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Could I get some hardware upgrade advice?
I was wondering, for those of you not having any issue running the game, what hardware do you recommend to play ME:C? Also, what is the most important piece to upgrade? I'm trying to figure out if it has to be all or nothing or if I can upgrade incrementally.
My pc is a good 5 years old, with parts that were probably getting out of date back then, so I'm surprised I can run the game as smoothly as I can.
I currently have:
MSI GeForce GTX 460
Intel Core i5-2400 Sandy Bridge Quad-Core 3.1GHz
8GB (2 x 4GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM
Thanks for any advice!
My pc is a good 5 years old, with parts that were probably getting out of date back then, so I'm surprised I can run the game as smoothly as I can.
I currently have:
MSI GeForce GTX 460
Intel Core i5-2400 Sandy Bridge Quad-Core 3.1GHz
8GB (2 x 4GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM
Thanks for any advice!
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Comments
So everything comes down to how much you ready to pay for upgrade.
I also would suggest to wait for a 1070 price drop or even a 1060 or a future AMD equivalent.
Use the MSI Afterburner OSD to determine which components are bottlenecking, as you can see what hits 100% computing or memory.
The absolute best thing you can do is to update that archaic graphics card and to increase your framebuffer. At 4Gb, I still saw the occasional lowres texture on Hyper/unlocked. At 8Gb, I never, ever, see lowres textures.
Thus, my suggestion would be to get yourself a 1070/80. You'll be CPU limited in a lot of cases, but you can move the card to a better CPU/mobo/ram combination later, if you want the best the card can push.
Even tho that may be some truth, he shouldn't go with one ram stick, cuz that will limit him to single channel. Take 2 or 4.
The GTX 1070 ist a huge waste of Money if you don't play in 1440p/2160p and it doesn't look like they will be high in Stock until August.
You could probably get a equally fast GTX 980ti for under 500€ in EU or under 400$ in US.
With graphics cards, you absolutely get what you pay for. Buy cheap, and you get cheap, with free regrets thrown in later.
As for the 1070 stock? Utter rubbish. There were stacks of them here when I picked up my MSI 1080 X last week. Perhaps you live in the middle of nowhere, or only buy hardware from Amazon, but stock is plentiful and cheap if you know where to look for it.
Lol. I love when people claim like "if you don't play 8K UHD VR then you don't nee that. 1080p will go fine with radeon 4850"
Look.. If you get a GTX 1080 on a 1080p screen I still doubt you will be able to totally max out all the games on hyper ultra with stable 144 fps. That said, you totally should consider buying a good GPU and not think about resolution as long as it's bigger than 720p. You will benefit from best cards on 1080p.
If you don't benefit and got all settings screwed up to the max just do super sampling and boom you're back under 60 fps.
First of all... Since the Crimson drivers, AMD's drivers have been superior in every way. nVidia's drivers have been plagued with crashes, freezes, BSODs, killing cards and so on this year alone. Google it. You'll know what I'm talking about.
Secondly, the RX 480 uses a mere 150W MAX (likely way below that), which throws the whole 'space heater' argument out the window. We're not in 2013 anymore. The RX 480 is likely the BEST card to go for, both in terms of performance per watt, performance per dollar, and future proofing.
This place is a bad place to ask for graphics card advice. Go to a place where people actually know what they're talking about... Overclock.net, Beyond3D and so on. Avoid TomsHardware, and apparently, this place.
Take your blind bias somewhere else. The other 88% of the market knows better, and won't be fooled by cheap price tickets.
Nvidia got their current gen GTX 950 at the top of a value/performance chart. (Counting out Radeon 6000 for obvious reason) here.
Nvidias driver app is much more functional and pleasing to the eye than AMDs bloatware (Gaming Evolved is the name and it reminds me of some online "tookens for survey" phishing site)
Cost are totally justified. Their latest research with their 1000 series costed so much that they could go to mars instead. The research made it possible for some huge boost in performance and costs cut.
You can tell me all you want about AMDs latest and greatest but the hard truth is that they are down to 12% market share, few years behind Nvidias technologies, and are cutting down on support in order to minimize the price you are paying for their new cards. My GTX 780 will be supported for years to come and is still a very powerful piece of hardware even today. The RX 480 you are talking about will be old in a couple of months and will become obsolete, without proper driver support in some 3 years. Not to mention that it will note cope with the games of 2018. Just no chance.
If you can't afford a Nvidia, that's fine. I got nothing against people with low income alright. But don't be dumb enough to actually believe that AMD is the best and leads the progress. It just falls behind Nvidia 100% of times.
Do you know which cards have been made into legacy products by AMD? Anything older than GCN 1.0. Do you know from which year that is? 2010.
Do you know which cards have been made into legacy products by nVidia? The GTX 700 series and older. Do you know from which year that is? 2013.
Don't talk about dumping half the user base when nVidia's cards have shorter support than AMD's.
It's not bias. It's reality. nVidia is a blatant liar and it's completely obvious for anyone that actually pays attention to the market.
They ignored the benefits of DX10.1
They used tessellation for everything unnecessarily downgrading performance on both their own cards and their competitors.
They use proprietary stuff for adaptive sync, compute software, gaming software.
They downplayed everything that's open source.
They downplayed Mantle while praising DX12.
They then downplayed DX12 because DX11 is superior for them.
They hijacked the term async compute to pretend that they can do it also.
The GTX 970 with their 3.5 GB useable memory instead of 4GB.
When releasing Pascal they praised VR to the heavens. When AMD announced the RX 480 suddenly VR is not viable until 20 years from now...
The other 88% of the market has been fooled into upgrading every two years, while even the HD7000 series has superior architectural features compared to 2016's Pascal.
When a GTX 960 can beat a 780 Ti, you know something fishy is going on...;
https://www.reddit.com/r/pcmasterrace/comments/36e7mx/a_960_outbenching_a_780_because_of_nvidia/
Oh really? Doesn't seem like it. What is this 'stuff' exactly...?
If you really did know your facts, you know that personal experience is not sufficient to warrant a claim true or not. That you know some basic coding doesn't mean you understand business practices nor workings of architectures. In any case, take a look here. You'll find all the reoccuring problems with nVidia drivers for this year.
https://www.destructoid.com/the-new-nvidia-drivers-are-crashing-systems-again-348508.phtml
Make sure to read the comments;
https://www.reddit.com/r/pcmasterrace/comments/4cu3pw/latest_nvidia_driver_36472_is_apparently_bricking/
That alone is sufficient, but here's a few bonus ones...
https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/4kos3n/i_cant_believe_people_still_say_nvidia_has/
https://www.reddit.com/r/nvidia/comments/49dghk/some_users_may_be_experiencing_issues_w_game/
http://gamerant.com/nvida-driver-division-crash/
https://forums.geforce.com/default/topic/940638/geforce-experience/reddit-win10-crash/
Oooh. Selective picking at its best. You can't even play Mirror's Edge Catalyst at max settings with that card. **** you'd be lucky to be able to play it at medium settings. Besides, the R9 390 can run Mirror's Edge catalyst on Hyper settings. The equivalent, the GTX 970, cannot, and downgrades to Ultra instead. So what do you have to say to that?
And even so, if you take the top 10 of that same chart of yours, it consists of 5 AMD cards and 5 nVidia cards. So things are not as spread out as you're trying to make it out to be... Have you even used it to make such a claim?
A) It's not bloatware
https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/4kos3n/i_cant_believe_people_still_say_nvidia_has/
It has even gone so far, that people are afraid of installing new nVidia drivers...
Lol yeah right... The node shrink from 28nm to 16nm is the only 'research' they did apparently. Pascal is nothing more than a node shrink with fixed async that was broken with Maxwell. The only reason for the performance increase is that they achieved higher clocks. No architectural improvements to be found.
Market share does not necessarily reflect product quality. In this case, it only reflects that nVidia has way superior marketing to AMD's. Also, AMD has been gaining market share back since this year, since people are starting to see through nVidia's shady business practices. Additionally, AMD's stock is rising, from a mere $1.60 USD at the beginning of this year, to $5.20 right now.
Pure nonsense. Here's where I know you have no idea what you're talking about. To put things into perspective using DX12 as a reference, we have the following;...
GCN 1.0 supports FL11_1
GCN 1.1 supports FL12_0
GCN 1.2 supports FL12_0
Fermi supports FL11_0
Kepler supports FL11_0
Maxwell supports FL11_0
Maxwell 2 supports FL12_1 (sort of)
Note that GCN 1.1 and GCN 1.2 support FL12_0. This means that since 2013, AMD has GPUs on the market supporting pretty much all DX12 features. On top of that, they support the majority of these features on the highest tiers, including the 'hidden' 11_2 feature level. They are only missing conservative rasterization and ROV. Compare that to nVidia. Maxwell which was released in 2014, were still only capable of FL11_0!!! In fact, AMD's GCN 1.0 from 2011 has a higher rank in feature level support than 2014's Maxwell... Let that sink in for a moment...
With Maxwell 2, they included the two missing features of AMD, conservative rasterization and ROV, making them capable of advertising FL12_1. They also have a higher tier in tiled resources. They had to include these features in their cards (and fast) for them to be remotely competitive to the features that GCN was offering.
However, despite all this;
- AMD's is still a higher tier in resource binding, even GCN 1.0 which is from 2011.
- Stencil reference value from pixel shader is still only supported by GCN cards, again starting from GCN 1.0.
- All GCN cards have the full heap available for UAV slots for all stages, Maxwell 2 cards are limited to 64.
- GCN 1.0 cards have two asynchronous compute engines with two queues per unit (total of 4), which allow concurrent calculations of graphics + compute. Maxwell 2 still can't do this since they're limited by their required context switch. The same is true for Pascal. They can do asynchronous computing only, but they can't do concurrent graphics + compute. GCN doesn't have this limit since no context switch is required. GCN 1.1 increased the compute units from two to eight compared to GCN 1.0, and the queues from 2 to 8 per unit also (total of 64). And this isn't even being used yet. Developers are starting to experiment with it.
- GCN 1.2 is the only card (including among GCN) that has minimum float precision. Maxwell 2 doesn't have it at all.
People complaining about GCN being outdated and the architecture needing to be redesigned have no idea what they're talking about. In fact, from this perspective, Fermi, Kepler and Maxwell look more like rebrands than the GCN cards. The GCN architecture is one of the best that has ever been designed in terms of longevity and being future proof. It supported so many features since 2011 that are still not being used nowadays.
Pure nonsense. As already stated above, AMD's legacy cards are from 2010 and older, while nVidia's are 2013 and older.
Your GTX 780 is already a legacy product... Its competitor at the time HD7970 (also known as he R9 280X) was mostly losing to it in the past, but is generally wiping the floor with your GTX 780 now under DX12. Not only that, it still has official driver support. Here. A gift for you;
Sorry but the RX 480 is not an nVidia card. AMD cards age well because their technology is in front of nVidia's, despite popular opinion.
Tell that to the HD7970... It's still going strong. And in fact, I guarantee that the RX 480 will last me at least 4 years, just like my HD6850 has. If I wasn't waiting for the RX 480, I would've gotten an R9 390 a long time ago. And yes, it is superior to the GTX 970
Actually, AMD is the one that leads to progress. They were the first that invented tessellation, they were the first that released a unified shader architecture, they designed HBM memory, they're the first that can do concurrent graphics & compute, and quite a few other things. What has nVidia offered? GameWorks, where the games run worse than they should...
Don't believe the nVidia hype. There's no substance behind it.
Lars Weinand, Senior Technical Marketing Manager, EMEA, told us that, ‘The problem with TDP is there is no “standard” for this. So everyone is measuring TDP in a different way and TDPs are only really comparable within the same manufacturer… We are using TDP in a way that makes most sense for us.’ Even Lars ultimately suggests that we put more faith in our power consumption tests than a number written on a spec sheet.
http://www.bit-tech.net/blog/2010/11/11/what-does-tdp-mean-nvidia/
All leaks indicate the RX 480 being at GTX 980 performance at stock clock (1266 MHz). If rumors are true, it will clock over 1500 MHz. Considering AMD is known for having higher IPC, it would not be inconceivable that an OC $200 RX 480 reaches stock GTX 1070 performance. And that, at almost half the price. BUT, we will have to wait to confirm this. Don't underestimate the RX 480...
Not that it matters right now. The GTX 1070/1080 prices are way out of proportion since the launch was a paper launch. Good luck getting one... Above that, it has been quite known that the cards really don't have any OC room. Some people are even arguing that it's better to go for a 980 Ti than a GTX 1080, since the 980 Ti overclocks so well, and reaches close to GTX 1080 performance. Soooo. Yeah.
Anyone buying hardware right now needs to do their homework. Don't just repeat. Investigate, or you'll end up spending more money than necessary.
http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/answers/id-2958200/graphics-card-good-choice-970.html
And what the F about 780 legacy? I seem to get my driver updates regularly. You're just bad at lying
And yes boy have I used the AMD bloatware gaming evolved app. It almost gave me cancer. "Play to get tokens to get chance to win prizes" is so 2010.
It's obvious you're just a troll. Still, I'll leave this here for you...
http://www.nvidia.com/page/legacy.html
It's a question of definition. Nvidia means that it's not their flagship anymore, yet they provide all the new updates for all of their cards, not dumping people like AMD does.
If I'm a troll and you're fully convinced of that then don't talk to me.
I might just follow your advise...
Okay look you are totally right. It's legacy. I agree. But still, you get support/drivers/fixes for their cards. AMD just dumps the customer base.