Well well well, thanks to Watch_Dogs running like a Broken_Dog with 3 legs missing and severe brain damage on my GTX 670, I'm thinking of selling it for around £150ish and switching to something like a GTX 780 or Radeon R290. That being said though, I doubt I'll see a massive difference in performance in games like Battlefield or Wolfenstein (they're all sluggish at this point but barely playable on med-high settings). So, question remains: At this point, is it just better to wait a few months for the new Nvidia/AMD cards to come out, or am I likely looking at a 2015 release for those? Anyone know when the supposed release dates are?
What res are you playing at? I have a 670 and Battlfield (I presume you mean 4) runs like a dream on ultra, averaging about 70+fps at 1920x1200.
That is... odd, I'm wondering if there isn't something wrong with my rig, on BF 4 I'd guess I'm averaging 35 - 45fps in most areas (haven't run fraps for some time so maybe I should), some smaller ones do hit 60+ but it's a struggle to play. Playing on 1920x1080 as well.
I'm running an i5-4670k at stock with 12GB RAM and an SSD, on a 23" 1080p monitor. Any suggestions for whether it's worth the wait for Maxwell high-end GPU's or not? When is the estimated launch date set for?
While it sounds like something is playing up, don't upgrade purely for watch dogs. Wait until they actually fix the game imo.
Fair enough; I'm expecting Watch Dogs to be broken for a long time, but I'm just worried that I'll be going into games like the Witcher 3, Arkham Knight, TC's The Division etc. that come out, having to leave some settings on medium whereas I personally prefer just setting everything on Max and away we go. The thought that I'm not playing the game to its full potential really gets to me, so I don't mind dropping a few hundred quid every few years if it means I can play happily instead of being bugged by graphical fidelity. I draw the line at £650 SLi setups of course, but £300 is fine.
You should be able to play both Watchdogs and Wolfenstein maxed out with the exception of texture detail. For Wolfenstein you should be able to get away with compressing textures, although I'm not sure how much of the game this will be ok for, you may find you need to turn texture detail down a notch. For Watch dogs, turn textures down a notch, disable Vsync in the game, possibly enable Adaptive Vsync in the control panel and the rest should run smoothly with the latest drivers.
Does look increasingly like a 2015 release date for the new generation of graphics cards. I'll be waiting because many of the big hitters including The Witcher 3 are out next year.
It's always difficult to make a suggestion on whether to wait or not, especially as you might wait for 2years before something decent is released again. My gut is always get the best you can afford at the time, unless you know for definite that something better is coming soon
I still think something fishy is going on with your rig, but if you are in an upgrading mood I'll leave this here...... along with this review.
Thank you all for your replies; I haven't truthfully checked this threat for a while, so here's what I did in the meantime: I decided to order the MSI GTX 780 OC Gaming Edition from Scan at £342 last week, and it arrived Saturday. While I was waiting, I decided to mess around with some settings, and I discovered that if I set my 670 to use Adaptive V-Sync (only ever used the on/off options as I didn't believe Adaptive would completely eliminate tearing) then Wolfenstein ran like a dream, even with Texture Compression off; Crysis still sat firmly at 32 - 45fps outside/inside on High / 2xMSAA, but that's to be expected. Anywho, at this point I'm thinking that it was maybe a waste to buy the 780 since it's only a small bump in performance, compared to waiting 2 generations, but boy am I glad I got it. Crysis (I haven't yet FRAPS'd it) runs at 60fps+ on Very High, Wolfenstein obviously 60+ but this time, it was a more definitive 60+ instead of occasional drops here and there. Oh, and I tried Watch Dogs, on my SSD this time to help with texture swapping since it apparently uses 3.5GB+ on Ultra instead of the 3GB it reports). Watch_Dogs still runs like a dog, which I expected. That being said, it's not as bad as reported (people with 780ti's have been reporting 45fps in some places) but it took a lot of messing around with settings to get it to stay above 50fps and still remain near-max settings. I'm not getting my hopes up that this is completely fixable since the textures it processes are just too big to begin with, and that's possibly what's causing issues. It's just great going forward that I know things should run well for another year or two before needing another upgrade. Thanks for everyone who offered suggestions, as usual, the person you were trying to help just ended up doing whatever they wanted to in the end anyway.
Interesting, I found that initially with Wolfenstein I could run with all settings at their fullest, but after I stormed into the castle I had to turn either the cache size (to reduce texture pop in) down or turn compression on, otherwise it would stall horrendously. That's with a 3GB card. I also found that normal Vsync and Triple buffering work from the Nvidia control panel. Crysis 3 seems to run about the same on both our PC's, but I use SMAA instead of MSAA. I'm running Watch Dogs fine with max settings, I've only ever seen it fill the 3GB once and even then it was playable. Again I'm using Temporal SMAA not MSAA as MSAA would have a large memory footprint. I also found that if I set Vsync to 1 and then set fullscreen mode to borderless window, then back again to fullscreen the I get Vsync with Triple buffering which is great because even with adaptive Vsync it still tears too much for me. Personally I'm very happy with my upgrade from a 670, but then I needed the extra grunt for my new 2560x1080 monitor. Have you tried overclocking it yet?
Ah, a fellow 670 - 780 upgrader. I don't quite understand why, but I do know that I had quite a big performance jump going from an i5-760 to an i5-4670 simply because my GPU was being held back by the older CPU. It’s still great for its age, I just noticed as much of a difference changing CPUs as I’ve just done changing GPUs, except it went from “okayish” to “not bad” the first upgrade, to “nearly perfect” this time around. It may be an upgrade worth considering, for yourself, in the next year or so just to iron out any performance issues you may still be having; but since I didn’t actually benchmark when I upgraded my CPU I can’t say for certain how much of it was simply perceived performance improvement. Also, if I confused SMAA with MSAA please forgive me as it happens sometimes (I know SMAA is Post-process and MSAA is the more intensive AA but I can’t always remember which game uses which). As for OCing the GPU, I’ve had it running at just over 1,100Mhz with Boost and it hasn’t gone above the mid 50deg range. I’ll run FRAPS tonight on some of them and see how it performs.
Did you have your 760 overclocked at all? I've not been let down by my CPU yet, i'm amazed it is doing so well 5 years on. What motherboard are you using? Is the 1100 the in game boost as measured by GPUz? Have you tried overclocking the graphics memory? GPUz should tell you what make memory your GPU has. Samsung and Hynix are known to be great overclockers.
That's a great idea, I still haven't even had the chance to properly benchmark it using Furmark etc. since I've spent most of my free time dealing with a very unwell cat, but what I did was loaded up EVGA Precision and set the MSI Afterburner to "Gaming Mode" which applies only a modest OC (when I checked it was something like 1,106Mhz with Turbo on). I didn't have time to look through it properly, so this weekend I'll just use Precision and tweak the Base clock and Memory as far as it can go before artifacting sets in. I'd imagine I can probably get a comfortable 1200+ and 7000+ Boost/Memory combo going. I had, about 6 months ago, OC'd my 670 but the games that were struggling still struggled, whereas now games that are on the fence of 60fps get tipped over and run great (Watch_Doge's excluded). I don't imagine it'll last for long, what with some of the titles out next year, but I guess there's always SLi. Which will be great, SLi on 1080 is overkill, but should delay an upgrade for a long time. Have you felt the need to upgrade anything lately, or are you happy with the way your rig is performing right now? Do you run any games from SSD?
I was wondering whether you overclocked your i5 when you had it? Never really had any games struggle, apart from possibly marching 10 testudo units up to storm the gates in Rome 2 but then every total war game has come to a crunch when hundreds of units are sharing the same space. I did find that overclocking my 670's memory to nearly 7000MHz was the difference between 30+ fps and 45+fps in demanding games. I was tempted by Devils Canyon but when it came down to it I figured I was happy with my computers performance, And I'd already spent £750 on the monitor and GPU. I get 60FPS in most games, the ones I don't I usually get 45+ with occasional dips to 30 but I think that is still playable. Back in the day I made it through games like Far Cry on less than that and still really enjoyed it. I used to run Arkham City from my SSD as it seems to smooth the gliding through maps on an engine that was only designed for smallish areas. I tend to keep the space reserved for games that either have a lot of streaming or load times that can be shortened significantly (Dragon Age I'm looking at you). Funnily enough, moving Watch Dogs to my WD RE4 2TB drive (optimised for servers and multiple video streams) from my Samsung F3, it became a smoother experience driving through the city. A good test for GPU memory is Metro: Last Light. then fine tuned with Crysis 3 to make sure the grenade aim arc isn't all over the place.
