform down the road especially since people may decide to change resolution of their monitor. If you know you're not changing your monitor then it's not as big of a deal. A card that can barely keep up 50fps on decent med/high graphics settings for current games is likely to only get worse so it may have a much shorter life in gaming performance. A year or two down the road a card doing 50fps on med/high might be doing 30-35fps on low graphics. Where as a card capable of pushing 60-70fps on high or ultra may very well be pushing fps in the 50's on high or med/high settings a couple years later.

Budget will play a big part of it as well, not everyone has $350-500+ to drop on a gpu. I'm one of those people who doesn't, but then while I enjoy gaming it's also not a major priority for me. My hd7850 is hanging in there fine for the games I play and I usually wait until games are a bit less expensive and see which ones they can work the bugs out of. But then I'm playing games like cod ghosts, far cry 3 (not 4), crysis 2 (not 3) and so on. In another 6mo or maybe longer (I'll have had the card 2yrs) I'll consider another upgrade around the $170-200 range. Your card's stronger than mine but I'm fine gaming at high not ultra and at 1080p. I typically turn anti aliasing down since it drags my card down pretty good. Also I'm not trying to play witcher 3 or ac unity, If I were it would probably be a slideshow.