Best direction for 1440p

[qubit]

I also use common sense. 290x is too hot, 780ti is too pricey. I'd rather wait for 20nm as 28nm seems to be getting stretched thin.

I don't really call myself a PC enthusiast... Not anymore. My focus is more on the games than the hardware.

Ok, waiting for 20nm sounds reasonable to me.

But shame on you for not being a PC enthusiasts any more! tsk

 

[hawk767]

Well, there's a lot of good options when you talk about video cards, but for 1440p gaming i suggest you to buy R9 280X and make a CF, or even a GTX 770 in SLI would allow you to play at very high frames and stable.

I did consider getting 2 290's for crossfire but I've heard of so many issues with crossfire that I decided to avoid it. I know many have success with it but with my experience with AMD drivers on single gpu's I figure I'd rather give the other competition a go before making a large investment that could just bite me in the ass.

As for 2 770's I also considered that but again I think I would rather get a top tier single gpu initially and maybe go SLI later on. I feel like getting two lower level cards will just leave me needing to upgrade within the next year and with 2 cards that won't have much resale value.

I'm no hardcore PC gamer by any means, but in my experience 1440P in terms of gaming is overrated.

If you've already splurged on a high end monitor though you might as well take it all the way and grab an EVGA 780Ti Classified. No half measures.

I'd take long term performance over short term satisfaction. Deal with the current card while waiting for the Ti, acquire additional funds, and secure the best possible performance for the long term.

Nothing wrong in upgrading in steps and it beats wishing you had a little extra performance when your 780 is struggling to maintain ~40 FPS when pushing all those pixels.

i would also wait to get more funds for a ti or to see what happens with the custom 290s

what's the rush, a month of using the 7950 on 1440p shouldnt be a big deal & a lot of games wont be THAT bad on it, you get to see how urgent the need for the jump would be

this is especially if the plan is to keep the new card for several years

I'm still considering waiting, yes. It will really depend on if the 780 Classified hits an awesome sale on black friday/cyber monday. If that particular card doesn't impress in sales I may wait. I would love to get the TI Classified for sure, I'm sure everyone would, its just justifying that 730$ bill over a 500$ purchase. Only having a 500$ credit limit on my credit card doesn't help much either xp.

This whole process of upgrading with this new monitor + gpu is something I'm sort of dancing around right now since together the total price is damn near the price I paid when I built this pc 2 years ago.

I also use common sense. 290x is too hot, 780ti is too pricey. I'd rather wait for 20nm as 28nm seems to be getting stretched thin.

I don't really call myself a PC enthusiast... Not anymore. My focus is more on the games than the hardware.

I think part of my problem right now is that I'm still relatively new toying with the hardware so there's little more exciting than getting a new part or the planning steps of getting new parts, even if the whole process does require a large investment on my part.

Luckily this is my only expensive hobby!

 

[Zakin]

I got to agree with a few others, I'd likely wait out 20nm that is around the corner now, sure a lot of times you can wait out for the next great thing but at least this is the next generation hitting and not a line of rebadges(Maybe?). Personally I run a GTX 660ti at 1440p and have no issues, although I have no qualms turning down placebo Ultras in games now a days that add 0 quality and take 30% of your FPS. I actually did run GTX 660ti SLI for some time, seemed pretty cool in maybe 2-3 games where I didn't get a solid 60 FPS anyway, but my friends GPU recently died and I gave him it. I noticed almost nothing except in Hitman which has obscenely demanding Ultras with little visual gains.

 

[erocker]

Ok, waiting for 20nm sounds reasonable to me.

But shame on you for not being a PC enthusiasts any more! tsk

Well, technically I am most likely much more of a PC enthusiast than the average Joe. Money needs to go other places at the moment.

 

[hawk767]

I got to agree with a few others, I'd likely wait out 20nm that is around the corner now, sure a lot of times you can wait out for the next great thing but at least this is the next generation hitting and not a line of rebadges(Maybe?). Personally I run a GTX 660ti at 1440p and have no issues, although I have no qualms turning down placebo Ultras in games now a days that add 0 quality and take 30% of your FPS. I actually did run GTX 660ti SLI for some time, seemed pretty cool in maybe 2-3 games where I didn't get a solid 60 FPS anyway, but my friends GPU recently died and I gave him it. I noticed almost nothing except in Hitman which has obscenely demanding Ultras with little visual gains.

I think once the monitor arrives on Wednesday and I've some time to use it with my 7950 I'll make my determination. I've never personally used a 1440p monitor so can't compare to 1080p with game quality. If the monitor blows me away even with lower in game settings I very well may wait, if not i'll probably jump on whatever I can.

 

[Zakin]

All up to you buddy. Just saying I've noticed how rediculous frame rate gains come just from swapping Ultra to High settings, sometimes all you need to do is drop shadows down and notice next to nothing without a screenshot comparison. I will say IPS 1440p really is a treat on the eyes once you compare it though. Even just IPS on it's own can be quite a treat. I really suspect that your 7950 will tide you over fine though, it's basically my 660ti in raw power, with better memory bandwidth if I remember correctly. Which means you should scale up resolution rather linearly from your past 1080p.

 

[Dent1]

I'd love to get a 780TI but I lack 700$ to drop and I don't own a credit card that can even cover that high of a purchase unfortunately.

So if you had a credit card you would have happily spent $700?

This is why American citizens are in debt.


One thing to consider as you move up the resolution ladder the more physical memory is required. You might hit near the 8GB limit on some games at the resolution.

 

[hawk767]

So if you had a credit card you would have happily spent $700?

This is why American citizens are in debt.


One thing to consider as you move up the resolution ladder the more physical memory is required. You might hit near the 8GB limit on some games at the resolution.

Thanks for the unnecessary generalization . I make large purchases on credit indeed and pay them off in full. No different than saving each pay check for an item, I just get it earlier and am willing to pay a degree of interest for the fact. I'm sitting on good credit with 2 paid off cards so I'm not sure how you can figure all us Americans are in debt.

As for memory, how exactly do higher resolutions effect memory? I've read that higher memory on the gpu is good for higher resolutions but not how RAM effects it. Getting 12 - 16gb of ram wouldn't be too difficult though if that were the case.

 

[Zakin]

I've never personally found even with games set up on Ultras, like Crysis 3, Battlefield 4 to each breach possibly upwards of 5-6GBs on my actual system RAM with possibly Chrome/Steam/Origin open below it.

 

[hawk767]

I've never personally found even with games set up on Ultras, like Crysis 3, Battlefield 4 to each breach possibly upwards of 5-6GBs on my actual system RAM with possibly Chrome/Steam/Origin open below it.

That's what I figured. I've never even seen mine get above 4 in most cases. I always thought of 12 - 16 to be more for novelty than anything. (I do do video rendering, 3D modeling on occasion and I know these sort of activities utilize RAM)

 

[Aithos]

Thanks for the unnecessary generalization . I make large purchases on credit indeed and pay them off in full. No different than saving each pay check for an item, I just get it earlier and am willing to pay a degree of interest for the fact. I'm sitting on good credit with 2 paid off cards so I'm not sure how you can figure all us Americans are in debt.

As for memory, how exactly do higher resolutions effect memory? I've read that higher memory on the gpu is good for higher resolutions but not how RAM effects it. Getting 12 - 16gb of ram wouldn't be too difficult though if that were the case.

Don't worry about system memory, it won't make a bit of difference if you already have 8gb. If you do 3d modeling or video editing you might see some performance benefit from going to 16gb but for gaming 8gb is more than enough regardless of what resolution you're running at. RAM isn't really affected by the resolution you run at, the general rule of thumb is you want 4gb of ram for system use and then at least as much over that as your video cards have. So if you get a video card with 3gb of ram you'd want at least 7gb (you have 8gb so you're fine). If you were going to throw a second graphics card in there you might want to upgrade to 16gb but that's debatable because even with 6gb of VRAM it still behaves like 3GB...

 

[Dent1]

I've never personally found even with games set up on Ultras, like Crysis 3, Battlefield 4 to each breach possibly upwards of 5-6GBs on my actual system RAM with possibly Chrome/Steam/Origin open below it.

I've tested Crysis 2, Max Payne 3, and BF3 on a mixture of high/ultra settings without Virtual Memory, in all three games near 6GBs is used, and this is on my tiny monitor and resolution.

As for memory, how exactly do higher resolutions effect memory?

The larger the resolution the bigger the frame buffer required for displaying the image.

 

[Aithos]

I've tested Crysis 2, Max Payne 3, and BF3 on a mixture of high/ultra settings without Virtual Memory, in all three games near 6GBs is used, and this is on my tiny monitor and resolution.



The larger the resolution the bigger the frame buffer required for displaying the image.

Sigh. In your first comment you're talking about total system use for your RAM which includes your OS and anything else you happen to be running. Since they recommend 4GB for modern windows OS in addition to whatever VRAM you have it isn't surprising you're getting 6GB because you have a couple GPUs with 1gb of VRAM each. Like I said, convention is 4GB + what you have on your video card. There is zero reason he'd need more than 8gb.

As for your second comment, the textures themselves are the same size in RAM regardless of what your GPU scales them too. The developers create textures in a specific resolution, when you install the game it installs those textures. When you run the game it loads textures (relating to where you are in the game, not all of them) and then the GPU renders them and scales them based on your selected resolution. Whatever the developer created the texture in is the native resolution, just like you have a native resolution for your monitor. No matter what resolution you select on your monitor the texture pack of the game is EXACTLY THE SAME SIZE. How much VRAM it takes to render is a different matter entirely, because upscaling obviously takes more buffer space than downscaling. What you're referring to requiring a frame buffer...that's VRAM and has nothing to do with system RAM.

This is another case of you don't know what you're talking about so please stop misleading the OP with your information. 2GB is fine for VRAM and 8GB is fine for system memory. 3-4GB is better for VRAM and 16GB of system memory is nice, but certainly not required. I'd lean towards getting a nicer video card with 3GB of VRAM than bumping your system memory to 16GB, but the cost difference from 8->16 isn't very high either.

Edit: And just so it's been said - this is why 4k is stupid and especially pointless for benchmarking current graphics cards. There isn't a single game that has been rendered at 4k, everything is being upscaled, which if I'm not mistaken is more GPU intensive than native content. I'm not an expert on how scaling affects GPUs except that I know it's extra processing and generally that means a performance hit (or lag if your monitor isn't displaying in it's native resolution and has to process the image).

Edit2: Just in case, you mention virtual memory...no one is talking about virtual memory...VRAM is video ram, as in the memory on your graphics card that holds the textures as they are being rendered. The higher resolution being rendered the more space it takes up. It is true that higher native resolution textures take up more space, but game engines aren't creating 4k content...so the time when more system RAM is needed for gaming (16gb+) is still quite a ways away.

 

[Dent1]

Sigh. In your first comment you're talking about total system use for your RAM which includes your OS and anything else you happen to be running. Since they recommend 4GB for modern windows OS in addition to whatever VRAM you have it isn't surprising you're getting 6GB because you have a couple GPUs with 1gb of VRAM each. Like I said, convention is 4GB + what you have on your video card. There is zero reason he'd need more than 8gb.

As for your second comment, the textures themselves are the same size in RAM regardless of what your GPU scales them too. The developers create textures in a specific resolution, when you install the game it installs those textures. When you run the game it loads textures (relating to where you are in the game, not all of them) and then the GPU renders them and scales them based on your selected resolution. Whatever the developer created the texture in is the native resolution, just like you have a native resolution for your monitor. No matter what resolution you select on your monitor the texture pack of the game is EXACTLY THE SAME SIZE. How much VRAM it takes to render is a different matter entirely, because upscaling obviously takes more buffer space than downscaling. What you're referring to requiring a frame buffer...that's VRAM and has nothing to do with system RAM.

This is another case of you don't know what you're talking about so please stop misleading the OP with your information. 2GB is fine for VRAM and 8GB is fine for system memory. 3-4GB is better for VRAM and 16GB of system memory is nice, but certainly not required. I'd lean towards getting a nicer video card with 3GB of VRAM than bumping your system memory to 16GB, but the cost difference from 8->16 isn't very high either.

Edit: And just so it's been said - this is why 4k is stupid and especially pointless for benchmarking current graphics cards. There isn't a single game that has been rendered at 4k, everything is being upscaled, which if I'm not mistaken is more GPU intensive than native content. I'm not an expert on how scaling affects GPUs except that I know it's extra processing and generally that means a performance hit (or lag if your monitor isn't displaying in it's native resolution and has to process the image).

Edit2: Just in case, you mention virtual memory...no one is talking about virtual memory...VRAM is video ram, as in the memory on your graphics card that holds the textures as they are being rendered. The higher resolution being rendered the more space it takes up. It is true that higher native resolution textures take up more space, but game engines aren't creating 4k content...so the time when more system RAM is needed for gaming (16gb+) is still quite a ways away.

It's a pity you wrote a book because you taught me nothing new.

Yes I know the difference between VRAM an main memory. I was making two separate points unrelated to one another.

I never said 16GB was required. Please quote where I said that?


Both the OS and game are developed to scale when more RAM is available. The more RAM you have the more windows will cache, its scaled on a percentage of the total memory resources available. As with some games, additional textures are stored in the RAM to make use of the available resources irrespective of how much VRAM you have.

If you feel the need to reply with a book again. Please don't.

 

[Aithos]

It's a pity you wrote a book because you taught me nothing new.

Yes I know the difference between VRAM an main memory. I was making two separate points unrelated to one another.

I never said 16GB was required. Please quote where I said that?


Both the OS and game are developed to scale when more RAM is available. The more RAM you have the more windows will cache, its scaled on a percentage of the total memory resources available. As with some games, additional textures are stored in the RAM to make use of the available resources irrespective of how much VRAM you have.

If you feel the need to reply with a book again. Please don't.

I didn't ask if you knew the difference between system memory and VRAM, I said the difference between virtual memory and VRAM...because in your previous post you mention virtual memory, which has nothing to do with either system ram or VRAM. I think you're confused. Games do not scale with RAM, if you put 64GB of ram into a system a game is not going to load the entire game into RAM just because it can. Game engines aren't designed that way, the developers design the games so that at any given moment depending on where the player is in the game world there are certain textures loaded based on the immediate game area. Even completely open worlds have what you could call a giant bubble around the player that includes what is currently loaded into memory and could be called on to be rendered.

However, it has nothing to do with how much RAM you have, it has to do with the settings you select. It's a static amount based on things in your video settings like "view distance" in games like WoW that determine how close you have to be before a texture might be rendered. The higher you put the setting, the more the game loads. If you don't have enough RAM to entirely load it then the system PAGES it and has to swap what is in RAM because there isn't room for what you've selected as a setting, which can cause annoying visual effects like entire mountains popping into view suddenly instead of becoming more clear as you get closer.

You say you don't want me to write books, but you have no idea how this stuff works...so if you don't want to learn DON'T COME HERE AND POST. It's ridiculous that you continue to defend what you post after someone clearly points out that you're mistaken. I'm not sitting here insulting you, I don't even think you're stupid, you're just uninformed and that's OK. You have a lot to learn about this stuff, I'm a professional systems programmer and I've done game development, I know a bit more about the subject that most people.

So if you had a credit card you would have happily spent $700?
This is why American citizens are in debt.
One thing to consider as you move up the resolution ladder the more physical memory is required. You might hit near the 8GB limit on some games at the resolution.

This is where you first mention that 8GB might not be enough.

I've tested Crysis 2, Max Payne 3, and BF3 on a mixture of high/ultra settings without Virtual Memory, in all three games near 6GBs is used, and this is on my tiny monitor and resolution.

The larger the resolution the bigger the frame buffer required for displaying the image.

This is the second time. You've also said in the past that you're running in 1440p which isn't a small resolution. Also, monitor size has nothing to do with anything, only resolution matters. In both of these posts you're implying strongly that 16GB is required for gaming. I've said repeatedly that it isn't, that's how this entire conversation started.

 

[Slizzo]

Considering most games are still 32-bit, they're at a maximum of 2GB useable address space. So no matter how much RAM you have in your system, that 32-bit app will NOT use more than 2GB of system memory.

 

[MxPhenom 216]

Considering most games are still 32-bit, they're at a maximum of 2GB useable address space. So no matter how much RAM you have in your system, that 32-bit app will NOT use more than 2GB of system memory.

What? Most games these days do use more then 2GB of RAM. VRAM, that's a completely different story.

 

[Dent1]

This is where you first mention that 8GB might not be enough.

Key word. "Might".

Also who says the next increment is 16GB?

Considering most games are still 32-bit, they're at a maximum of 2GB useable address space. So no matter how much RAM you have in your system, that 32-bit app will NOT use more than 2GB of system memory.

A lot of games are 64-bit executable. It's becoming the norm too.

With a 64-bit operating system the ability to cache more data into the RAM for applications is benefit regardless whether a particular 32-bit game benefits.

 

[BiggieShady]

The larger the resolution the bigger the frame buffer required for displaying the image.

Many people use the term frame buffer wrong ... it's not a huge chunk of VRAM, it's 2 frames if double buffering is used ... even at 4K resolution it's only about 66 MB ... I have even seen article at guru3d where author uses the term for complete used VRAM. Bad author.

 

[Dent1]

Many people use the term frame buffer wrong ... it's not a huge chunk of VRAM, it's 2 frames if double buffering is used ... even at 4K resolution it's only about 66 MB ... I have even seen article at guru3d where author uses the term for complete used VRAM. Bad author.

I agree. Was just pointing out how resolution and memory interact in general.

More RAM complementing VRAM for additional textures storage was a different point which was more gaming specific.

 

[Slizzo]

What? Most games these days do use more then 2GB of RAM. VRAM, that's a completely different story.

32bit programs have a kernel limit of 2GB of addressable space, unless they are "Large Address Aware", in which case the limit is 3GB. This is where games with a 64-bit executable are getting to be more of the norm, with the new consoles around that finally have a "normal" amount of memory (8GB on both new consoles) we should finally see games start to use 64-bit executables now, which is great for us.

 

[erocker]

My goodness people...

Running 1440p?

You want 8gb's of system RAM and 3gb or more of VRAM is preferable, though Nvidia's 2gb cards will do fine as well.

Stop overthinking it.

 

[hawk767]

Well thanks folks for the suggestions/help. I appreciate those that provided helpful and on-topic recommendations and and much more comfortable with my decision.

Feel free to cut short whatever it is going on that's not related to video cards powering a 1440p monitor .