dave343
[H]ard|Gawd
- Joined
- Oct 17, 2000
- Messages
- 1,869
FX-8350 / GTX 970 4gb checking in....
I actually just purchased the MSI GTX 970 used. I was using an EVGA GTX 960 2gb FTW, but the vram was forcing me in to "low" textures. You don't want to play this game with the low texture setting, at least I didn't. I'd almost say all the other settings are superfluous and will be fine on Medium or Low, but you need to at least have medium textures to really enjoy the experience.
My PC is sort of a miracle, I was gaming on a AMD 1090T until earlier this year - I'm locked in to the AM3+ socket on my mobo. Im staving off until I decide to get a completely new computer, probably after next summer and another round of RTX cards.
I grabbed the FX-8350 for $80 and it paved the way for... a G-Sync enabled ASUS ROG PG248q 1080p monitor. And in the months following those purchases my gaming experience was great even on the GTX 960.
The 970 I bought was $120, which in my budget is not a major expense and was justifiable. I thought about shoving a 1660Ti in there, but... bottlenecking. And Ray Tracing. The same guy also had a 1060 6g for sale for $180 but then...why wouldn't I just spend another $70 for the 1660Ti... and at that point why not suck it up and get a 2060 Super.... I wanted to spend as little as possible to clear the bar, essentially. I'm anticipating this hardware will finally say goodnight once Cyberpunk 2077 releases, but that's fine with me. Two gaming PC's are better than one anyway, right?
Anyway now I'm sitting pretty with High textures, a mix of high and medium settings, and an FPS average around 30-40, which is totally playable in this game. (Last benchmark I ran was - Min: 12fps Max: 60fps Avg:40fps) And the game is absolutely gorgeous if you take the time to find the right mix of graphics settings.
I'm using FXAA with a light amount of TAA. Yes it produces a sort of smudgy look but it's not pronounced enough to ruin my experience, and its better than seeing all those jaggies on the trees. My soft shadows are turned on, so medium shadows look pretty decent. Edit: Screenshots are pretty misleading for this title because there is LOTS of movement, literally almost everything is moving at all times: rabbits duck through the grass, trees sway, clouds move and so do the shadows and light with them. You will be really hard pressed to actually notice any kind of heavy anti-aliasing you apply.
Some might just have to accept that only the beefy-est rigs that are going to handle MSAA on this title. Such was the case when GTAV was released until the next round or two of GPUs came around.
As much as I'd love to experience a solid 60FPS experience, if even the newest hardware released this year is having trouble, then I'm totally happy with what I got for what I've spent (my PC is essentially seven years old, upgraded component by component).
If you aren't gaming on a screen syncing technology, now is the time to consider getting there. Like someone stated before, it really helps turn a choppy 30-60fps experience in to something smooth. I might dabble in the online mode, but I have no posse... I got this game for the narrative. Literally grinning ear to ear from the experience Rockstar has crafted.
And as an added bonus, now I'm probably going to see 144fps gameplay in the majority of the rest of my collection.
If you are having a hard time, start with basics, disable any secondary monitors, update drivers. Bring your settings down to low and go up from there. I feel like the benchmark is more about measuring the visual fidelity than the framerate. I feel like I haven't had any noticeable dips in to that minimum the benchmark states. I even had the average go down after lowering a setting. As is customary, for best results, restart you game after applying graphics settings. I turned off TAA once during my game and it slaughtered my fps.
The lesson here? If I had just spent the extra 120 dollars in the first place and gotten a 970 instead of the 960, I would have been set. smh, because the 4gb 960 came out maybe only a month after I got my 2gb one. And that is where I came to the conclusion to not try and spend more for the 1000 series generation, and instead save up for a new, high end computer that will actually be future-minded. In the end the math worked for me and if you are in a similar situation thinking you need a whole new computer, maybe this will indicate otherwise to you.
Kudo's for tweaking it and having it run good on that hardware... I was wondering if people were out there running it on pre Ryzen CPU's. You also may be able to squeeze some more performance out of that 970 by looking for an older 2600k/mobo combo, or 3770/4770. But at any rate, that's pretty awesome and goes to show you can get stuff running good on older hardware if you take the time to make the right adjustments while keeping the game looking good.