Guild Wars 2

Hi, I don’t know much in depth knowledge about what makes the best hardware, but I’m looking to get a graphics card for around $200 and I’m wondering if anyone can give me some advice or comparison:

First, my PC’s specs:
CPU: Intel 5830k
Mobo: MSI X99S SLI Plus

Here’s what I’ve seen on Newegg tonight:

GTX 960 4GD5T Titanium OC
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814127898

It says “Titanium”, not “Ti”, and the internet seems to be talking about IF a 960 Ti will ever be released, with no reference to a GTX 960 Ti on the geforce website, so this is just calling itself “Titanium” but not actually a Ti release?

Also I found this video making fun of the 960 series for having a 128-bit memory interface instead of a 256-bit. Which gives me concerns.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8zQ9VUNnKNU

So I started to look at 256-bit GPUs in my target price range.

*I found a link here for R9 380’s: *
https://www.quora.com/Should-I-get-the-GTX-950-the-GTX-960-or-the-R9-380

Seems to show the R9-380 is a better choice? But I can’t figure out which one is which? Also R9s are AMD? But I’m running an intel mobo? Do they work together?… I don’t know these things…

What is the function difference between these below? Only one says PCI-Express 3.0, but is PCI-Express 3.0 implied for all of them?:

R9 380 GAMING 4G LE 4GB
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814127879

R9 380 GAMING 2G 2GB
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814127876

R9 380 4GD5T OC 4GB
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814127913

I don’t really know what all the “LE” or “4GD5T” stuff means. That last one though says it’s overclocked, but it doesn’t say PCI-Express 3.0 on the stats page so I can’t tell if it’s gonna work with my mobo.

I can’t figure out how to get more details on these cards because I know there are often multiple manufacturer’s of what seems to be the same card…

Any advice or recommendations on what I should get? Please? Right now I’m just using an old GPU and I’m thinking it’s getting tired since the HoT release.

Going to start a flame war =P but I have been on both sides and it comes down to this: NVIDIA simply has better support. I agree the 128bit memory interface would worry me too. I would say save up the extra money for a 970… its the perfect middle ground.

Radeon you do get “more” for your money, or so you think, until you try to run a game that has an NVIDIA logo upon boot up and you can’t use all its nice features… sure there are some games that Radeon has the upper hand but its few and far between. To this day though my R9 295×2 blows Tomb Raider out of the water… but with my 980ti SLI system I get all the NVIDIA works options, which are lovely. I usually shoot for the underdog here, but I’m too much of a gamer as well and want my FPS….

As for playing Guild Wars 2… you could go either way. Guild Wars 2 is mostly CPU dependent and any of these cards would probably run it just fine.

My personal experience .. eith NVidia you waste hours and days often trying out
older drivers and even older driver … until you find maybe that 10-20 version
below the newest there finally is one that runs more or less stable.

Beldin makes a good point, if you have a lot of games and a specific one isn’t running as nice as you want, some people revert to older drivers and can waste a lot of time… personally though, I’ve never had that issue. I’d rather have more drivers to chose from than rare driver updates from Radeon. Radeon for some reason takes forever to release drivers =/ so a new game can go a long time without optimizations.

380 is a 285
960 is a weak GPU that should just not be considered.

I would say look at the following lineup

370, 270x, 280, GTX660Ti, HD7870 for the low end
gtx970, 280x, GTX770, HD7970 for the mid-high
290, 390 GTX980, 290x, 390x, Fury, FuryX, 980Ti for the High end

Also consider buying used. You can get a used 290 for under 225 now.

Thanks for all the input. Based on what’s been said and my own history of using NVidia, I’ll look at some of the alternative NVidia’s suggested.

Geforce all the way baby!

If you choose Nvidia, save up a bit more and get a Gtx 970 (minimum). I have one for several months now and i didn’t regret buying mine, all demanding games run smooth with high framerate (fps) and exquisite quality (everything on ultra settings).

I run GW2, (and most other games on ultra) with this baby on my triple screen setup. Sweeeeet.

A GTX 970 is worth getting with a descent price per performance.

GTX 970 is worth getting, i agree. It’s cheaper than the 980 (although its really a high-end card that is just beautiful but expensive), however the GTX 970 is the bang for your buck to play games at a smooth rate and enjoy gaming.

Right now, GTX 970 should be plenty good enough for Guild Wars 2 because it is still CPU bound, so there’s no point to get a 980 if it’s just for Guild Wars 2.

However, if there’s any chance you may play future games, you may want to wait to see if nVidia can make better DirectX12 drivers before taking a decision. Last news is that AMD’s cards are much better than nVidia with DirectX12, but nVidia seems to have the better engineers these days so it may just be a matter of time before they get things right.

I have an r9 285 and it has plenty of performance for this game. Playing at 1440p nearly at ultra plus reshade on top and in the new maps I’m playing at 40-60fps.

The thing is to disable reflections, shadows and put to medium Character quantity limit to Medium. These settings are very cpu intensive and are the truly fps killers, when at the same time the graphic improvement they provide is minimal.

If you’re going to get a 970 save a couple dollars and get a 390 instead. The same/better performance, more vram, and it pulls way ahead at higher resolutions.

$200 will get you a decent used 290, though; my brother has an XFX DD he got for that much a couple months back. Hell, a 280x will only run you ~$130 used and will beat both of the cards you were originally after.

In general, find the cards in your price range, look up the benchmarks to see what performs better, and buy whatever that is regardless of what brand the card is.

Edit: Looking into 960 vs 380 benchmarks shows the 380 pulling ahead across the board by between 5-15% or so. I personally would want at least 3 GB of vram on any decently high-end card these days, so I’d go with the 4 GB MSI one for $180 after MIR=; it offers the best price:performance. If you wanted 2 GB of vram nVidia’s going to be like $5-7 cheaper, so it’s up to you if the slight performance increase is worth the price.

Oh .. another thing, where i am however not sure if its just a rumor, but a lot of
people also start to tell that all these OOM crashes happen much more with
GForce cards.

Personally i never have OOM crashes at least with my R9 280x and character
model limit an quality on medium.

intel HD… honestly at this point..

Right now the game has a HUGE memory leak that is effecting both nvidia and ATI cards making the game unplayable.

However.. i am running intel HD with UMA shared memory (card only has 32m memory, rest is system shared ram) and i havent crashed once with OOM errors.

They really need to fix the OOM errors.. my wife and my guildies cant stay logged in for more than 5-10 minutes… and TONS of people are crashing in wvw and pvp.. the game is almost unplayable.

I have been running this game on a HD4600 off a i5-4570 since Saturday (ITX build, in the process…ect) and Ill say, I am impressed at what the 4570+HD4600 can do for the game.

medium settings, 1600×900 1GB shared ram (BIOS setting) 40FPS in cities and 60FPS+ out in open areas. Not bad for integrated graphics.

But I agree with Fermi for the Dedicated card. You want more vRAM, a 380, 280x, would be my to go for AMD solutions for ‘Low end’. They are both sub 200USD~ cards and will sustain high FPS at 1440p easily.

edit
Also a 280x is a 7970Ghz, the only things faster are the 290/290x, 390/390x and the Fury/FuryX cards since the 7970Ghz was a single card flag ship back in 2012. While the Pixel rate of the 380 matches the 280x, the 280x has far superior Memory Bandwidth, and that is why the 280x is faster then the 380.
end edit

But, Anytime now we should be getting a 380x (Tonga XT) release. So maybe hold off until this card is released and reviewed before buying anything just yet. The ONLY Tonga XT chip we saw was in the MacBooks (M295X) so on a desktop board with more power overhead we do not know what to fully expect out of the 380x yet.

http://www.kitguru.net/components/graphic-cards/matthew-wilson/amd-radeon-r9-380x-confirmed-will-feature-4gb-vram-and-258-bit-bus/