GTX 770 2GB vs 4GB vs ATI

[Marcvs]

So I have a couple of days to decide if its worth upgrading GPU, but as I haven't been watching what do you recommend.

Is the GTX 770 4GB version going to be a decent improvement over the 2GB, or should I go for a 290X.

Will be for some gaming and some video editing.

Current Specs:

i7 950 @ 4.5Ghz (@X-58 Gigabyte Chipset)
18GBs Ram
SSD + HDDs
GTX 480

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Some of the custom R9 290 cards can be had for around the £300 mark on offer. What type of budget are you looking at??

[Marcvs]

No fixed one; but ofc dont wanna spend too much - given I am not playing anything super graphically demanding at the moment, my question is more that is the ~£70 stepup from ~250 to 320 for the 2gb vs 4gb actually worthwhile or am I better off looking at an R9. (I play at 1900x1200 usually)

[kompukare]

What kind of games are we talking about?#

Because of anything demanding, your LGA1366 might not be quick enough any more. DirectX really wants crazy single-threaded performance, so for well-threaded games like BF4 it really makes sense to go for AMD because of Mantle. Having said that performance-wise, isn't the R9-280X the equivalent of the GTX770?

[Marcvs]

AC IV, Rome II, Civ V, Maybe NA when it comes out, possibly Dark Souls II,

[malfunction]

I doubt you're lacking that much in single thread performance at 4.5GHz, if you were running stock or just significantly slower than a typical haswell overclock then maybe but at 4.5GHz a platform upgrade seems a bit drastic unless you know you're CPU limited. I'd upgrade the graphics card first...

...though looking at your other thread maybe it's time for an upgrade!

[Marcvs]

Ye but I really dont want to spend £600+ for new CPU and Mobo and then anopther 300 for a graphics card

[DanceswithUnix]

No fixed one; but ofc dont wanna spend too much - given I am not playing anything super graphically demanding at the moment, my question is more that is the ~£70 stepup from ~250 to 320 for the 2gb vs 4gb actually worthwhile or am I better off looking at an R9. (I play at 1900x1200 usually)

I can't see you needing 4GB of VRAM. If you are driving lots of monitors from one card where it needs to store buffers for each screen, or you are doing stuff like rendering jobs in OpenCL where the card needs all the render data in ram then 4GB would make sense.

Most graphics cards are 2GB, there are plenty out there that are 1GB, so that is what games devs seem to be tuning for. So I would say you want 2GB at least, but beyond that speed of ram is going to be more important than amount, and there must be a better way of spending £70.

[Marcvs]

And yes I use a dual/tri-monitor setup for work (though usually only preview on one) and have maybe PS or a game on the other

[Spreadie]

As above - you don't need anything more than the 2GB 770 or 280X for 19x12 res.

In fact, pick up a cheap 2GB 680, stick a mild OC on it (which is all a 770 is) and put the rest towards a new board and CPU - for video encoding, that 950 (with HT) at 4.5GHz isn't much better than a 2500K at stock speed; and it's using waaaaaaay more power.

[DanceswithUnix]

As above - you don't need anything more than the 2GB 770 or 280X for 19x12 res.

In fact, pick up a cheap 2GB 680, stick a mild OC on it (which is all a 770 is) and put the rest towards a new board and CPU - for video encoding, that 950 (with HT) at 4.5GHz isn't much better than a 2500K at stock speed; and it's using waaaaaaay more power.

Really? Anandtech says the stock 950 is faster than the stock 2500K which is as I would expect. Well, apart from the H264 first pass but that is pretty pointless given the second pass is where all the time is spent.

http://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/100?vs=288

[Spreadie]

I was going by what I remember of the Bit Sandy Bridge review - video encoding test.

I'll dig out a link later

[Wolmack]

I'd go got a gtx 770 I think 4gb version.