Long story short, I’ve been away to Africa for the past 7 months and pretty much missed all of DF content so far. Just managed to level up toon to lvl 70 with an old laptop, and that was it.
I’m returning home soon, and wanted to improve my desktop to get back on the game. I currently have a GeForce 1660 Super (only decent thing I managed to buy during lockdown a few years ago) that I really wanted to update, but when I look at the price of the newer graphic cards, I almost have a heart attack.
I can’t spend more than 600€ on a new card…
From my research, the best that would get me would be a Geforce 3070. (Ti or non Ti)
Now, I also read pretty damming reviews on the 3070 series, and that puts me on the backfoot.
For sure, I believe it would be an improvement over my old 1660S, but is there anything better I can buy with this budget?
What’s your CPU? WoW needs strong CPU performance for raids/bigger combat.
Nvidia 3000 series cards are being phased out by 4000 and the prices may be speculatory/not the best. AMD 6000 faces the same from 7000 but at the same time they are more widely available and prices are going down so you may keep an eye if any local store doesn’t have a flash sale on an AMD or Nvidia card (especially as right now GPU sales are very low and vendors have to lower prices).
Middle of the pack. I have RTX 3070 and in WoW before DF it did perform really well when playing ultrawide 3440x1440. Not sure what’s your intended resolution and effects. For 1080p/1440p you could probably go with something cheaper one tier below.
Hm 240Hz? Unless you spent like a grand on that display it is most likely 1080 or ultrawide.
Since your Ryzen 5600 cant handle those high refreshrates in most modern games anyways i would say a capped FPS of 120Hz sounds good.
Assuming 1080P/120Hz i would say a AMD RX 6700 XT with 12GB is more than fine.
If you prefer Nvidia then the new 4060 TI is closest i guess but it only has 8GB of VRAM, which might be enough for 1080P for today but i would not suggest it at all.
You can check out this vid and decide:
Actually, if you can’t make use of the Nvidia exclusive features in a game like DLSS 3 the RX will be a way better deal.
The biggest problem is the low amount of VRAM.
8GB just does not cut it anymore.
We had 8GB since the 2070.
Two generations later… same amount of VRAM, but AMD has 16GB.
Nvidia knows how to artificially gimp their cards so people have to get a replacement sooner than later because they can’t run on max texture resolution/settings anymore even though the GPU would be fast enough had it enough VRAM.
Oh and don’t forget that for example the PS5 has 16GB of shared memory of which developers say thay are using about 11GB for textures.
Now u know why the recent PS5 ports run like garbo on PCs with less than 12/16GB of VRAM.
They don’t optimize them anymore, maybe like 10 patches later if we’re lucky like TloU Part 1.
This is also the reason i haven’t upgraded from my 2070S.
I’m not gonna spend 1000+€ on a 4080 with 16GB.
Anything less just does not make any sense right now if you are playing in 1440P or higher.
Yeah i could get an AMD GPU, but honestly i want the Nvidia features like DLSS, the much better raytracing performance, software, drivers etc.
That’s what the reviews about the card said.
I could get a used 3080 ti for about 500€, but tbh it doesnt make that much sense to be buying an older card for this amount of money! (Not to mention I would probably need to buy a more powerfull PSU if I went that way).
Guess best bet is to hold on to the 1660 Super and see what happens until Black Friday of this year I guess…
I really don’t want to have to upgrade my GPU again one year from now.
If you don’t really NEED to upgrade or replace your GPU and you can live with the 1660S for a while longer, than do it.
You are just gonna waste money now and most likely regret it.
The 3080TI gets hot and also draws alot more power than the 4000 series.
Gigabyte 3080 TIs are having real issues btw, they get fried when a game causes a high spike in powerdraw like in D4 beta without a FPS cap or New World
I think if you mostly play WoW or games with lower requirements you will be fine until you upgrade. There’s so many games you can play until then.
I mean it s.xx but if you don’t have money to burn, then don’t upgrade now unless you are ok with an AMD GPU then it would make sense to get something like an 6700 XT.
I prefer NVidia tbh. Always had good experieces with them, but sadly a GPU is costing almost the same as a used car XD
I guess I’ll hold onto that upgrade for now. See what the market brings. In the meanwhile, perhaps I should start thinking about upgrading my monitor instead. No point in having a fancy GPU if my current monitor only has 1920x1080 resolution.
I saw a Samsung Odyssey g5 vs 32 (2560 x 1440 resolution @ 144hz refresh rate) for 275€. Maybe I should start there… (The Samsung G7 series are double the price, so yikes)
Yeah that sounds good, but there is one problem… your GPU is not fit for that resolution nor the high refreshrates.
You will have to lower the settings even more to get playable FPS.
Tbh it does not make any sense. You are gaining resolution at the cost of performance and visual quality so in the end you’ll have a much worse experience.
Brand loyalty isn’t a good thing really. If they don’t offer the best value you should pick something else that does. For-profit companies are not our friends.
You should decide what you want to get. WoW is quite a problematic game and a high refresh rate may not be possible no matter your hardware when the game has performance issues (looks like there are more of them in DF). On the other hand, the current GPU isn’t able to pump FPS on its own.
If you want to play other games, especially those that can run >= 120 FPS and can benefit from that then you can look at such displays. If you want the best looks then either that TV or just an ultrawide display and slightly lower FPS.
The GPU doesn’t have to be upgraded each year but if you will have “minimal” requirements each year then for next year’s games you will have to upgrade. On the other hand, you can play with settings. Cyberpunk 2077 can be played on laptops and handhelds with AMD integrated graphics (680M/780M) but for high-resolution high fidelity RTX 3070 is just the start and it can use RTX 4090 or RX 7900 XTX. Not to mention DLSS/FSR for upscaling the game so you get more FPS.
Today I would be looking at RX 6950 XT / 6900 XT prices. It seems the cheapest of most of the high-end cards and has strong performance.
