Decisions, Decisions.....

OliverQueen

Limp Gawd
Joined
Apr 17, 2019
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170
First post, so try to be nice :) lol

Just started playing PC games again after a long layoff and in the past few months upgraded from the "old" GeForce GTX660 to a "newer" GeForce GTX970. The 970 is giving me reasonable performance in most games I have been playing but I will be stepping up my display soon from 1080p to either QHD SuperWide or 4K in the next few months as well as possibly building a new system to replace the "aging" i7 4770K build I am currently using. The 4770K is OC to 4.2GHz with a 120mm AIO (which will probably need replacing soon as it is 4 years+ and probably running a little lean on liquid).

My dilemma is a simple one really. Do I upgrade to a RTX2080, RTX2070 or go with a GTX1080 SLI setup? I am in a quandary as want a rig that will be OK for 5 years or so with some more modern titles (should any come along that catch my eye). Currently playing Diablo3, Battlefield4 & GTAV. MY head is leading towards a RTX20x0 card because of things like raytracing & being the newer architecture, but I don't think I will see much difference in real world performance in the games I play than if I had a single GTX1080, let alone SLI'd. The monitor I will be getting will not be a 144hz panel but maybe a 100hz/120hz if budget stretches that far, but more likely be a 1440p/4K 60hz panel. I will be pairing the card up with a i7 8700K if that helps (and will be OC it)


I intend to look for another GTX970 to SLI in the "old" rig once I do build a new one so the wife has a machine to play games on.
 
While I do 4k with a RTX 2070 it's mostly because of the games I play and the limitations of a non upgradeable system.

I do fine but for more futureproofing I'd suggest a 2080TI.

I play ARPG's and some other games like No Man's Sky and Anthem.

DLSS in Anthem is nice. But not many titles offer that atm.
 
If you want something with legs then I'd take the money you'd spend on the 8700K, new motherboard and memory and put it toward a 2080 Ti. The 4770K is really only getting long in the tooth in newer multiplayer games like Anthem and The Division 2.
 
First post, so try to be nice :) lol

Just started playing PC games again after a long layoff and in the past few months upgraded from the "old" GeForce GTX660 to a "newer" GeForce GTX970. The 970 is giving me reasonable performance in most games I have been playing but I will be stepping up my display soon from 1080p to either QHD SuperWide or 4K in the next few months as well as possibly building a new system to replace the "aging" i7 4770K build I am currently using. The 4770K is OC to 4.2GHz with a 120mm AIO (which will probably need replacing soon as it is 4 years+ and probably running a little lean on liquid).

My dilemma is a simple one really. Do I upgrade to a RTX2080, RTX2070 or go with a GTX1080 SLI setup? I am in a quandary as want a rig that will be OK for 5 years or so with some more modern titles (should any come along that catch my eye). Currently playing Diablo3, Battlefield4 & GTAV. MY head is leading towards a RTX20x0 card because of things like raytracing & being the newer architecture, but I don't think I will see much difference in real world performance in the games I play than if I had a single GTX1080, let alone SLI'd. The monitor I will be getting will not be a 144hz panel but maybe a 100hz/120hz if budget stretches that far, but more likely be a 1440p/4K 60hz panel. I will be pairing the card up with a i7 8700K if that helps (and will be OC it)


I intend to look for another GTX970 to SLI in the "old" rig once I do build a new one so the wife has a machine to play games on.
Dual 970's will only give you enough leg room to make you unhappy with their performance. I know, I had a pair of overclocked ones. Only 3.5 GB of their RAM is viable at 256 bit (the other 1/2 GB runs at 32 bit and causes game stuttering once you saturate that memory region). Furthermore, very few titles moving forward have been including support for multi GPU configurations. and the actual benefit gained is not always great.

Your processor is fine, the findings on Hard OCP even showed us this much on their benchmarks. You will gain a COUPLE frames per second moving to a newer generation of Intel CPU. The 4770K is still very capable of pushing FPS. You're better off investing in a ballsy, single video card.

The GeForce 10 Series Cards will give you zero issues in general (though bad cards do manifest around the 1% mark). A single GTX 1080 is roughly equivalent to a pair of GTX 970's (that was my first upgrade and it was more of a side grade). The 1080 TI is a major uplift by almost 50% over the 1080. THe 1080Ti will deliver an average fo 40 FPS at 4K maximum settings.

The 2080Ti is what you want, however, if you want it to have some legs for a couple years. You can enter that market segment for 999 bucks like I did with the EVGA Black Edition, other editions cost hundreds more and will only give you a couple fps. Your call on that. As far as reliability goes, in the past the failure rate of the 2080Ti was somewhere around 20% (a figure assembled from multiple sources including Kyle Bennett himself). Whether or not that remains to be the truth, I don't know. The 20 series is hit or miss. When it works, it works well, when it doesn't it either drives you nuts or fails outright. I still am seeing reports of people purchasing 2080Ti's that are failing, some right away and others up to six months down the road.

The 2080Ti is 25% faster than the 1080Ti and you can expect excellent to maxim FPS at 1440P with Max Settings and between 50-80 FPS at 4K with Maximum settings depending on the game.

You're, by any chance, one of the guys that wrote REUP are you?
 
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I am doing a CX system as most of the games from AMD's list I own already but not played in years https://amdcrossfire.fandom.com/wiki/Crossfire_Game_Compatibility_List as Nvidia may have a list like that , but my reason is my 9 year platform needs something to do and RX 570's was dirt cheap .. even if no new games support it = Strang Brigade does by the way .. a game like Just Cause 2 has never seen RX 570's and there a beast it CX .. to each there own but kind of gives you the number one reason to own a lot of hardware .
 
Thanks all for the replies. They are all appreciated.

One thing I did miss out in the original post is that the machine is also used to edit video and also mess around with RAW images in Photoshop. The current machine is running a little slow in those tasks nowadays compared to what a new machine would give me, hence the reason to build a new machine. I know that the 3 cards I listed are natively supported by Adobe Premiere Pro for hardware GPU rendering (which I have enabled for the GTX970 by manually adding it to the graphics card text file). The wife also needs a new machine as her "very old" 19" Acer Aspire 8930G C2D laptop is also showing it's age in a big style even with a Samsung 840Pro SSD in it! As you can see, I like to get as much use out of my hardware as possible even if it is just a spare machine for when friends come over to have a bit of multiplayer gaming with.

It does look likely that I will be buying a RTX2080 of some flavour (maybe TI depending on if I can find good price on an Asus model - just personal preference for motherboards & video cards from the first Asus board way back I ever used in the TX97 - with the horrid Intel i430TX chipset that would only cache the first 64MB of RAM & having 128MB would drag the machine to a crawl- & then the Slot 1 P2B!!!). Am I right in thinking that the TI model only differs by a small clock speed increase & almost 50% more memory? Is the price to performance difference between the RTX2080 & RTX2080ti worth paying? Maybe with the problems that have been mentioned it would be better to hold off with a GTX1080ti instead until ray tracing etc becomes defacto in games and media creation applications? This is one of the reasons why I retired from the PC industry after almost 30 years because of the confusing decisions that had to be made in times like this lol Things are so much easier when games are not in the equation lol

I will not use AMD cards due to having bad experiences in the past with both ATI & AMD variants of the Radeon chipsets & especially with their drivers not being up to scratch even for media creation tasks. Once bitten, twice shy and all that.
 
I will not use AMD cards due to having bad experiences in the past with both ATI & AMD variants of the Radeon chipsets & especially with their drivers not being up to scratch even for media creation tasks. Once bitten, twice shy and all that.

Yes but the problem with that is it representative for the current state of drivers and you guessed it it is not.
If you have questions surrounding those problems why don't you ask if current users still have the same exact problems?
You don't have to buy AMD but you will find out that a lot has changed.
 
Yes but the problem with that is it representative for the current state of drivers and you guessed it it is not.
If you have questions surrounding those problems why don't you ask if current users still have the same exact problems?
You don't have to buy AMD but you will find out that a lot has changed.

I had issues in Adobe Lightroom with my RX580. Mainly when going in to editing mode from the catalog window, images would just be all blacked out. Solved by disabling hardware acceleration.

And to some, performance matters. But maybe things have been better lately, I don't know as I don't use my RX580 in a workstation anymore.

https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/a...-2018-NVIDIA-GeForce-vs-AMD-Radeon-Vega-1206/

https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/Photoshop-CC-2018-NVIDIA-GeForce-vs-AMD-Radeon-Vega-1197/
 
As mentioned, grab the most powerful single GPU for your format. Don't SLI/Xfire.

AMD really isn't that bad, but you do you.

The 2080 Ti will be held back a bit by your CPU. So consider that. Depending on your res.

I'd consider a 1440p ultrawide or WQHD monitor personally with an RTX 2070 being budget conscious.
 
Thanks for the input. I took the plunge & went with a PNY RTX2070 8GB card (it was £170 cheaper than the equivalent Asus Strix card and having Aura/RGB is not that important if saving that much!). Honestly I cannot believe how much better it is than the GTX970 that it replaced!!!! In Diablo3, at 4K resolution with everything maxxed out, it doubles the performance on average and a lot of the time, I am seeing TRIPLE the frame rates of the GTX970 on the same other hardware!

I also purchased a triple 28" Samsung U28E590D 2160p monitor setup as well (£199 per panel!) which the GTX2070 runs them all on DisplayPort perfectly. They are 60hz panels but for the games I play, I honestly could not see any benefit in going with a higher hz panel when demoed in the shops. Maybe my eyes, but certainly wasn't going to spend significantly more for not a lot of visual difference to my eye sight.

Just got to replace the motherboard, CPU, RAM & get a nVME M.2 drive now.... Going to miss the Plextor BluRay Burner when I change cases...... But at least it will be in the Mrs' system lol
 
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