Hardware & Technical Graphics Card conundrum

Iron Orchid

Iron Orchid
I wonder if anyone can help me make a decision -

I have a GTX 960 2Gb card that I run at 1080 and was wondering whether there would be any visible benefit to upgrading to a 1060 6Gb or RX 480 /580 ?
 

MickyG1982

M
Iron Orchid said:
I wonder if anyone can help me make a decision -

I have a GTX 960 2Gb card that I run at 1080 and was wondering whether there would be any visible benefit to upgrading to a 1060 6Gb or RX 480 /580 ?
Click to expand...

It really depends on the rest of the system. The 1060 is quite close to the 980 in terms of raw performance but, you'll only see the best out of the card if the rest of your system doesn't bottleneck it. You should however be fully capable of ultra settings plus some SS and/or AA.

As for ultra on a 2gb 960 Sha? Nope, ultra at 720p uses up 1.8 GB of VRAM. At 1080p (more than double the pixel count) you need a 4GB card to avoid the texture popping.

Anyway, I digress, if you have a system similar to mine then the upgrade is only really worth it if you plan to change the rest of the system at a later date. That said, the 1060 would be a perfect match for a Pentium G4560 (or equivalent) and above.
 

shadragon

shadragon
MickyG1982 said:
As for ultra on a 2gb 960 Sha? Nope, ultra at 720p uses up 1.8 GB of VRAM. At 1080p (more than double the pixel count) you need a 4GB card to avoid the texture popping.
Click to expand...

Here's a post from a while back with people testing actual VRAM usage under various conditions. I never saw more than 2GB vram used on my system until I fired up VR. YMMV and MSI Afterburner will tell you exactly how much VRAM you are burning.

adoredtv said:
1920x1080, maximum settings, 93 fps, 830 MB VRAM usage http://i.imgur.com/KX5laH0.jpg
1920x1080, low settings, 152 fps, 739 MB VRAM usage - http://i.imgur.com/l1p1F0b.jpg

This was basically the hardest thing I could find to look at, ie a planet. You can see the difference in texture on the surface and the frame-rates clearly show the difference between high and low.

What's more, if I run the game on Eyefinity 5280x1010, the memory usage doesn't go up by that much (frame rate drops to 45 or so on Max looking at the same planet).

At 720p the same scene is using about 520 MB of VRAM, on maximum, and I get about 175 fps.
Click to expand...
 

MickyG1982

M
shadragon said:
Here's a post from a while back with people testing actual VRAM usage under various conditions. I never saw more than 2GB vram used on my system until I fired up VR. YMMV and MSI Afterburner will tell you exactly how much VRAM you are burning.
Click to expand...

With that particular post being from 2014 over a year before Horizons was released, yes, you are right Elite dangerous did not need that much VRAM & could be played on a potato with a very old GPU & quite happily play. EDH is a very different animal - given that just before I discovered the beta I was sat in a station at with the resolution at 720p (not even a ground station) with the settings turned up to Ultra & my card's VRAM was near enough maxed out at 1.95Gb. That was the reading taken from MSI afterburner, nothing else was running other than Windows itself.

For consistancy I will also try the same test in 2.3.10 beta to see if that is the same case, then I'll try the same settings, I'll also bet that it'll peg at 2Gb but that will be because my card (the same as the OP's) only has 2 Gb in total. The rest will go to system RAM.
 

shadragon

shadragon
MickyG1982 said:
For consistancy I will also try the same test in 2.3.10 beta to see if that is the same case, then I'll try the same settings, I'll also bet that it'll peg at 2Gb but that will be because my card (the same as the OP's) only has 2 Gb in total. The rest will go to system RAM.
Click to expand...
Please do. I'll try to do the same tonight if I have time. I have 12GB VRAM and have bumped up the texture sizes with INI file edits.
 

Iron Orchid

Iron Orchid
I'm glad I've sparked off a debate - anyway it's an i5 6600 16gb RAM pc and it is running Horizons.
(I upgraded from a g3420 16Gb HD4670 18 months ago after problems at the Core.)

I'll look forward to your memory usage stats.
 

MickyG1982

M
Iron Orchid said:
I'm glad I've sparked off a debate - anyway it's an i5 6600 16gb RAM pc and it is running Horizons.
(I upgraded from a g3420 16Gb HD4670 18 months ago after problems at the Core.)

I'll look forward to your memory usage stats.
Click to expand...

720p, same card as yours in beta and an asteroid field topped out at 2020mb memory usage...

That was Ultra at 1366x768 a 2Gb card really does not cut it these days...
 
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Iron Orchid

Iron Orchid
Bit the bullet and bought a 6gb 1060.

So it's an improvement :-

Settings up to Ultra
Constant 60fps (limited to V sync of monitor)
Textures don't pop in
Really fast load - the initialisation is quick.
Very smooth
and the most noticeable thing is that the galaxy map pops up very quickly indeed.

(Old 960 installed in the G3420 PC mentioned before )

Overall if you are playing at 1080 at ultra and 1060 is all you need -whether a 3gb card would cut it I don't know but as I've seen the 6gb around the £200 mark I'm not sure why you would buy a 3gb at £180.
 

Necronaught

Necronaught
I recently bought an RX 570 4Gb card. It was dirt cheap and a nice last little upgrade for my aging i5 2500k due to bottle necking with the more powerful cards. The RX 570 destroys everything maxed out at 1080 so it was the obvious choice for my 6 year old CPU. Looking to upgrade this year but there is no point the CPU still eats anything including Arma 3 on 100 player servers. I can max out Elite and run it at 1.5x resolution thingy which is really cool. Just on 4 Gb of video memory. in the last 11 years I have only had 2 CPU's. The fantastic q6600 and this even better i5 2500k. Gone are the days of upgrading every two years. Thanks console nublets, I think.

Anyway the 1060 6Gb is a beast for the price. What CPU you running?
 
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shadragon

shadragon
Iron Orchid said:
I'll look forward to your memory usage stats.
Click to expand...
I didn't forget about this. I've had a password cracker running on my home machine for the last two weeks because my boss forgot the password he used to encrypt a Word Doc. My home machine is twelve times faster than my work box at brute force so I've been using my GPU to speed up the process. GPU memory tests are a bit skewed ATM showing 9+ GB in use even before I boot Elite. :O
 
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