Ok so my build is in my sig, its served me well for the past 5/6 years but i downloaded Mafia 3 and realised that my graphics set up may finally need an upgrade with suttering that i am experiencing in the game. Could anyone recommend a mid -high level gpu with around a £200 budget? I have been out of the loop for a while. Nvidia rather than AMD.
For that budget you are looking at a RX 480 4GB or GTX 1060 3GB. Both can be had for just under £200 for certain models. EDIT: Examples below Sapphire RX480 Nitro+ 4 GB Zotac GeForce GTX 1060 3GB
If your looking to keep it any period of time then maybe look at upping the budget by 15% and looking at the 6GB 1060 / 8GB 480 as the extra VRAM is likely to extend the life of the card. What ever you choose its a massive upgrade.
It will be a huge upgrade and outperform your SLI setup, yes. I would also do as above and get the 6GB 1060 or 8GB 480. You'll regret getting 3GB now as it is not enough for titles, nor is 4GB. My 290X's were hitting VRAM limits earlier this year at 1080P ... so I'd hate to think what it will be like next year or the year after.
Thanks i will take a look I have since also obtained a mortgage and two children hence the £200 thought.
Yikes. Hefty bills ahead! Don't just get something because it'll do, though. Spend a little more and do yourself the favour of knowing VRAM won't plague you for a little while longer.
Click here for a direct link to the summaries. Either card is good, performing about the same across their suite. Personally I'd got with the AMDs simply for the extra VRAM in both price brackets. Shame you weren't looking on black friday, the MSI 480 8GB was under £200 after rebate and, IIRC, assuming you'd sold the game code for £10.
tl;dr version: For pretty much every existing game made using DX version 11 and earlier (and current games with a DX1/DX12 switch), the 1060 will perform better than the equivalent 480. For older games (think pretty uch anything DX9 or earlier), this is a moot point, either card will have more than enough performance that any difference will be effectively unnoticeable (who cares if you're getting 150 or 200fps when your display is only 60). For future games that are built directly for DX12 or Vulkan with no DX11 fallback, which card will perform better is entirely dependant on what specific architectures the game developer chooses to optimise for. There are current examples on both sides of the coin with one card performing better than the other, and that's likely to continue going forward. And as newer architectures arrive, expect focus for architecture-specific optimisation to shift to those over current cards.
Not entirely true, 4/8 of the games that AMD are ahead on in that video are running DX11, The Division, F1 2016, Titanfall 2, CoD:IW. Hitman is also tested using the faster API for both cards, DX12 for AMD, DX11 for NVidia. Quantum Break (is it still broken? ) is also tested on DX11 only. I do generally agree though. ^+1 ^+1 As an addition, purely in terms of Mafia 3, the 1060 6GB is ahead enough that I'd choose that over the 8GB 480, if you're going for the lower VRAM cards though the results are so close (1 min-2 average fps in favour of the 3GB 1060) I'd still say get the AMD. Generally I'd still go for the AMDs in both price brackets, but that's me
AMD have sort of fixed the VRAM issues. It now caches to your HDD. Not ideal, as min FPS are cack, but yeah, it no longer hangs and or crashes. As said though, definitely get a 6/8gb. The AMD is ahead in nearly every DX12 title so far. IIRC it was only slower in one. The more devs get the hang of DX12 and the more mature the drivers the better it will get (as it has already). I personally would not buy a 1060 now. It may be 2% faster in DX11 overall but it will only get worse because it is missing the key functionality of the 480 (Async).
Both cards (and indeed any GCN or Fermi-and-later card) utilise asynchronous compute operations. The difference is that Nvidia have the shader dispatch as part of the driver, and AMD have it as a hardware function bloc. The impact of this is that Nvidia gets no benefit from the exposure of shader dispatch in DX12/Vulkan because shader operations have been being dispatched asynchronously even under DX11 and earlier (and trying to micromanage shader dispatch can end up in performance drops as you fight the driver), whilst GCN requires shader dispatch to be exposed to the engine for GCN to take advantage of it, leaving many shaders to spin up and do nothing under DX11 and earlier.
Its a easy decision for me, i have always been a nvidia guy. Its just a case of what card from there range really.