GPU upgrade advice.

[EmileS]

Saving R1500 by buying something that has similar performance is a no brainer. I promise you, you won't miss that "extra eyecandy" or even notice it if you weren't looking for it. Just take that 1.5k and add it to your screen purchase or buy a nice mouse or KB or headies.

 

[Nikkel]

I bought my PowerColor AX7870 LE Myst from Wootware. Great company and great card. Nothing wrong with PowerColor.

^^+100

Bought a R9 280X PowerColor Turbo duo from Wootware and I'm as happy as a fly in *****

Not the highest clocker out of the bunch but all my games runs 1080p on Ultra with most, if not all, bells and whistles turned on!

The best thing at the time was it being almost R1k cheaper than the "preferred" brands.

 

[UsernameLadiesMan217]

Why is powercolor on wootware so cheap and will it stay that way?

I am searching for upgrades, but I wanted to upgrade CPU first, but if this is a really good deal I will go powercolor GPU first.

Why does takealot not stock powercolor

 

[CataclysmZA]

I was thinking that the GTX780 with 6gb vram will at least last me till start 2016 running everything maxed out, reason I want the 6GB is because I am thinking about huge games coming like witcher 3 and GTA V that has open world that MIGHT require more frame buffer and I love AA and AF (rather have 6GB and not use it than being with out when games actually do start to consume lager vram as it is more available and game dev are tempted to utilize it).

I don't think that any game coming out in 2016 will max out a 3GB, let alone a 4GB frame buffer before you apply anti-aliasing. The only game currently out that comes close without mods is Crysis 3, because of the incredible texture work. I wouldn't worry much about frame buffers once you go over 3GB simply because you can enable FXAA or TXAA (Nvidia only) and enjoy the same visual effect as 2x MSAA but with a tenth of the performance hit and a third of the memory use.

The biggest memory hog is, in fact, anti-aliasing. You can keep all other game options on Ultra but leave MSAA at 2x, which is still a pleasing look and smooths out 90% of the jaggies.

Don't overthink this too much right now. Flip your coin and carry on. You're going to be playing at 1080p for a while anyway while you save for your 1440p monitor in late 2015.

But now...does the GTX780 have the horsepower to fill that 6gb with its 384bit lanes? and will the 384bit not be a limit when games start getting really big (speculating for 2015 )? and lets say the GTX drops price and of year meaning there is a opportunity to SLI which I am sure the 6GB will come in handy.

Yeah, Nvidia's hardware is really efficient when it comes to memory use and the driver teams are doing great work to duck around the bandwidth issues. A 384-bit bus with tons of memory won't be slow for a good while. Consider that only now, in the last year or so, have Radeon HD5870 owners begun to really feel the performance pinch and a real need to upgrade, and those cards had 1GB GDDR5 RAM and a 256-bit bus. You'll be fine.

As for SLI, remember that the same benefit extends to the R9 290/290X with Crossfire as well. There are no issues with how Crossfire is implemented today, the only ****ups happen when playing DirectX 9 games. Grab a R9 290 when it becomes cheap, have enough GPU horsepower to game at UltraHD 4K resolutions. That same benefit is there for the GTX780 as well, only its far more expensive when looking at the PowerColor offerings.

I cant get to much reading info on how AMD handles things like fog and lighting and shadows compared to Nvidia. some clips I saw on youtube the AMD test just did not have the fog that surrounds the characters in such way that it is visually impressive, I mean physX the fog moves with the characters. but is that R1500+- worth? the reason we get stronger GPUs is to experience that type of effects?

Don't get hung up on Physx. Its a nice-to-have, but very few developers implement it properly, let alone use it for an actual purpose besides eye candy. Radeon cards handle fog and lighting just as well as any Geforce.

Arkham Origins' Physx-driven fog is nonsensical anyway - where the **** does it all come from? Why is it there? What purpose does it have other than interacting with other objects and Batman's cape?

Why is powercolor on wootware so cheap and will it stay that way?

Why does takealot not stock powercolor

I believe that Wootware imports the cards themselves, Esquire is also a licensed distributor for the brand as well. Takealot doesn't stock them probably because they don't want the admin burden of handling warranties locally.

 

[Nirv]

I have the Asus R9 290 DCUII with the 8-phase power design custom PCB, backplate and all that good stuff. Can highly recommend it.