Guild Wars 2

So I’m looking at upgrading my systems graphics card for the first time in a while now I live in australia and can buy directly from a supplier (work in retail ftw) and I’m just wondering I’ve had a few issues with cards in the past not working very well or up to par of what they should do as apparently according to my Tech they bottleneck with my cpu so here is my specs and I would love to be able to play most new gen games as well! Need that ultra setting running smoothly

990fx Ausus Motherboard
AMD FX 8120 8core running at 3.8
Current GPU is a 260gtx
16gb of ram

What Hidori said.

It couldn’t hurt upgrading to a GTX 960 – 980 depending on your budget. 970 is a good middle ground for price / performance with 960 being the budget card that can still run most new games on high.

Also your cpu is AMD, nothing wrong with that – mine is as well. However this game seems to play nice with Intel so even if you got a rediculous GPU the fact that the game is primarily CPU bound means you may still not get the results you want.

Get a 280x-290x, depending on what your budget is.

There are some settings that will crash the game in big champion fights regardless of what graphics card is in use.

I can’t give a good tech answer. But yesterday I found out something interesting.

My husband and I headed over to Micro Center so he could get some bits and pieces to upgrade his really old PC. He doesn’t game and has been fine with bare bones for a long time. He picked up a GTX 960 to tide things over until the really new stuff comes out in a couple of months. I said that once he got his for real full new PC maybe I’d want the 960 to replace my GTX 780, even though I’m doing fine on High settings as it is.

But we looked at the Tom’s Hardware GPU Hierarchy chart, and my 780 is still two tiers better than the 960. A top end previous-series card outdoes a current mid-range one! So research actual performance rather than believing higher numbers equal better in all cases.

Donari.5237:

So research actual performance rather than believing higher numbers equal better in all cases.

The best place to go for this is most likely Anandtech, at least in my experience.

For someone who really “does not game” as in “does not start games on his PC”, a GTX960 is already overkill. He could have just bought a GTX750 for half the price, which would also have consumed only half the power and help save even more money.

For someone who does game, a GTX960 is currently a fine card although its price/performance ratio is slightly lacking. If your budget is tight, it still will be good enough for the vast majority of people playing games at FullHD today.

For someone who wants better than average performance and is thinking of maybe using the new card not only in his current PC, but possibly also still in the next PC, a GTX970 is a good choice with a great price/performance ratio.

For someone who has the cash but does not like buying new stuff all the time: If you want a great card that you can use for the next several years, get a GTX980ti and forget about the topic till 2020 (I could not write “until” instead of “till” because of the stupid censoring seeing things that are not there).

And anyone who truly thinks he needs to buy a better card than a GTX980ti probably has enough money to spend and does not need shopping advice.

PS: Sorry I am a NVidia person. I do not know much about current Radeon cards apart from the fact that the current lineup consumes a lot more power to achieve the same performance as a comparable NVidia card. My current PC has an outdated MSI GTX460 Cyclone card and the one I am currently building to replace it will likely just have a modest GTX960 (or a GTX960ti if it ever comes out and I still don’t have a regular 960 by then)

Sorry, your graphics card really does not affect this game as much as your CPU does. I would suggest going with a nice I5 Intel – which is faster and also this game is not multithreaded.

Shikigami.4013:

For someone who really “does not game” as in “does not start games on his PC”, a GTX960 is already overkill. He could have just bought a GTX750 for half the price, which would also have consumed only half the power and help save even more money.

You’re missing the full story He also bought a super fancy HD monitor and needed a card that could drive that. The monitor will transfer to his fancier rig when he buys that in a couple of months, as might the card, and then he’ll be using what he has for a long time since he doesn’t upgrade often, so he wanted something good and solid to last. As to the power, this could be misinformation but the Micro Center counter guy said that the tech has evolved so the 900 series uses less power than the 700’s.

I’m trying to get him to try out GW2 the next time it’s on sale for 10 bucks (hopefully it will be) now that he has a machine able to handle it. Or at least Witcher 3, since he’s not big on MMO play.

The GTX750/750ti are “special cases” as they were the last cards released in the 700 series while being the first cards released using the new “Maxwell” technology. So while the Micro Center guy generally was right and made a very good point, he neglected to tell you that the 750 and 750ti were just as power efficient as the whole 900 series. Anyways, what’s done is done and the 960 is far from a bad choice, so no harm done

the 990 Motherboard doesn’t support PCI-E 16 v3.0…

Consider this when upgrading. It’s mostly influences load times ino maps where this could be noticed I guess… but certain versions of the 900 series of nvidia have narrow(ed) busses. this with a lower bus spec will influence the performance.

Well i got i7 4790k , 16Gb ram and crapy gtx460. Settings are almost max, i turn of post processing coz this makes game look like kitten and no reflections on water plus shadows on mid. Most times i got 60fps with frame limiter, in wvw drops to 30fps.

I have the i7-4770K clocked to 4Ghz, 16G Crucial Balistix, MSI Z87-GD65 Gaming and MSI GTX 780 and I can run GW2 on Ultra @ 75fps minimum @1080p. When I played @ 4K I got 42fps in Silver Wastes today.

If you can find a really cheap 290X, that’s the best value card nowadays (be sure to get one with custom fan though).

If you wait a couple of days, that will probably be replaced by 390X but it depends on the cost. If its as much as a GTX980… I’d almost say get the GTX980. 390X by all indications will be about as fast as the GTX970 but with 8gb vram. Its performance upgrade over 290X is minor and since the reference fans are still complete kitten compared to Nvidias (290X reference run hot and loud) chances are that the good cards will soar in price. If those extra 4gb are really worth it… meh I dont know. 3 years from now, possibly.

Best performer is GTX980Ti, its as fast as a Titan X (unless you happen to run something that consume more than 6gb vram). A bit pricey though, but cheaper than Titan X.

Fury will more than likely cost as much as a Titan X and run on about the same level, ie no one is going to buy it except tech nerds that drool over HBM memory and theoretical compute performance.

In the future the cut down air cooled Fury may be interesting if they price it on a GTX980 level, but I seriously doubt that’s going to happen. Not to mention its probably at least 4 months or more away.

DISCLAIMER: I never ever advice anyone to get anything kittentier than the performance card or the cut down version of this card. All these Nvidia GTX950 or Radeon 250B or whatever the hell kind of kitten version names Nvidia and AMD cook up, its all crap. Poor driver support often leading to a very poor experience. There are always only two versions that’s worth it. Been like that forever now.

GTX 970.

Price/performance ratio is fantastic. Improved lately thanks to the release of the 980 Ti, which should see the price of the other cards dipping slightly.

There were some silly stories about it having a VRAM issue, but these are only seen in situations that you wouldn’t use such a card in (like 4K resolutions with 16x AA). So dismiss those worries.

Going for anything above it (GTX 980 / GTX 980 Ti) is worth it only if you have plenty of money to burn.

Going for anything lower should only be an option if you can’t afford the GTX 970.

I’d normally advocate an equivalent AMD card, but the 970 will match most of their beasts in a more elegant manner – it’s a single GPU (not 2 bolted together), it’s got relatively low power consumption, lower temps and is therefore quieter. So for the time being it’s unreservedly the best card for your money right now, hands down.

dace.8019:

I’d normally advocate an equivalent AMD card, but the 970 will match most of their beasts in a more elegant manner – it’s a single GPU (not 2 bolted together), it’s got relatively low power consumption, lower temps and is therefore quieter. So for the time being it’s unreservedly the best card for your money right now, hands down.

A 290x gets you much, much more for your dollar, especially since you can get them for $220-240.

For a comprehensive comparison I use TechPowerUp. Besides using a range of games and resolutions, they also test power use and have a performance/dollar and performance/watt charts.

Assuming you aren’t insane and buying a GTX 980Ti or a Titan X, here’s a like to their recent performance chart from a GTX 960 review. You can look at the other charts from the pulldown at the bottom of the page.

http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/Gigabyte/GTX_960_OC/27.html

You’re never going to hit 60 fps in zergs with high settings at 1920×1080 or higher with that cpu. I7-5930k @ 4.4ghz and gtx 980 on 2560×1440 and the best I do in big zergs is 30-45 fps. This is with low player count, no FXAA, and native sampling. Everything else is maxed and I am running in borderless window. Maybe at lower resolutions I could manage 60fps… but I bet it would still tank during intense battles (lots of effects).

PaxTheGreatOne.9472:

the 990 Motherboard doesn’t support PCI-E 16 v3.0…

Consider this when upgrading. It’s mostly influences load times ino maps where this could be noticed I guess… but certain versions of the 900 series of nvidia have narrow(ed) busses. this with a lower bus spec will influence the performance.

So what you’re saying is I should probably look at upgrading absolutely everything rather than just the graphics card at this point? I don’t mind having a little wait to actually get a huge performance upgrade, I’ve had a bit of a research and the CPU I currently have is a huge mistake by AMD and was not a very good product as well.

I thank everyone for their input too and I’ll be looking at a 970 by the sounds of it or a 980 if I’m super keen!

PCIe is backwards compatible. A PCIe V3 card will work fine in a PCIe V2 slot. Sure it’s total bandwidth is degraded but that’s small potatoes compared to the computational power and VRAM memory bandwidth of the higher end cards. Total overkill for this game but most PC gamers play more than one game.

Behellagh is right. Not only is PCIe backwards compatible, a GTX960 or GTX970 will also NOT bring a PCIexpress slot 2.0 to its limit. You can totally disregard that your old board “only” has a PCIe 2.0 slot. It will not slow your card down.

There is an article on techpowerup.com about the performance of a (much faster) GTX980 in a PCIe 2.0 slot and the difference to a PCIe 3.0 slot was only around 1%. For anyone interested, the conclusion of that test is here: Article at techpowerup.com

Fermi.2409:

dace.8019:

I’d normally advocate an equivalent AMD card, but the 970 will match most of their beasts in a more elegant manner – it’s a single GPU (not 2 bolted together), it’s got relatively low power consumption, lower temps and is therefore quieter. So for the time being it’s unreservedly the best card for your money right now, hands down.

A 290x gets you much, much more for your dollar, especially since you can get them for $220-240.

AMD slashed the price because, although they’ve very close, the 970 is usually seen edging in front overall in benchmarks. It’s also much more recent and its’ part of the current generation of nvidia cards, so there are a myriad of small pluses that stack up (particularly in effects).

The 290x would be a decent choice if you couldn’t afford the 970 and don’t mind the increased (substantially) fan noise or power consumption.

I’ve just built a.new system my self, and have an MSI GTX 960 Gaming 2GB card. With everything on max, I get 70+ fps that drop to between 58-63 In big boss fights. If you are not really planning on buying any new games for awhile then. The 960 is well worth the money. But if you have around £500-600 to spend the new GTX 980Ti has just come out. Its a Titan X with 6GB instead of the 12GB.

dace.8019:

AMD slashed the price because, although they’ve very close, the 970 is usually seen edging in front overall in benchmarks.

Incorrect, they trade blows. If anything, the 290x is ahead in more benchmarks.

dace.8019:

It’s also much more recent and its’ part of the current generation of nvidia cards, so there are a myriad of small pluses that stack up (particularly in effects).

Such as? The only thing a 970 really has over a 290x is power consumption, and it’s more then worth the slightly higher cost since you can buy nonreference 290xs for as low as $240 new, compared to $300 for a 970.

dace.8019:

The 290x would be a decent choice if you couldn’t afford the 970 and don’t mind the increased (substantially) fan noise or power consumption.

Even if I could drop $300 on a 970 I’d get a 290x all day long; it’s the much better deal overall. Fan noise is a nonissue, especially with a decent case, and the power consumption difference still won’t make up for the much higher entry cost of a 970.

Fermi.2409:

Even if I could drop $300 on a 970 I’d get a 290x all day long; it’s the much better deal overall. Fan noise is a nonissue, especially with a decent case, and the power consumption difference still won’t make up for the much higher entry cost of a 970.

They are close enough that opinion has a firm place in the buying decision. So that’s fair.

Load temps just under 100 C and a 25% louder fan noise are not, however, non-issues. Neither is the older architecture (the 970 enjoys the newest Maxwell tech).

The OP will likely be happy with either but I firmly believe that only cost concerns (or a strong opinion on either nVidia or AMD) is enough to actually suggest the 290x over the 970. There is a reason AMD moved to sharply undercut the 970.

BTW, if you are interested in the AMD cards, they just released the R9 300 series and the price is really good for, it is worth to take a look.

dace.8019:

Load temps just under 100 C

You’re right that a lot of it is preference, but let’s not spread lies. You’re only sitting just under 100C if you buy a reference card and you’d have to be a pretty big fool to do that. Nonreference cards will sit in the 70-80 range depending on what you get, which is entirely reasonable.

dace.8019:

and a 25% louder fan noise are not, however, non-issues.

Fan noise is going to depend quite a bit on your setup, though. My 280x is probably sort of loud but I can’t hear it at all.

dace.8019:

Neither is the older architecture (the 970 enjoys the newest Maxwell tech).

How does that matter at all? That just brings about things like performance/heat, it’s not something to really buy a card on.

dace.8019:

The OP will likely be happy with either but I firmly believe that only cost concerns (or a strong opinion on either nVidia or AMD) is enough to actually suggest the 290x over the 970. There is a reason AMD moved to sharply undercut the 970.

AMD priced the 290x to offer the best price:performance, like they usually do. The price gap is so big (a 970 is going to cost ~25% more then a 290x, depending on what card you pick up) that it’s not “only cost concerns” that would bring about a 290x purchase; it’s a much better value for your dollar, even if you have the money to blow.

AMD 300 series jsut came out. You should take a look at that. Use the Benchmark website to compare GPUs