Graphics card?

marine1

marine1

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I want to upgrade my card,
Looking at either AMD / Nvidia, probably around 10-12k.
What would you recommend? Mainly for 2 monitors, one 32 inch TV / monitor and the other is a widescreen running display port.
possibly only need 1 x display port

What are your recommendations?
 
What's the use case, is this for gaming or a work requirement?

What resolution?

I would probably go for a 6800. Faster than a 7700XT at 1080 and 1440p. Faster than a 4060Ti. More VRAM than both.
 
UrBaN963 said:
What's the use case, is this for gaming or a work requirement?

What resolution?

I would probably go for a 6800. Faster than a 7700XT at 1080 and 1440p. Faster than a 4060Ti. More VRAM than both.
Click to expand...
Thanks will have a look at those, I play a game or 2 every now and then , like World of Warships for example, just feel like if I am spending anything right now to just get a good card around the 10k-15k mark
So you prefer AMD?
 
It was the best option in your budget. If you're stretching to R15k that changes things.

Your best options are then the 7800XT, the 4070 and the 6950XT. 6950XT is fastest in rasterized workloads (all games) but is extremely power hungry.

7800XT would be next fastest and 4070 just behind that. However, in ray-traced games (optional setting), the 4070 will be best. Add DLSS and Frame-Gen to that and the 4070 becomes the best, but only in ray-traced scenarios. It also has less VRAM.

So for my money, you're looking at the 6950XT or 7800XT. They both also have 16GB VRAM to the 4070s 12GB - might become an issue later in life as texture sizes increase and VRAM becomes a limiting factor.
 
UrBaN963 said:
It was the best option in your budget. If you're stretching to R15k that changes things.

Your best options are then the 7800XT, the 4070 and the 6950XT. 6950XT is fastest in rasterized workloads (all games) but is extremely power hungry.

7800XT would be next fastest and 4070 just behind that. However, in ray-traced games (optional setting), the 4070 will be best. Add DLSS and Frame-Gen to that and the 4070 becomes the best, but only in ray-traced scenarios. It also has less VRAM.

So for my money, you're looking at the 6950XT or 7800XT. They both also have 16GB VRAM to the 4070s 12GB - might become an issue later in life as texture sizes increase and VRAM becomes a limiting factor.
Click to expand...
what is the difference between VRAM and normal ram in the cards? Sorry man I have been out of this for so long I dont know what is going on
 
marine1 said:
what is the difference between VRAM and normal ram in the cards? Sorry man I have been out of this for so long I dont know what is going on
Click to expand...
VRAM is Video RAM, it's the term used to refer to the RAM on a graphics card. So a card like a 4070 12GB has 12GB of RAM (VRAM).

When you're playing a game, things like textures get loaded into VRAM as it's far faster then system RAM or your HDD/SSD. However, when you don't have enough, the system has to swap out a new texture for an old one and that takes time, it's slow. That can cause drops in frame rate or missing textures, things looking incorrect. A game like Control shows this clearly, I'll try find the video.

In essence, more is better. The VRAM doesn't determine the speed of the card, but the lack of VRAM can determine the smoothness of gameplay, if there's a lot of swapping going on. 8GB would be bare minimum these days. 12GB is fine for now, 16GB would be better in the long term, especially at higher resolutions as a 1440p/4K texture is a lot larger than a 1080p texture, so uses more VRAM.
 
marine1 said:
So if i am correct, RTX = Nvidia and RX = AMD
is there a reason one would take one over the other or is it just what brand you prefer?
Click to expand...
There are a few factors.

nVidia has the technological edge, they do make the faster cards. AMD then beats them by being cheaper. ie. a R10k nVidia GPU is likely matched or slightly slower than a R10K AMD GPU.

nVidia have DLSS. AMD has FSR. DLSS is better, though FSR has caught up a bit.

nVidia and AMD both have Ray-Tracing. nVidia call theirs RTX. nVidia is better at Ray-Tracing, however they are more expensive and RT is still fairly niche, not that many games support it and of those, it is only sometimes amazing, other times fairly meh. It is also a massive hit to performance.

nVidia generally have better driver support and stability. Not always true but on the average I would say they're probably more stable. The latest generation is also fairly power efficient, more so than AMD cards.

So if you want max performance, it's nVidia. If you want performance at a budget, it's AMD. If you also want max graphics with Ray-Tracing, it's nVidia with RTX and DLSS.

It's basically a trade-off between price/performance and then the additional features like RTX and DLSS and AMD's equivalents.

At your budget, I would take the AMD card if buying brand new and locally. They've been quite stable, fast and a better deal overall in terms of raw performance for the price.
 
This is a review of the 7800XT, however it shows graphs with relative performance so you can get a look at the options. Keep in mind this is not local pricing so you'll have to factor that in.

 
@UrBaN963 I see Nvidia cards with suffix Ti. Is this very important for gaming? Without Ti the cards are cheaper. What am I missing here?
 
I have a 6950xt powering a 4k display. I have undervolted so it doesn't draw so much power and runs cooler.

It's true, raytracing hits it really hard, but even in CP2077 with RT on, it manages a decent 70 fps. Very playable.

Turn RT off and it doesn't even sweat it. Fully 144 synced FPS.

You have to admire the brute force nature of AMD's rasterization performance, but yeah Nvidia has them beat on RT.
 
UB40 said:
@UrBaN963 I see Nvidia cards with suffix Ti. Is this very important for gaming? Without Ti the cards are cheaper. What am I missing here?
Click to expand...
Ti is a bit better performing than the non-Ti variants. You're paying for that higher performance.

I think the non-Ti have lower cores, clocks, bus speeds and VRAM (or some combination thereof).
 
UB40 said:
@UrBaN963 I see Nvidia cards with suffix Ti. Is this very important for gaming? Without Ti the cards are cheaper. What am I missing here?
Click to expand...
It's usually just a faster version of the card. So faster clock speeds, possibly differences in the amount of memory on the GPU chip itself (cache) as well as differences in the amounts of processing power (cores or compute units) in the GPU.

The 4070/4070Ti for example share the same basic GPU, but there are differences. Here's an article comparing them.

www.techspot.com

Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 vs. 4070 Ti: Is the Ti Worth It?

Here's an extensive benchmark session comparing the new GeForce RTX 4070 with its more formal tie-wearing sibling, the RTX 4070 Ti, to determine whether the Ti is...
www.techspot.com www.techspot.com
 
UrBaN963 said:
It's usually just a faster version of the card. So faster clock speeds, possibly differences in the amount of memory on the GPU chip itself (cache) as well as differences in the amounts of processing power (cores or compute units) in the GPU.

The 4070/4070Ti for example share the same basic GPU, but there are differences. Here's an article comparing them.

www.techspot.com

Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 vs. 4070 Ti: Is the Ti Worth It?

Here's an extensive benchmark session comparing the new GeForce RTX 4070 with its more formal tie-wearing sibling, the RTX 4070 Ti, to determine whether the Ti is...
www.techspot.com www.techspot.com
Click to expand...
Brilliant article. Thank You
 
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